The Fall of the West, in the Name of Blind Compassion
- Melanie Preston
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
I recently watched an interview with Dr. Gad Saad about something he calls Suicidal Empathy, a phenomenon that has well-intentioned people caring so much about others, that they will care about them regardless of really understanding who they might actually be, what their morals might be and whether or not they may actually be deserving of such empathy and blind compassion.
This sort of empathy has people automatically pick a side of an incredibly complicated issue they know little to nothing about, and essentially bet the farm on it and go to war on it - a war of course that is on the streets of their very safe city where no missiles are falling, and where no terrorists are sitting on their border, intent to come in and slaughter them and their families.
How quickly their tune would change had an attack like the one that happened on the Greyhound bus in Canada, or the attack in the Maritimes with a stabber - if something like that but with thousands of terrorists, killing hundreds of their own - happened in British Columbia. Something tells me the compassion and empathy for the terror organization that committed crimes against humanity, especially against women, would suddenly be seen for what they are - crimes of such a barbaric nature that it would suddenly be very clear that this group was not fighting for the freedom of anybody - that this group was a death cult and against peaceful ideals, the very ideals that inspire the progressives of the west to take on their cause in the first place.
I have been thinking about "suicidal empathy" as I read what I like to call the statuses of "Compassionate Canadians," such as this one, posted the day Dick Cheney passed away:
It doesn't sound too compassionate, right?
Yet, this came from someone I knew in Vancouver, British Columbia, a place that prided itself on being so compassionate, only compassionate, all about the little guy, the minority and the underdog.
And yet, my experience when I lived there was that it was the coldest place on earth, and I'm not talking about the weather. I'm talking about what would happen if I tried to talk to a stranger on a bus, or volunteer something friendly to a cashier in a store, or start crying in a yoga class.
These weren't things you wanted to do in Vancouver - you would know right away that you were breaking a social code, and so if you had an emergency - which was unfortunately where I lived when I had one - you would learn very quickly that there wasn't a whole lot of compassion.
I began making a bad joke while I lived there, that the locals thought the world's problems could be solved with an empty phrase on facebook and a vegan sandwich, and by the time I left, I was a shell of myself, practically apologizing for existing and had decided it was an evil place, as only in a place this far-removed from reality and from anything resembling war or Hamas terrorists seizing upon your neighborhood and carving your family into tiny little bits, could people afford to have such relentless empathy for the monsters who commit such atrocities far, far away in the Middle East.
And let me also add - there were next to no Jews in British Columbia.
It was just a lily-white place, where people could afford to be as openminded as they wanted to be - because they really didn't have to be.
My political views have always changed, from left, to right, to middle and back again.
I was neutral on Trump, until I started hating him during the pandemic, and this hatred only grew leading up to the 2020 election and of course, afterward.
I can therefore still understand why people dislike him, and I still criticize the things I criticized before. However, once October 7th happened and I returned to Israel to write about the hostage crisis and to try to educate the world on the scale of this attack - the fact that 1200 Israeli civilians would be 40,000 Americans per capita - and that 251 hostages would equate 7000 in America - once I was here in Israel doing that and running to shelters from rockets from Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen and Iran - I began to think very carefully about who I wanted "giving permission" to Israel to fight this war for our survival as a nation and as a people - and it sure as hell wasn't Kamala Harris.
She said one thing that made her an instant deal breaker:
"We need to have the courage to not use the words "Radical Islam."
You need to have the courage to not call the most radical Islamists - actual Jihadists - Radical?
Hamas and groups like them state very clearly that they are not interested in a two-state solution. They never have been, and yet others from Vancouver have commented on my page and written to me privately stating " Just Free Palestine and blah blah blah..." They actually think we can "just free two million people" who have been educated to hate by Jihadists to kill since birth - and that this will solve the enormous problems of the Middle East...and that this will bring peace...to Israel? Or do they not care if it does or doesn't bring peace to Israel?
Do they even know that October 7th happened because we did leave them to govern Gaza in 2005? Do they know that we dragged every Jew out of Gaza in the name of peace? Do they know that not one cent of the billions given to them for their poor people actually goes to their poor people but instead goes to purchase weapons and build terror tunnels? Do they care about that?
I don't think they do. The past two years have shown me that these "Free Palestine" people see terror toward Israelis and Jews as justified and that money being spent to murder us all is seen as money well spent.
And this brings me to Mamdani's sweep of Tuesday's election.
It is terrifying - and it is also smart, for when his policies fail - and they will fail - he will say his critics are Islamophobes, just like all of us concerned about his "Globalize the Intifada" talk were considered the same.
