Soviet propaganda still dominates the West.

The Soviet Union disappeared, but Soviet propaganda never did. It metastasized, moving from state propaganda into universities, NGOs, media ecosystems, and eventually internet platforms.

photo: Soviet Artefacts/Unsplash

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The death toll in the suppressed demonstrations in Iran is more than 16,500, according to a British report published Sunday, citing an account put together by a network of Iranian doctors that far exceeds previous estimates. Among those killed were children and pregnant women.

Amit Segal, one of Israel’s top political commentators, reported testimony of horror from the Iranian city Isfahan, where “bodies of the massacre victims are being kept in fruit and vegetable refrigerators because hospitals have run out of space. … Heavy machine guns have been brought to the main street.”¹

Afghans and Arabs from other countries were brought in to do much of the killing, since it’s easier to pay non-Persians to murder Persians.

“This is a whole new level of brutality,” Professor Amir Parasta, an Iranian-German eye surgeon who helped put together the network of doctors, told The Sunday Times. “This time they are using military-grade weapons and what we are seeing are gunshot and shrapnel wounds in the head, neck, and chest.”²

Pause on that number: 16,500 people in about three weeks’ time. If that rate were extrapolated across two years — roughly the length of the Israel–Hamas war that Hamas initiated on October 7, 2023 — the death toll would approach 570,000 people. Or approximately a half-million more than purportedly died in Gaza according to Hamas (which groups militant deaths, natural deaths, and Palestinian-on-Palestinian deaths in with wartime civilian deaths).

And yet, there is no sustained upheaval in the West. No academic uproar. No mass boycotts. No celebrities dissolving into tears on social media. No chants echoing through city centers night after night. Why? Because what the West “cares about” is not determined by suffering alone. It is shaped — filtered, amplified, or buried — by propaganda.

The term “Palestinian” no longer functions primarily as a humanitarian reference. It has become a political weapon: a photo-op, a hashtag, a moral shortcut. It is invoked not to illuminate reality, but to shut down inquiry. What we are watching is a grotesque gaslighting campaign, performed in the language of compassion and staged for Western consumption.

This didn’t happen organically. Pro-Palestinian propaganda was consciously cultivated during the Cold War, after Israel aligned itself with the democratic West.

Ironically, the Soviet Union was among the first nations to support the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948, even providing crucial backing for the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan and allowing Czechoslovakia to supply arms that proved vital in Israel’s War of Independence. At the time Moscow saw Israel as a potential socialist ally in the Middle East. But as Israel aligned itself with the Western bloc during the Cold War, the USSR pivoted dramatically. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviets began courting Arab states, supplying them with arms, training, and diplomatic backing.

This shift wasn’t only about geopolitics; it helped reframe the Arab-Israeli conflict itself. The USSR amplified and exported the narrative of the Arab refugees from 1948, promoting the term “Palestinians” as a distinct national identity in global diplomacy and media. This ideological and linguistic rebranding was part of a broader Soviet strategy to position Israel as a “Western colonial outpost” and the Palestinians as an “anti-imperialist” cause.

In fact, the term “Palestinian People” as a description of Arabs in “Palestine” appeared for the first time in the preamble of the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization Charter, drafted in Moscow. Yes, you read that correctly: in Moscow.

Why there, of all places?

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets were in the business of creating “liberation” for a variety of countries: Bolivia in 1964, Colombia the following year, in the 1970s “The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia” that bombed U.S. airline offices in Europe, and “The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine” that waged terrorism against Israel.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was by far its most enduring success. Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, wrote that for nearly four decades, the Palestine Liberation Organization was the largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terrorist organization in the world.

For most of that time, the Palestine Liberation Organization was held in the firm grip of Yasser Arafat’s iron fist, yet Arafat was not the fierce, independent actor he posed as. Instead, Arafat was very much dependent on the Soviet KGB and its surrogate Warsaw Pact intelligence services for arms, training, logistical support, funds, and direction.

Initially, Arafat and his terrorist comrades talked openly about their desire to annihilate the Jews in Israel, but at the Soviets’ urging, Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu persuaded him in favor of “liberating the Palestinian People.” It was a brilliant communications strategy, and the first step in reframing the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews from religious jihad to “secular” nationalism, suddenly a quest for political self-determination, a posture far less offensive to the West, especially in the wake of overwhelming guilt following the Holocaust.

By focusing on political liberation for a small group of Arabs, it ignored the fact that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the surrounding Arab states, and rebranded the Jews from victims to oppressors. Most of all, it worked. In his book, “History Upside Down,” David Meir Levi put it this way:

“Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the propaganda line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation.”

“Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the Palestine Liberation Organization needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation: ‘Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.’”

At the same time, Arafat was being mentored by Muhammad Yazid, the minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments, who told him to present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation and wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists, but also “world imperialism.”

To dramatize this new narrative and depict the Jews as gross violators of human rights, the Palestinians exorbitantly inflated the number of refugees created by Israeli “imperialism.” Beginning in 1982, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the only UN agency dedicated to a single “refugee” group, expanded the definition of a Palestinian refugee to include every generation of descendants. In other words, even the great-grandchild of a refugee is also considered a refugee.

As a result, in its 75-year existence, the number of UNRWA beneficiaries has grown from 700,000 refugees, to almost six million by 2022. This includes 1.6 million people in Gaza, a fourth generation of refugees, which is utterly manipulated by the UNRWA criteria.

