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# May I have your attention?
- URL: https://otherwise.ghost.io/may-i-have-your-attention/
- Published: 2025-09-18T19:59:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-17T13:43:36.000Z
- Description: How language masks power and predation
- Author: Khaled Salih
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1792244264359, #Import 2026-10-17 14:38

By Khaled Salih

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/c1c0f13b-9a6d-4753-bb6f-967c3a752c3f_816x864-heic.jpg)

Curtsy of [Memri](https://www.memri.org/reports/after-dearborn-michigan-names-street-after-local-pro-hizbullah-figure-osama-siblani-and?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

Recently, three short videos attracted my attention. Now I ask for your attention. As Iain McGilchrist say, attention is a moral act.

**Attention 1.**

Check out this short [exchange](https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1968080068485529850?ref=otherwise.ghost.io):

> **Resident:** I mean, Hezbollah bombed the embassy in Beirut and including many Americans. So I just feel it’s quite inappropriate.  
>  
> Mayor Abdullah Hammoud: You are an Islamophobe. And although you live here, I want you to know, as mayor, you’re not welcome here. And the day you move out of this city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of this city because you are not somebody who believes in coexistence

**Mayor Abdullah Hammoud: When the mask slips**

That exchange happened in Dearborn, Michigan. A resident wanted to question why the city was honouring a man tied to Hezbollah. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the face of civic leadership, should have responded with empathy or at least reason. Instead, he lashed out. He dismissed, excluded, and silenced. He accused the resident of being an “Islamophobe,” turning a legitimate concern about terrorism into a smear.

This moment is not just a local spat. It is a case study in how predators, political, ideological, or personal, use masks and language to dominate. The mask was “civic leadership.” The weapon was language. And the goal was control.

To understand why this works, and why so many of us struggle to see it, we need two tools: Vera Hart’s psychology of predation and the linguistic deconstruction techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Together, they expose how appearances deceive and how words become weapons.

**The Predator next door**

Vera Hart has spent her career dismantling our biggest delusion: that looking human means being human. We assume faces, smiles, and polite words reflect empathy and conscience. Hart calls this assumption “a dangerous mistake.”

Predators, she argues, survive through mimicry. They copy facial expressions, bonding rituals, and social norms the way a chameleon copies leaves. Behind the mask is not empathy but strategy. In their brains, the circuitry for conscience is dim, while the wiring for manipulation and image-maintenance is blazing hot. Victims’ pain is just “data.”

And they follow scripts: mirror you, devalue you, gaslight you, drain you. Hart is blunt: a human face is no guarantee of safety.

Even worse, culture itself often sides with predators. We’re told to “see the good in everyone,” to “forgive all,” to “find balance.” Noble advice on paper. Deadly in practice. These ideals can be turned against us, blinding us to cruelty, forcing us to excuse what we should confront. Hart’s answer? Clarity over balance. In contexts of abuse, “seeing both sides” is not wisdom, it’s surrender.

**The Architecture of Manipulation**

If Hart explains why we fall for predators, NLP explains how they bend language to trap us. NLP looks not at what is said, but at the structure of speech, the patterns that smuggle assumptions past our defences.

The tricks are everywhere. Deletion: inconvenient facts vanish. Distortion: interpretations are recast as facts. Generalisation: one case is inflated into a universal law.

Add to this the arsenal of weaponised phrasing. Universal quantifiers: “always,” “never,” “everyone.” Cause-effect chains: “If you oppose this, then you are that.” Complex equivalences: “Criticising X means you hate Y.” Thought-terminating clichés: “racist,” “Islamophobe,” words meant to shut down thought. Nominalisations: turning verbs into abstract nouns—“coexistence,” “liberation,” that sound untouchable. Double-binds: two bad choices, no way out.

These tricks don’t just confuse. They corral thought. They make opposition sound immoral and compliance sound inevitable.

**Attention 2.**

**When Language Becomes Camouflage**

Take the Dearborn exchange again. The mayor deletes the facts about Hezbollah’s violence, distorts the resident’s concern into “Islamophobia,” and wraps himself in the noble idea of “coexistence.” The critic is painted as hateful, while the real issue, the honouring of a terrorist sympathiser, disappears.

