The BDS Playbook

[shira]

There is a clinical term for an individual (BDS'er) whose lack of empathy for others makes them particularly effective at emotional manipulation: sociopath.

cont'd...

5. Despite the degree to which BDS advocates count on other people’s empathetic reaction to human suffering, the boycotters themselves possess no such empathy. This is why it is so easy for them to ignore or slough off demands that they respond to images or descriptions of suffering Israelis, or Palestinians and other Arabs whose suffering cannot be laid at the foot of the Jewish state. There is a clinical term for an individual whose lack of empathy for others makes them particularly effective at emotional manipulation: sociopath. And it is vital to understand how much the manipulative power of BDS rests on their representing that rare and dangerous phenomenon: the sociopathic political movement.

This lack of genuine sympathy with others makes it easy for the boycotters to bring their BDS resolutions before organizations again and again and again, no matter how many times they are rejected and no matter what harm they cause others by dragging the Middle East conflict into other people’s civic life. This is because, for the boycotters, targeted civic groups are not entities made up of real people with their own challenges and needs. Rather, such groups exist for the sole purpose of passing their anti-Israel resolutions.

Such relentlessness is also stoked by the fact that the BDS crowd considers it a victory if they can subject a group like a university Student Senate to hours and hours of anti-Israel invective, hoping that – even if they lose the vote – their steady drip of bile will eventually convince the public that Israel must be a pretty horrible place if people are saying so many horrible things about it.

An agenda built around poisoning the minds of the public is one of the reasons BDS advocates can claim that even if they lose a battle (like a student government vote) they are still winning a longer war, an argument our side often accepts (for better or worse).

But also remember that a political movement must be able to demonstrate actual success, something that’s been in short supply if you consider how Israel’s economy has boomed during the same decade and a half the boycotters have worked tirelessly to bring it to its knees. Such an empty record makes BDS reliant on creating the image (or, more accurately, the illusion) of momentum, and a political project that relies on fantasy is always going to be vulnerable to those who choose strategies and tactics based on reality.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/07/10/the-bds-playbook/

[shira]

1. Very similar argument from 2012 about sociopathic BDS behavior

These 2 articles greatly explain the complete lack of empathy exhibited by Israel bashing BDS holes.

Even supporters of Israel can find themselves questioning their own beliefs when confronted by provocative imagery, such as a photo of a dead or suffering child. “Did the Israeli army actually do all it could to prevent such tragedies?” we may ask ourselves (even if we understand full well the difference between Israel trying to prevent civilian casualties while fighting a defensive war vs. Hamas trying to maximize civilian causalities – their own and Israel’s – in the course of waging an offensive one).

Under normal circumstances, an overreliance on pathos by one side in a debate has a corrective: the equivalent use of pathos by the other side. After all, if we’re meant to respond to words or imagery of suffering Palestinian children in the way the BDSers insist we must, why can’t we show them photos of dead Israeli children, or their suffering families, or dead Syrians, or dead Palestinians killed by Hamas for that matter (with all the requisite blood and surviving family members with faces contorted in pain) and insist the BDSers must respond to our accusations and challenges?

If you’ve ever tried such an approach (or watched someone else attempt this tactic), it immediately becomes clear that “pathos jui jitsu” simply does not work on the Israel haters. Which makes sense once you realize that much of the anti-Israel activism we experience exists outside the realm of what could be called “normal politics.”

For the first reaction of a BDSer to stories or photos of dead Israelis (or dead Palestinians they cannot blame directly on Israel), is to ignore them. And if that doesn’t work, they create an elaborate fallacy-laden argument to explain why those deaths are also Israel’s fault (“they wouldn’t have died if it wasn’t for ‘The Occupation!’). And if that doesn’t work, they fly into a rage and drag out 100 more pictures of dead Arabs to trump whatever you present to them. And if none of that works, they simply walk away, only to return to make the same pathos-laced arguments that didn’t work on you to another audience two days later.

In other words, their arguments leverage the empathy of their target audience, but their imperviousness to the same type of arguments directed towards them relies on their own total lack of empathy for others.

I’ve recently been reading a book entitled The Science of Evil written by Simon Baron Cohen (brother of Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat and The Dictator fame, as it turns out) which tries to explain all human evil in the context of empathy (or lack thereof). And while I’m not that convinced by his overall argument, he does bring up an important reminder of where we can find the combination of emotional manipulative behavior coupled with the lack of susceptibility to emotional manipulation I describe above with regard to BDS behavior: in the psychological makeup of the sociopath.

http://divestthis.com/2012/06/rhetoric-abnormal-politics.html

[Calista241]

2. Doesn't seem to be working out well for them now does it?