NYT and the Art of Blaming the Victims
By Khaled Salih
Note: This article was first published by Guerre and Shalom. I urge you to subscribe to this valuable publishing house.
On October 6th, 2025, just as the world marked the second anniversary of the October 7th terror attacks, Roger Cohen of The New York Times published a fictional op-ed that serves as a masterclass in modern narrative warfare. His piece, titled “Israel at War With Itself,” advances a sophisticated and dangerous thesis, one that systematically reframes the victim of a horrific terror attack as the primary cause of the ensuing two-year conflict. This is not a straightforward accusation but a subtle and powerful journalistic technique of narrative inversion. Let’s deconstruct precisely how this inversion is achieved, revealing the architecture of blame that lies just beneath the surface of a seemingly reasonable argument.
The Plausible Veneer
Before deconstructing a narrative, it is strategically vital to first understand its explicit claims. By mapping the surface of an argument, we can better appreciate the depth of the structural biases that lie beneath. This section lays out the primary pillars of Roger Cohen’s narrative, demonstrating how its “reasonable” veneer is carefully constructed to mask a profound re-framing of cause and effect.
Failed war Aims. Cohen frames the two-year war as a strategic quagmire for Israel. He highlights that not all hostages have been freed and that Hamas, while militarily weakened, remains an “intractable” and persistent “idea.” This focus on Israeli ineffectiveness shifts the reader’s attention from the war’s origins to the perceived futility of the victim’s response.
Internal division. The narrative’s central conflict is not Israel versus Hamas, but Israel versus itself. Cohen emphasises mass protests and internal societal fractures, powerfully illustrated by the quote from Nimrod Cohen’s father: “We see Netanyahu’s government as our enemy.” This deliberate choice reframes the primary struggle as internal and political rather than external and existential.
The “immovable issue.” Cohen asserts that the ultimate root cause of the conflict predates October 7th. He positions the lack of Palestinian statehood and the “expanding settler movement” as “the immovable issue at the heart of war after war.” This linguistic move establishes Israel’s long-term policies, not Hamas’s immediate actions, as the conflict’s foundational cause.
Symmetrical suffering. The article meticulously quantifies the human cost to create a sense of moral equivalence. It cites “more than 67,000” Palestinian deaths while describing Israeli “trauma.” By placing foundational traumas like the Holocaust and the Nakba on the sterile scales of competitive victimhood, the narrative suggests a shared responsibility for the suffering, effectively erasing the distinction between aggressor and victim.
With Cohen’s explicit points laid bare, we can now turn to the subtle and manipulative techniques that give this narrative its persuasive power.
Three Steps to Inverting Reality
Behind Roger Cohen’s plausible narrative of a broken Israel lies a deliberate architecture of blame. This architecture is built with identifiable techniques that can be exposed using established models of narrative analysis, from Neuro-Linguistic Programming to Dr. Vera Hart’s work on Predator-Victim Dynamics. This is not an argument made with overt claims but one built through subtle omissions, false equivalencies, and a strategic reordering of cause and effect. Let’s dissect three of these core techniques to reveal how they work in concert to systematically shift accountability from the perpetrator of a terror attack to its victim.
Technique 1: Erase the Aggressor, Abstract the Threat
The first step in inverting reality is to systematically downplay the perpetrator, a process illuminated by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which analyses how language patterns shape belief. By deleting any substantive mention of Hamas’s genocidal charter or its core ideological goals, the narrative transforms it from a specific organization into a nebulous political “idea.”
This linguistic choice serves a strategic purpose identified in Dr. Vera Hart’s analysis of Predator-Victim Dynamics: it prevents Hamas from being seen as a “predatory entity.” An enemy without a clear, predatory nature cannot be the sole aggressor; it becomes part of a complex, shared problem. This makes Israel’s military response appear not as a necessary defense, but as a disproportionate and ultimately futile war against an abstract concept.
Technique 2: Engineer a “False Balance”
The second technique creates a misleading moral equivalency between the attacker and the attacked. A true predator, as Dr. Vera Hart describes, “feeds off your confusion, your pain, your chaos.” Yet immediately after acknowledging the October 7th attack, Cohen pivots away from this reality to a detailed accounting of Israel’s internal political divisions, its government’s policy failures, and the historical grievances of the settler movement. This mirrors a technique identified by Hart where journalism “reduces obvious cruelty into a ‘difference of opinion.’”
It reframes an unprovoked act of mass violence as a mere symptom of a long-standing “two-way dysfunction.” In this carefully constructed balance, both sides are presented as flawed parties with legitimate grievances, making them appear equally culpable for the resulting chaos.
Technique 3: Decontextualise the Crime, Recenter the Cause
The third and most crucial technique distorts the fundamental relationship between cause and effect. The narrative first decontextualises the October 7th attack, a hallmark of what systems thinker Iain McGilchrist calls “Left Hemisphere Capture” (LHC). Instead of treating the attack as a unique, world-altering event, it is reduced to a mere data point in a pre-existing political equation. In this view, the logical “Emissary” (the left hemisphere) has usurped the holistic “Master” (the right hemisphere), creating a neat but false map of reality.
Once stripped of its context, a new causal chain is explicitly built for the reader: a cause-effect distortion identified through Neuro-Linguistic Programming. The “expanding settler movement” is positioned as “the immovable issue at the heart of war after war.” This linguistic and structural manoeuvre makes Israel’s policies, not Hamas’s violent actions on a specific day, the conflict’s true origin point, effectively blaming the victim for creating the conditions for their own assault.
Together, these three techniques build a comprehensive, cohesive, and deeply deceptive case against the victim, all without ever stating it directly.
The Danger of a Carefully Un-Told Reality
The convergence of these narrative techniques creates a single, powerful effect. The fragmented, decontextualised view of Left Hemisphere Capture is the very mechanism that enables the “false balance” Dr. Hart critiques. This psychological manipulation is then encoded linguistically through NLP’s deletions, omitting Hamas’s core ideology, and cause-effect distortions, which construct a new causal chain that positions Israeli policy as the root of the conflict. The result is a sophisticated reframing of causality that operates not through explicit accusation but through the covert manipulation of structure, psychology, and cognition.
This sophisticated reframing is a more insidious form of victim-blaming than overt accusation, as it guides the reader to a predetermined conclusion while maintaining a veneer of objective analysis. While Roger Cohen never explicitly states that Israel was to blame for the October 7th attack, the combined structural and cognitive effect of his narrative functionally assigns responsibility for the ongoing war to the victim.
A critical truth for our times: in the war of narratives, the most effective weapon is not the lie told, but the reality carefully un-told, leaving the audience to condemn the victim for the chaos the perpetrator created.
Sources:
Roger Cohen, 20251006, “Israel at War With Itself.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/world/israel-war-france-resignation-everest-oktoberfest.html
The Duke Report, 20250807, “A User’s Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Defense. Defending Yourself From Word Magic.”
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
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
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
McGilchrist, Iain, 2009, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, Iain, 2021, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.
Khaled Salih, 20250918, “May I have your attention? How language masks power and predation.” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/may-i-have-your-attention