Check out these [professors](https://x.com/eyakoby/status/1968519351922749609?s=43&ref=otherwise.ghost.io) from Virginia public universities:

> In the moment that you grab the gun, like Fanon says, you’re no longer oppressed. You are now free. How do we teach that in a class? Just to say that in a class, my students’ heads explode—right? To tell them about violence, you know, as a revolutionary tool, sometimes a revolutionary essential.  
>  
> We actually need to crash the U.S. settler state which has incredible reverberations—literally strangling the tentacles that are reaching into the Israeli state.  
>  
> Bikrum Gill, Professor, Political Science, Virginia Tech: So we must stand with armed resistance and work right now to end this impunity by disrupting the flow of weapons to Zionists. Because, trust me, the armed resistance will defeat Zionism if it were an open battlefield.  
>  
> Yeah, I’ve been humbled since October 7th. Particularly being in community with folks. Particularly when you’re someone who has been doing this work—why stop? This is a profound moment for us, right? And we need to dig in and go harder.  
>  
> I think putting our bodies on the line sometimes, to protect those who are more vulnerable—right? To eat tear gas when we should be doing that, and not students. I think that’s essential.  
>  
> So, we have to struggle to crash things here. And my students were very, very clear about this: we have to struggle for indigenous sovereignty right here on Turtle Island. There’s no way around it, and there’s no looking past a particular moment.  
>  
> When that comes time to the university saying, retract that, or get fired. I am confident in myself that I will make the right decision. That is the point of being a guerrilla scholar.  
>  
> You know, I’m sure you’ve been snitched on to the administration about the content in your courses. And it’s something that has happened for me. And I don’t know what our administration is going to do, right? I know the work that I have been doing. I know the work I have committed myself to and I am going to continue to the work, right?  
>  
> Bikrum Gill: I know people missed out on the significance of what Hezbollah represented—right?—of what the Iranian Revolution represented. And they just fell into the imperialist ideological representation of those movements and forces that were challenging imperialism.  
>  
> Challenging what the settler state really is. The settlement of the university of Virginia which is still a planation, and has all planation artefacts. Why ride the wheels off of these institutional resources? And go for broke?  
>  
> Bikrum Gill: We have to understand al-aqsa flood on October 7th since then as a really decisive historic strike. In terms of not just Palestinian national liberation—right?—but as a historic strike intervening into this moment. I apologize for kind of rushing through the anti-imperialist moment of the past 20–30 years, but I think it’s a decisive strike into challenging those two legs of imperialism.  
>  
> Some colleagues who are part of my chapter, Faculty for Justice for Palestine, help us teach Palestinian liberation, right? To teach about resistance struggles at this particular phase—the Palestinian resistance in our classrooms, and how to build community with not just faculty, but students who are committed to this.  
>  
> Bikrum Gill: I think Hamas—what it represents, and not just Hamas but the whole armed resistance movement—represents a rejection and refusal of an equation of force that leaves Palestinians dependent and eternally vulnerable. And having to distort and configure themselves to seek recognition and protection from their oppressors.  
>  
> So how can subjugated states elevate their struggle from that—in a colony, in a one-to-one relation—overthrowing the immediate colonizer, to overturning this broader imperialist world system? Which was missing in the 20th-century struggles. And I believe we are in a moment where it never has been before.

Look at professors at U.S. universities calling to “crash the U.S.” while celebrating armed resistance abroad. They delete the blood and civilian casualties of Hamas’s attacks, then reframe it as “national liberation” or an “anti-imperialist moment.” The mask is academia. The weapon is intellectual jargon.

**Attention 3**

**Satire**

Even satire has exposed the trick. Videos mocking violent interpretations of *jihad* show the absurdity: “Because religion is sacred, violent interpretations must be respected.” A neat complex equivalence. An unassailable shield for brutality.

The pattern is the same: noble words, “liberation,” “spiritual growth,” “coexistence”, become camouflage. They make destruction sound righteous.