No - being concerned (and by concerned I mean petrified) about his blatant refusal to say he does not agree with sentiments to "Globalize the Intifada" means he is for this sentiment - and this means he is for the Jihadist goal to rise up violently all over the world with suicide bombings, bus bombings, car ramming and other terrorist attacks.
His self-victimization around September 11th affecting him and his "aunt" - (she isn't his aunt) - when it actually affected New Yorkers and the entire world, was beyond concerning.
Hell - in my case, the September 11th attack affected decisions that led to my not getting my American citizenship when I otherwise would have, and this caused me to have to leave Israel in 2009 for what turned into 16 years, redoing my "American time"....I now know this time was 'wasted' as since October 7th, I have watched the US (and Canada, and Europe) erupt into an antisemitism I don't think I ever truly believed existed.
Sure, I grew up seeing all of the Holocaust movies, but I think, even with all of that proof, that it was just too hard to believe. I was also young and naive once, and I thought the world was with us with the "Never Again" promise.
So, this was the thing that bashed me incessantly and relentlessly as I sat in Charlotte watching the footage of the October 7th massacre and listening to the families describe in agony what had happened to their loved ones:
The world was celebrating, the world was blaming us, and the world was screaming for a ceasefire while the bodies in Israel hadn't even cooled yet.
The hunger to hate Jews was SO great - that the second this attack happened the lid flew off the pot - a pot I hadn't known was boiling - and I watched in horror as the world erupted in a lava of evil, held in for 80 years, that might have been left simmering on some long-forgotten stove, but had been metastasizing all along.
And this has been the real war for me - this war with the world, and with Jews and non-Jews, educated and uneducated, whites and with blacks, the right and the left.
It is a war with almost everybody, and it has exhausted me, derailed me and caused me to at times lose course, but never to give up.
Israel needs an army, but of a different kind. We need an army of educators, that can teach the ideologies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, in a way that will elicit fear. Not with videos we can be accused of doctoring, but with people from the other side willing to speak out. People like Dalia Ziada, the Egyptian activist, and Mosab Hasan Youssef, the "Son of Hamas," and many more.
We need an army of writers and video makers who work full-time on such endeavors, and we also need to look within. We need to listen to Israelis more, and understand where they are coming from. Anytime I have tried to explain the anger in Israel and the perspective here, I have been attacked by Jews in the Diaspora, but this also isn't fair.
There is a case to be made here in Israel, and it is a valid one, and the most crucial thing is that we listen to each other, get on the same page and unite.
If there is anything positive that came out of this hostage disaster it was that Hamas told the hostages repeatedly that they fear us when we are united, and that nothing can beat us when we are that way, but we are not, and they know it, and they are experts at psychological terror and manipulation.
We need to use our resilience and not let them take advantage of the many cracks in our surface and more importantly, in our souls - ever again.
One thing I've been hearing regularly from some UK podcast hosts is that the UK has fallen, and that surely Americans are paying attention to this and don't want to fall, too.
I beg to differ.
The issue I always had with Americans generally, and the reason I wanted to live abroad even before I discovered Israel, was that I couldn't find many Americans who wanted to travel abroad or who followed international news.
It was therefore amazing for me to see that close to 70% of New York voters listed "Israeli policy" as somewhat or very important to them in their choice for mayor.
I thought of this all day on Tuesday - how probably less than 2% of these people had ever traveled to Israel or knew anymore about Israel than they knew about other foreign countries - yet they considered themselves just so "expert" on this conflict.
It infuriated me to think about this - that I left Israel for 16 years to become an American citizen - only for New Yorkers to hate Israel that much, because I think it is safe to say that hatred of Israel is the reason Mamdani is now the mayor of New York City, which happens to be the city with the most Jews in the entire world.
How we will educate the younger generation after such a decision was made baffles me, and how a third of New York's Jews hate Israel as much as they do also puzzles me, but it doesn't completely surprise me. There has been a disconnect between Israel and the Diaspora for a long time. I discovered Israel 23 years ago, and tried to find my place in the Jewish world abroad after that, but never felt accepted. I then started this website as soon as the war began, interviewing the families of hostages, sent my articles to every synagogue I had belonged to - and didn't hear back. The importance of Israel's existence needs to be made really clear to the Jews of America and of the world. I was lucky to have gone on Birthright, as otherwise I might never have learned that while I was living my life, traveling the globe, 19-year-old women were here in Israel, fighting to protect my ignorant self. That was one of so many things I learned on my incredible first trip to Israel that changed my life. Somehow, bridges must be built between the two countries, because until they are, this divide has led to an anti-Israel mayor just being elected in New York City. This is more than a wakeup call. It is a tzeva adom - a red alert, but unlike in Israel, nobody is hearing it coming, and they are therefore not running to safety - and that worries me far more than anything I have experienced being on the ground in Israel for the actual war.
