Orli Peter

Neuropsychologist, trauma specialist, former associate professor at Mount St. Mary's University, child of a Holocaust survivor, CEO, Israel Healing Initiative.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

@Mr_Andrew_Fox For Owen Jones, thought is an experiment.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

@BriHReed @jot_au @Cornell Can you please share the actual study not just an interview with the authors?

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Article here. https://t.co/9Flml3RbIz

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Meet Maureen Galindo, the Democratic candidate running in the runoff primary for Texas’s 35th Congressional District. She received about 29% of the vote in the primary.

Galindo said she would convert the ICE detention center in Karnes County into an internment camp for “American Zionists.”

“It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists,” she added.

She is a marriage and family therapist with a profile in the Psychology Today directory.

During Nazi Germany, major parts of the medical, psychiatric and psychological professions helped legitimize dehumanization, eugenics, forced sterilization and the classification of groups as dangerous or diseased. These mental health professionals believed they were serving morality, accelerating social progress, and were on the right side of history.

Link to article in comments.

Linked to article in the comments.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Here is @Mr_Andrew_Fox substack where you can find the report and a short video outlining it. https://t.co/QEfvdh4yRA

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Why are intelligent people so vulnerable to disinformation, propaganda and ideological manipulation.

This new report by @Mr_Andrew_Fox for the Henry Jackson Society gives a powerful overview of the psychological research behind how belief, emotion, social pressure and repeated exposure shape perception and distort reality at scale.

I helped review the report and was glad to contribute to this important project.
Worth reading, especially in the age of algorithmic outrage and information warfare.

Link in comments.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

We may be living through one of the largest and best-funded ideological influence campaigns in modern history while millions of people think they are arriving at these conclusions independently.

In the past, @asranomani and her team would be awarded for their comprehensive research, but the influence campaign they report on has been too successful for that to happen. Ten years down the road this work will be recognized appropriately.

[Asra Nomani @AsraNomani]

🌹🍉 You’ll see A LOT OF HATE against Israel and Jews this weekend on the streets. Who is behind it?

At @FoxNews Digital, I teamed up with my colleague @M_Dorgan to follow the money and the digital breadcrumbs.

A coordinated global network of socialist, communist and Islamist groups is behind “Nakba 78” protests this weekend and today, using the metaphor of the “Nakba,” the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” to dismantle Israel’s creation 78 years ago on May 14, 1948.

🌹🍉 425 organizations with a combined funding footprint of annual revenues of about $1 BILLION are organizing an estimated 736 “Nakba 78” events across 39 countries.

Full story 🔗 https://t.co/2WInuefFnZ

⚖️ @LeoTerrellDOJ @EliseStefanik @HarmeetKDhillon @JasonMiyaresVA and many others have warned this network has stoked much of the rising antisemitism felt by Jews. Thank you to the erstwhile @DataRepublican for her help collating the data.

The coalition spans communist groups, Islamist organizations, anti-Israel activist networks and student coalitions using the anniversary of Israel’s founding to challenge the Jewish state’s legitimacy.

🌹 Socialist groups use a rose symbol. 🍉 Palestinians groups use a watermelon symbol.

💡 Brave Middle East scholar @ISGAP @DaliaZiada calls the anti-Israel network a “sinful marriage between the radical left and radical Islamism” united against Western democracies.

💡 @yudapearl, the father of my colleague and friend Danny Pearl, murdered for being an American Jew of Israeli ancestry, calls it “Zionophobia.”

🌹🍉 The investigation traces the influence of a Shanghai-based American Marxist mogul, Neville Roy Singham, who has poured $278M into activist nonprofits tied to anti-Israel organizing.

🌹🍉 Sen. @MarshaBlackburn, a strong critics of China’s “soft propaganda” campaign against the U.S., tells us that the Singham network will look to partner with any “bad actor” to sow discord in the U.S.

🌹🍉 Indeed, we used a large-language model to analyze the protest rhetoric and found 85% repeatedly frame America as “imperialist” and Israel as a “genocidal settler state, while critics warn chants like “from the river to the sea” erase Israel’s right to exist.

⚖️ @GoldsteinBrooke of @LawfareProject warns that when demonstrations cross into intimidation, obstruction, vandalism, or targeting Jewish institutions, it moves beyond protected speech.

The same groups that harassed Jews at synagogues earlier this week — Within Our Lifetime, Muslim American Society, PAL-AWAD and others — will be out on the streets of New York today with the Singham network’s People’s Forum, Party for Socialism Liberation, ANSWER Coalition to send one message: they want to destroy the state if Israel.

Full story below👇 and watch our coverage this weekend with our colleague @MizellPreston as we report from the streets.