Check out this satire about [religion](https://x.com/shariakill/status/1968530584109502757?s=43&ref=otherwise.ghost.io):

> That jihad is a spiritual struggle during which Muslim attempts to rise to higher plane of consciousness by slaughtering unbelievers, raping their women, taking over there civilizations And persecuting and oppressing them until they’re all dead. Thus To oppose *jihad* is the thwart the spiritual development of religious believer. You wouldn’t want to thwart someone’s spiritual development, would you? Of course not that will be wrong. There are over 150 verses concerning *jihad* in quran. Almost all of them refer to waging war against unbelievers. In short *jihad* is a religious concept, and religion is sacred, that’s why it called “religion.” If it weren’t sacred, it would not be call “religion.” But something else, like killing and raping people. Then you will able to oppose it. But as long as it’s called “religion,” you must submit to being killed and raped. That’s in the constitution.

**Cognitive Dissonance: The Predator’s Playground**

Why do so many people fall for this? Hart points to cognitive dissonance. When someone in authority behaves cruelly, or when a professor praises violence, it clashes with our expectations. That discomfort pushes us to rationalise the contradiction: Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe I’m misinterpreting. Maybe they’re right.

Manipulators thrive on this confusion. Hammoud silenced a citizen by making the crowd uncomfortable. The professors radicalise by presenting violence as intellectual sophistication. Satire flips the script, using the same discomfort to wake people up.

The point is simple: dissonance is both the target and the tool. And unless we learn to recognize it, we’ll keep excusing what should be exposed.

**The Lesson: Clarity Over Illusion**

So how do we fight back? Question the mask. Don’t assume good intentions from a smile, a title, or a role. Politician, professor, priest, none of it guarantees empathy. Dissect noble ideas. Ask whether “justice,” “freedom,” or “coexistence” is being used to illuminate reality, or to obscure it. Challenge the words. Don’t accept false equations. Break down abstractions. Refuse to let clichés end the conversation. Recognize dissonance. That sick feeling in your gut? Don’t dismiss it. It’s your signal to stop rationalising and start questioning. Demand clarity. Balance is not always virtue. Sometimes it’s a trap. Insist on definitions. Expose generalisations. Push past either/or framings.

Above all, watch for extraction. Predators don’t argue to enlighten; they argue to drain, to dominate, to silence. If the effect of a conversation leaves one side confused, ashamed, or voiceless, you’ve just seen the predator’s hand at work.

**Beyond the veil**

When you strip away the masks and the noble words, what remains is naked strategy: control, domination, extraction. Vera Hart gives us the psychological map of why we don’t see it. NLP gives us the tools to recognize how it is done. Together, they cut through the illusion.

The goal is not cynicism. It is clarity. It is the ability to tell the difference between language that illuminates and language that ensnares. In Dearborn, in academia, in religion, in politics, the pattern repeats.

Once you see it, you can’t unseen it. And that is the first step toward freedom.

**Sources:**

Vera Hart, 20250914, “Naming Predators — Escaping the Illusion. When behavior tells the truth that appearance tries to hide.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-171778809](https://substack.com/home/post/p-171778809?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

Vera Hart, 20250907, “The Illusion of Humanity: Why We Struggle to See Predators for What They Are. The camouflage of predators and the cost of our misplaced compassion.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-171773396](https://substack.com/home/post/p-171773396?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

Vera Hart, 202500831, “Why ‘Seeing Both Sides’ Is a Manipulation Tactic, Not Wisdom. How False Balance Silences Survivors and Shields Abusers.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-171155932](https://substack.com/home/post/p-171155932?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

The Duke Report, 20250807, “A User’s Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Defense. Defending Yourself From Word Magic.”

[A User's Guide to Neuro-Linguistic DefenseMy motivation for writing this today is a note by esc who posted: “It’s good when people understand that they're being manipulated through having it pointed out to them - but it’s better when people notice it themselves. We need some sort of educational approach where people learn to pick up the patterns on their own.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/10c4b591-fbcb-42be-92f2-d7390562fa24_150x150-11.png)The Duke Report](https://thedukereport.substack.com/p/a-users-guide-to-neuro-linguistic)