The Tyranny of Unsafety

On the weaponization of victimhood

Jordan Neely was acting erratic on the subway. He was homeless, he was hungry, he was experiencing a mental health crisis — and he was shouting, a lot. Daniel Penny was also on that train. At some point during Neely’s outburst, the 26 year-old former Marine approached Neely from behind and placed him in a chokehold until he died. In Penny’s statement to the police, he said “A man was acting irate, dropping things on the floor, saying he doesn’t care if he goes to jail, he doesn’t care if he gets killed or does. He was pacing back and forth on the car I came from behind and put him in a chokehold. People in the subway were afraid for their safety.” After this incident went viral, two camps formed: those who were calling Penny a hero, and those who were calling him a cold-blooded murderer. For those that see Penny as a hero, much of the justification for his actions revolves around how people like Neely make subway passengers feel unsafe, and that it necessarily follows that if you feel unsafe you can take any and all action to preserve your safety, even if it is lethal. The problem with this logic is that there is no evidence that Neely was actually dangerous. Shouting and acting erratic is not the same as being a danger to others. And more importantly, feeling unsafe is not the same as being unsafe.

The concept of unsafety is something that is invoked often by perpetrators of great harm to justify their actions and invert power differentials. In fact, one of the more blunt weapons of reactionary thought is to make its adherents feel unsafe and paranoid, as if danger is lurking around every corner, and then to convince them that submission to authority will protect them. The fear immediately following the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 so successfully invoked unsafety that it lied us into not only accepting a fraudulent war, but also the removal of civil rights through permanent mass surveillance at home. The American imagination is so instilled with a reflexive fear of “terrorists” that this fear has been used to manufacture consent for all sorts of tax-payer funded atrocities for decades.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Who is allowed to “feel unsafe” in society is usually congruent with who holds power. In the current era, this is most apparent in the cultural, political, and media treatment of Zionists. Since the beginning of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in 2023, the majority of the mainstream discourse has revolved around placing Jewish feelings (really, Zionist feelings) above - or at best equal to - the actual harms being committed against Palestinians by the apartheid state of Israel. We’ve had endless debates about whether the phrase “from the river to the sea” is a call to eradicate Jews, whether campuses are safe spaces for Jewish students during anti-genocide protests, whether boycotts of Israeli products are bigotry, whether it’s antisemitic to exclude Zionists from leftwing spaces. We’ve had these same circular arguments for 16 months while Israel has murdered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Congress, while being on the brink of a Trump presidency, while grocery prices rose exponentially, while homelessness shot up 32%, spent much of its last legislative session passing resolutions and laws around “antisemitism” (the IHRA definition) in an attempt to quash pro Palestine protests and criminalize anti-Israel speech. Congress members will immediately put out statements of condemnation en masse every time someone protests an Israeli restaurant or a synagogue that is selling off stolen land, but have been mostly silent as actual violence is inflicted on Arab and Muslim people at home.

While three men in Burlington, Vermont were shot for speaking Arabic and wearing a keffiyeh, and a young Palestinian boy in Chicago was stabbed to death by his landlord, the sole focus of media, our politicians, and every Zionist on earth has been about the unsafety of Jews. Piers Morgan begins every single interview with a Palestinian by asking if they condemn Hamas - no matter how many of their family members have been slaughtered - but has never once asked a Zionist if they condemn Israel. Mainstream media figures have openly compared Palestine protesters to Nazis and maintained their jobs, while these same protestors have been fired, expelled from school, beaten by police and more for simply objecting to mass murder. It has become painfully clear that the few hundred victims on October 7th and the 251 Israeli hostages have far more value to the western world than the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel. The mere act of protest, of objection to the genocide of an entire people, has been framed by the mainstream as antisemitic. The mere feelings of wealthy, comfortable, Jewish Zionists in America have been elevated above every Palestinian life. That Zionists have to now feel discomfort with their support of a barbaric apartheid state is taken more seriously than the wholesale slaughter of a population.

The success of the Zionist project has, in large part, been due to the leveraging of the generational trauma of the Holocaust to indoctrinate Jewish children from birth that the world hates Jews and that the only way for them to be safe is for there to be a Jewish majority homeland. The Zionist project could not exist if Jews around the world felt safe where they were. It is therefore necessary for Zionist Jews to embrace their victimhood in all situations, even those in which they are the perpetrators, because if they don’t, the entire justification for their settler-colonial project disappears. The Anti Defamation League is a prime example of this. Their database of antisemitic incidents can include things like seeing a sticker that says “Free Palestine”, while they simultaneously embrace the likes of Elon Musk who has repeatedly boosted neo-Nazi twitter accounts and agreed with the sentiment that Jews are responsible for the “great replacement”. You can be as antisemitic as you want so long as you support the settler-colonial project of Israel.

“Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic. […] And it’s very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic, and to bring up the Holocaust, and the suffering of the Jewish people, and that is to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.” - Shulamit Aloni, Former Education Minister of Israel

While Palestinians have to constantly walk on eggshells, be deferential to Jewish feelings, mention the hostages, condemn Hamas, Zionists are allowed to vocally support a genocide without consequence. That Palestinians are actually unsafe, being bombed to death by us and our client state for 16 months straight, being locked in an open air prison for 76 years, being subject to military occupation, is immaterial. They aren’t afforded the status of victim in any circumstance, aren’t entitled to talk about their feelings of unsafety, because they are not a politically useful demographic. As Mohammed El-Kurd says in his new book Perfect Victims, “We remind the sniper of the halos on our heads, the crosses we bear, the blindness we heal. Of our other cheek. Of mercy. We don’t hate you we hate the circumstance. We are women and children, always, and if we are men, then we are fr ail and elderly, reiterating our nonviolence, gesturing at each other’s amputated limbs, the branches cut from our trees.” ¹

The inversion of victimhood is a useful rhetorical tool that has been used since time immemorial to obscure the power balance between victim and oppressor. In an era where feelings are treated as facts, the mantle of “unsafety” is a powerful weapon. Lilie Chouliaraki calls this weaponization the “platformisation of pain”². It does not matter who is truly in danger, it only matters who has the platform and power to articulate their victimhood and be heard. While there are many, many true believers that actually have convinced themselves that caring about Palestine is indeed antisemitic, there are many still who cynically deploy the charge of antisemitism due to their ideological commitment to having an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. This was best stated by Joe Biden, who said “[Supporting Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

There is no great commitment, of course, to making sure people are safe in our society. The people who lead us have worked together to remove even the modest social safety nets we once had and push us further and further into precarity. The police protect property from us, instead of protecting us from anything. Climate change ravages us and burns down our cities while politicians take bribes to keep approving pipelines. Our leaders let a pandemic rip through the population because lockdowns effect profit margins. When the political and media environment use the concept of “feeling unsafe” to support more cops on subways, more people in prison, more bombs for Israel, it is not doing so in service of creating a society in which its people are protected, it is doing so in service of its true aims: safeguarding capital, subduing the populace, expanding its geopolitical influence. The only actual humans this system is interested in keeping safe are the wealthy and well-connected. When the concept of safety is invoked by our leaders it is always trick. It is a tool used to get buy-in from the subjects of empire towards the goals of capital.

A society that was truly interested in the safety of its subjects would make sure that everyone was housed, that everyone was fed, that everyone had good healthcare and clean water and a good education. That is not our society. The suffering of those who don’t matter to capital is all but invisible. The plight of the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, Palestinians, immigrants, trans people, the disabled, over-policed black and brown people, is never addressed or resolved and only serves as the background hum to the wheels of capital that roll over us all. While the media and politicians convince you that the reason you “feel unsafe” is because of your neighbor, because of rising crime, because of the homeless man on the subway, they refuse to actually keep you safe by giving you the tools you need to survive. While you fear what you are told to, a ruling class that doesn’t care if you live or die is picking your pockets clean.

We need a radical reframing of the concept of safety. Safety cannot exist in a society that cannot meet your basic needs. Safety cannot exist when profit is prioritized over human lives. Recognizing the propaganda trap of unsafety can lead us to a deeper understanding of power differentials and how they are leveraged to invisibilize the suffering of those who don’t matter to the ruling class. You have good reasons to be afraid, but they may not be the reasons you think. You are more than likely a couple paychecks from being unhoused, you are one bad stroke of luck from a debilitating illness and ensuing catastrophic amount of medical debt. Deep down you know that you live your life on a knife’s edge. We all do. Our society is structured that way and it’s what keeps us in line.

If we zoom out and realize who is actually putting us in danger, those who seek to use these narratives to discipline and distract us can’t succeed. Safety is impossible in a system that revolves around profit margins and not human beings. We must collectively stop buying into the tyranny of unsafety and start envisioning a world in which humans are truly protected and able to prosper, no matter who they are.

1. Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2499-perfect-victims

2. Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, Lilie Chouliaraki https://cup.columbia.edu/book/wronged/9780231550239