Mick Hartley

From an interesting little essay by Peter Himmelman on Facebook:

Over the past several years, and especially since October 7, 2023, I have watched something unfold that is difficult to explain, especially if you assume it emerged entirely on its own. On that day, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. Families burned alive. Young people hunted down. Children murdered and taken hostage. And yet within hours, even before the scale of the atrocity was fully understood, a counternarrative appeared.

Israel was blamed. The victims were recast as perpetrators. The language spread with astonishing speed. Genocide. Colonialism. Resistance. These words did not emerge gradually. They arrived pre-packaged, as if they had been rehearsed and readied for a moment of maximum psychological effect.

And then something else became visible. The language replicated.

The same phrases appeared on handmade signs in New York and London. The same chants were heard on campuses separated by oceans. The same formulations, the same accusations, the same moral certainties, delivered with the strange precision of actors who had never met but somehow shared the same script. There was a theatrical aspect to what we were seeing.

Not in the sense that the emotions were fake. I assume much of the vehemence was sincere. But sincerity does not preclude choreography. Actors can believe deeply in the lines they have been given. They can inhabit them fully. What was striking was the uniformity. The compression of complex history into identical slogans. The speed with which those slogans moved from iPhones to city streets.

To understand how this happens, it helps to follow the structure that supports it.

Last week, I listened to an important conversation between journalist Melissa Chen and Israeli historian and analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. Chen said something that clarified the geopolitical foundation beneath events that otherwise seem disconnected.

“Iran,” she said, “is able to behave the way it does because China is willing to absorb the cost of its isolation.”

This is not speculation, it’s is an observable economic relationship. For decades, Iran has been the subject of international sanctions intended to limit its ability to fund its military and its regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Those sanctions cannot achieve their intended effect if Iran continues to sell its primary export.

Today, according to energy analysts, roughly eighty percent or more of Iran’s heavily discounted oil exports go to China. Tankers move across the sea, sometimes disabling their tracking systems. Oil is transferred ship to ship, relabeled, and sold. China receives the energy it needs to sustain its vast industrial economy. Iran receives the revenue it needs to sustain its regime. And with that revenue, Iran continues its regional project.

Iran’s leadership has never hidden its intentions. In 2005, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” language that has been echoed and reiterated by senior Iranian officials ever since. This objective is rooted partly in revolutionary ideology and partly in theology. In the Iranian regime’s view, Israel represents both a Western outpost and a non-Muslim sovereign presence on land they consider inherently Islamic. Its existence is seen not merely as a political problem but as a civilizational affront. This belief has practical consequences.

Iran provides funding, weapons, and training to its proxies. They, not Iran, carry out the attacks. The attacks provoke war. The war provokes global reaction. And institutional trust across the West begins to erode.

That chain reaction now unfolds in a digital information environment shaped heavily by platforms such as TikTok, owned by the Chinese parent company ByteDance.…

You may not see China when Jewish students are harassed on Western campuses. You may not see Iran when protesters chant for Israel’s elimination. You may not see the economic and ideological structures that connect oil fields, social media feeds, and society-dissembling street demonstrations.

But invisibility is essential to their function. The most effective form of influence is the one that feels like your own conclusion.

War, it turns out, no longer requires bombs. Sometimes it requires only a story, and the patience to let others tell it for you.