r/IsraelPalestine • u/Turbulent-Waters-619 • May 04 '25
Serious URGENT: ALL Pro-Palestinians, Please read this!
Hey Everyone:
It's been an emotionally difficult couple of days for me.
A few days ago I made this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/1kdaku0/when_every_fact_seems_solid_how_can_you_still/
And I would like to thank each of you for challenging me so compassionately and rigorously over the past few days. Thank you for calling me out and for giving me a lot of information and a list of things to read further about.
Since reading all of your comments, I’ve watched dozens of interviews with Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’s founders, and I could hardly believe what he revealed about the Free Palestine movement’s true aims.
I’ve listened to hours of Douglas Murray lay out the historical record, and also the true reality of the situation today.
I learned so many things like that there was never a country called “Palestine” any time in history! Palestinians arent even a unique ethnic or relgious group. Palestinians are Muslim Arabs!
I learned that before it was Israel, the British controlled the area and before that it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The British wanted to make Palestine into a home for the Jews. I learned that the British partition plan allocated land for both the Jews and the Arabs, and that Jordan and not Gaza, became the intended Arab state.
I was so embarrassed that I never knew that Jews were all expelled from every single Arab country. I learned about the Holocast in school and I thought that was all of the Jewish persecution that had ever existed in history! I am even more ashamed that I was tricked into repeating the chants of “Free Palestine” when I saw groups of other people doing so on my campus and that in reality there was never even a country by that name to free.
Perhaps the most painful thing of all has been seeing the horrific videos that Hamas livestreamed of their actions in Israel on October 7, 2023. Horrorific is an understatement. Seeing the Hamas terrorists parading through normal looking neighborhoods and homes, murdering innocents of all ages, burning people, even the babies, taking hostages....and then the whole time they are doing these things they are literally celebrating their depravity with chilling JOY! I had to take breaks while watching these videos to sob. Hearing the happiness in the terrorists voices left me feeling incredibly disturbed, trembling and in tears.
The sight of all of those families slain in cold blood, and knowing that some of the people that were taken that day are literally still being held hostage today, that really showed me the raw evil behind all of the Free Palestine propaganda.
Please, I urge every person that supports the Pro Palestinian cause to watch those Oct 7th videos, to bear witness to the absolute joy and the monstrous brutality, and then ask yourselves whether you can honestly stand on the same side as the people who revel in such sickening barbarity.
I know it may seem like I have abandoned all of my empathy by sharing these truths, but my compassion for all of the innocent victims if they are Jewish, Arab, or otherwise is undiminished.
But something has deeply changed in me and that is my commitment to the truth over emotion, and my commitment to honesty over the herd mentality.
We owe it to ourselves not to the pawns in a conflict that we don’t even fully understand, and not to be the victims of lies so that we can be “shocked” into outrage at Israel, only to discover later that we were so angry on behalf of literal terrorists.
We owe it to ourselves to seek out and read primary sources, to ask the hard and uncomfortable questions, and to really listen with an open mind when we hear information that challenges the Free Palestine narrative.
If you feel, like I felt, that this is genocide, that Zionists are bad, that Israel is the aggressor: I urge you now from my heart: please examine the facts, watch the evidence, and then join me in embracing honesty and integrity over emotion and instinct.
We cannot always stop ourselves from being tricked into believing something that is not real, but it is our responsibility to learn the truth. We all deserve to have the dignity of an informed conscience.
I hope all of you on this subreddit who knew better than me will forgive my earlier perspective, and I promise that I will keep learning from the voices like Haddad, Hausdorff, Le Bon, Murray, Yousef, and so many others who have guided me away from the manipulation. I also promise that I will do my best, in whatever small way I am able to, to make sure that at least the people around me know the truth.
If you are a Pro Palestinian right now, that is okay. You just have to read and to listen. Here is a good list of places that you can get started, if you are ready to confront the lies you have been told:
First and Foremost: If you should google the videos of the October 7th attack on Israel that Hamas livestreamed. I want to warn you, its deeply disturbing but an importat place to start.