With more “refugees” to serve, UNRWA is easily able to extract an exponentially expansive budget from the UN and, through its schools and other services, profusely propagate explicit anti-Israel and anti-Jewish narratives that further erode any opportunity for true, lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Today, many of these anti-Israel and anti-Jewish narratives are quickly broadcast from UNRWA’s social media accounts to gullible audiences across the world, often repackaged by media outlets, academics, and influencers without any ounce of scrutiny.

This includes “Nakba Day,” which was conveniently invented by Yasser Arafat in 1998 just as the State of Israel was celebrating its 50th anniversary. From his West Bank headquarters, Arafat read out marching orders for the day over Palestinian Authority radio stations and public loudspeakers:

“The ‘Nakba’ has thrown us out of our homes and dispersed us around the globe. Historians may search, but they will not find any nation subjugated to as much torture as ours. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking to close the chapter of ‘Nakba’ once and for all, for the refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land, our land, our land, just like other peoples.”

The “Nakba” is now well-integrated into the institutions of liberal Western democracies through political resolutions, academic lore, and pop culture causes. Meanwhile, countless politicians, diplomats, educators, activists, and influencers seem bizarrely ignorant of the deadly implications of the “Nakba” narrative to avoid the shame of being accused as insensitive to another people’s suffering.

The Soviet Union disappeared, but these Soviet-created frameworks never did; they metastasized. They moved from state propaganda into universities, NGOs, media ecosystems, and eventually internet platforms. Today they serve the geopolitical interests of Russia, Iran, China, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood alike. The contemporary Palestinian movement, as mobilized in the West, is not merely sympathetic to anti-Western regimes; it is structurally useful to them. It channels Western moral energy away from the crimes of these anti-Western autocracies — toward a single, endlessly renewable target.

Iran’s regime kills 16,500 people in three weeks. It also jails women for removing headscarves, executes protesters for demanding dignity, and severs internet access to smother dissent. And yet there is no global reckoning. No ritualized outrage. The repression is described as an “internal dispute,” then quietly forgotten. Gaza, by contrast, is flooded with images (carefully curated, emotionally charged, often stripped of context) because images move Western consciences more than numbers ever could. Iran suppresses images; Gaza exports them. Western empathy is image-driven, not reality-driven.

This is why statistics alone don’t mobilize outrage. Images do. And images, in the modern propaganda economy, are not neutral evidence; they are weapons. They are selected, framed, and circulated to produce a specific moral response. Gaza supplies a constant stream of visuals that fit an already familiar script. Iran does not. The result is not compassion; it is conditioning designed to benefit the governments that prevent their people from having everything that makes the West imperfectly great.

The Iranian people are demanding life: freedom, dignity, the right to live without fear of their own government. Many of their aspirations align naturally with liberal Western values. Gaza’s ruling ideology, by contrast, is not oriented toward building a peaceful state alongside Israel; it is oriented toward eliminating the Jewish state because it is Jewish. Its culture sanctifies death over life, martyrdom over coexistence. Its most effective weapon is not a rocket; it is naïve Western sympathy.

For example, when Israel considers restricting internet access in Gaza as a military tool, the world erupts in flames. The New York Times and other wannabes flood the mediascape promoting a scandal worthy of everyone’s undying attention. But when Iranian authorities shut down the internet to crush protests, the response is a shrug. The New York Times calls it “economic turmoil.” Academia is conveniently “on vacation.” This is not humanitarianism; it is psychological manipulation that dupes people in the West into caring about one arbitrary cause over another, all for anti-Western gain.

Their empathy is being curated, narrowed, and steered — less by facts on the ground than by narrative incentives. They are not choosing one cause over another after careful moral comparison; they are being nudged, repeatedly and emotionally, toward a single approved fixation. Algorithms reward certain images. Media ecosystems reinforce certain frames. Activist institutions signal which suffering is fashionable and which is inconvenient. Over time, this conditioning creates the illusion of moral clarity while quietly eliminating moral agency.

This is how propaganda works in an age that believes itself immune to propaganda. It does not say, “Ignore Iran.” It simply floods the zone with Gaza. It does not argue that Sudanese or Syrian lives matter less; it ensures you rarely see them at all. Outrage becomes a finite resource, and it is deliberately monopolized. When every emotional lever is pulled in one direction, compassion elsewhere atrophies — not because people are cruel, but because their attention has been hijacked.

The result is a population that believes it is morally awake while functioning on autopilot. People confuse repetition with truth, visibility with importance, virality with justice. They internalize the assumption that if something truly mattered, it would already be everywhere — on their feeds, in their classrooms, in their corporate statements. And so when entire nations bleed off-camera, the silence feels normal. Even deserved.

This is not accidental imbalance; it is engineered selectivity. Westerners are being taught — subtly, persistently — to care most about the one conflict that flatters their self-image, absolves them of complexity, and channels their moral anxiety toward a familiar villain. Caring becomes performative, not principled. And once empathy is reduced to habit rather than judgment, it can be redirected at will.

That is the real tragedy. Not that people care — but that they are being taught what to care about, how intensely, and at whose expense, all while presuming they are still thinking for themselves.

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1. Amit Segal on Substack

2. “Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness’.” The Sunday Times.