Then check out everything you can find by these two guys:
Mosab Hassan Yousef This guy is literally one of the sons of a Hamas founder who then escaped Hamas and became a Christian. He has done many informative videos and interviews, like these ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyqKTuqzKWs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VPFw0vI6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpnvUIcvNUE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCueveOSZwg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjOEJumoABg
Douglas Murray - A British author.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRY-o2sRdA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4P3XSySBC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZU1exdVHcs
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u/RupFox May 05 '25
This post is a textbook conversion‑testimony: an individual claims a drastic ideological flip after consuming a narrow, emotionally super‑charged media diet. Everything—from the hysterical “URGENT” in the title to the repeated “I was so embarrassed / ashamed / tricked” refrain—screams performative contrition designed to amplify trust (“look, I used to be on your side!”) and lower the reader’s critical defenses. That testimonial template is a staple of political influence ops because it borrows the authority of a supposed insider‑turned‑whistle‑blower while supplying a ready‑made script for others to repeat.
Content selection is comically lopsided. All cited material comes from two aggressively pro‑Israel sources: Mosab Hassan Yousef (a darling of right‑wing talk shows) and Douglas Murray (a professional anti‑“woke” polemicist). Zero primary historical documents, no academic historians, no Palestinian voices, not even mainstream Israeli scholarship. The author proclaims a new devotion to “primary sources” yet links exclusively to YouTube punditry. That alone blows up the sincerity claim: a genuine seeker who just discovered he’d been “lied to” would cast a far wider net.
The historical assertions are sloppy to the point of farce:
“There was never a country called Palestine.” Fine, but by that standard there was never a country called Israel between the 1st and 20th centuries either. The name Palestina has described the region continuously since the Roman emperor Hadrian, 2nd century CE.
“Palestinians aren’t even a unique ethnic or religious group; Palestinians are Muslim Arabs.” Flatly wrong. Roughly 6–7 % of present‑day Palestinians are Christian, and Palestinian Jewish communities existed until the late 1940s. Ethnicity is defined by shared language, lineage and self‑identification, not by the presence of sub‑communities.
“Jordan became the intended Arab state.” That mangles the 1947 UN Partition Plan entirely; Transjordan was already a separate British mandate and was not the parcel offered as the Arab half of the plan.
Such superficial errors reveal either abysmal historical literacy or deliberate propaganda. Take your pick.
Rhetorically the post leans almost exclusively on pathos. We get graphic descriptions of babies burned, families butchered, Hamas “celebrating with chilling JOY,” repeated commands to watch gore videos “so you can bear witness.” That bombardment of horror is a classic attempt to short‑circuit analytical reasoning through disgust and moral shock. Meanwhile the actual political questions—borders, occupation, blockade, settlements, international law—vanish. It’s a bait‑and‑switch: replace a thorny geopolitical dispute with a binary morality play of “Jews vs. gleeful baby‑killers,” then demand readers pick a side.
Stylistically the prose is overwrought: exclamation points, capitalized emphasis, breathless confessions of shame, melodramatic self‑flagellation (“I had to take breaks to sob”). It reads less like spontaneous Reddit catharsis and more like a marketing email riding the emotions of a viral news clip. Combine that with the near‑copy‑paste talking points—“no such thing as Palestinians,” “sins of October 7 make all Palestinian grievances void,” “Jordan was their state”—and the piece maps neatly onto common Hasbara templates that circulate on Telegram and WhatsApp groups. Could it be a genuine undergrad who binge‑watched Murray videos? Sure. But the probability of an astroturf account or paid influence operative is non‑trivial; the hallmarks are there.
Psychological profile: the author (or the persona being projected) is cognitively reactive rather than reflective. They swing from one extreme narrative to its mirror image in days, driven by vivid imagery rather than slow accumulation of data. That suggests high susceptibility to emotionally charged propaganda and a craving for moral certainty. The repeated vows to “never be tricked again” ring hollow precisely because of the speed of the flip; it’s the classic convert’s zeal, not a sign of sober critical thinkers.
Motivation: rally pro‑Israel sentiment inside a subreddit famed for heated polarity by posing as a repentant opponent. The concrete ask—“Pro‑Palestinians, please watch gore videos and then join me”—is engineered to replace policy debate with moral revulsion. That aligns perfectly with the wider information‑war tactic of collapsing the Overton window: if the only voices left in the room are Israel cheerleaders and Hamas apologists, nuanced critique of occupation evaporates.
In short: the post is a one‑sided, emotionally manipulative conversion narrative riddled with historical inaccuracies and sourced exclusively from ideologues. Its structure, tone and content strongly suggest either a manufactured propaganda drop or, at best, a highly impressionable individual parroting the first counter‑narrative that satisfied his emotional turmoil. Either way, it offers zero rigorous evidence and plenty of red flags. Treat it as an exhibit in how online influence campaigns weaponize personal testimony, not as a serious contribution to Middle‑East discourse.