Why do I care? This hate killed Danny Pearl, and I don’t want to see it stoke more hate, violence or death.

See you on the streets!

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

It was wonderful seeing my friend, the formidable @Mr_Andrew_Fox , in London. I brought my brain-mapping equipment to examine his neural functioning, but the cable was damaged in transit - so British infrastructure triumphed over American neuroscience.

Andrew, being Andrew, wasn’t remotely bothered and simply said he was happy to see me. Fortunately, his brilliant essays already provide ample evidence that his brain is functioning extremely well.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Raised in Gaza and now living in the U.S., @afalkhatib is being threatened by Hamas for speaking openly about a future beyond terror and endless war for Palestinians.

These threats do not always stay online.

I would say stay safe, my friend but change doesn’t come that way. Stay strong and vigilant.

This is a moment where if you are not following @afalkhatib I recommend you do so now. You will not be alone.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Hamas Declares War: In a bizarre twist of events, Hamas has officially declared war on me today, calling me a “suspicious figure,” after its leader, Basem Naim, came out against me because a Board of Peace official had retweeted a post of mine, triggering a cascade of events by the terror group and its online armies. Naim said that I am a “suspicious person” who has maligned Hamas and that my condemnation of the terror group is “fascist, racist, and extremist” because, according to Naim, my depictions of Hamas are “inaccurate.”

He attacked the Board of Peace official for retweeting me, questioning how a “suspicious” person like me could be taken seriously. Hamas’s media office then issued statements on my page, while their outlets published articles inciting against me and accusing me of “marketing Zionist projects to eliminate the resistance and deport Gaza’s population,” all of which began trending on Gazan social media.

Hamas didn’t just go after me; they also viciously attacked the UAE and its leadership, claiming I am “wholly financed by the Emirates” and an “agent of media empires they control.” They even targeted the Realign For Palestine initiative, falsely alleging that the UAE Foreign Ministry funds me (they don’t). Hilariously, they added that I write for “Zionist platforms like Haaretz to malign the resistance” and call for peace and reconciliation – interestingly, I’ve only ever written for Haaretz twice in 2017 and 2024.

Unfortunately, attacks by Hamas’s leaders and government against me triggered an avalanche of online hate by the group’s members and terrorists, including those who were calling for there to be “operations like the 1972 Munich attack to deal with agents and those who seek to weaken the resistance in Western countries,” in reference to me.

All of this started because of a post that called out Hamas for not allowing the construction of new accommodations for displaced Gazans near the Rafah area beyond the “Yellow Line,” and because I said that, like many other conflicts, civilians must not be left along with combatants if there is ever to be hope for the removal of terrorists and the reconstruction of Gaza for its people.

Hamas knows exactly why my words hit a nerve. They know that moving civilians out of the red zone they control and creating a new reality beyond the “Yellow Line” with better housing, health, education, and security under an International Stabilization Force and a new Gaza police force is the only strategy that will weaken them. They fear any plan that removes their leverage, their ability to weaponize Gazans suffering, and their access to aid and resources.

So if Hamas and Basem Naim want a war, they have one. And I’m only getting started. Now that we know what triggers them, this is precisely the strategy the Arab world, the international community, the United States, the European Union, the Board of Peace, Israel, and the United Nations must pursue, maximally and without hesitation.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

“Yet one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.” George Orwell

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

After years of a propaganda campaign about Israel training dolphins, sharks, vultures, birds, rats, and cattle to attack, spy on, or harm Palestinians, we now add “raping dogs.”

@NickKristof has helped give another grotesque conspiracy campaign oxygen.

[Jon Levine @LevineJonathan]

A list of animals Israel has been accused of "weaponizing" against Palestinians over the years

Thread 🧵🧵

[Moshe Emilio Lavi @MosheELavi]

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion.

The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else.

The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject.

This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X.

Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility.

The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting.

This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier.

Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price.

It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence.

Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters.

The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record.

Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously.

It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Worth noting that under Governor Newsom’s watch, California agencies directed over $40 million in grants and contracts to CAIR-California and its programs.

It is unconscionable that an organization presenting itself as a human rights group, one that was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case involving money traced to Hamas itself, continues to receive massive public funding while keeping foreign ties and financial networks hidden.

Investigate CAIR-California next. Force their books open.

[Greg Abbott @GregAbbott_TX]

Progress in my legal fight against CAIR.

I declared CAIR a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

They sued to block it.

I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror.

A federal court granted my request

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

It’s not just that ‘from the river to the sea’ movement I s an obsession with a fantasy that will never happen. It’s that the obsession itself is aimed at the wrong thing: the destruction of others rather than the flourishing of itself.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

The Israel Collapse Industrial Complex: Since Hamas’s October 7th attack, a new genre of pseudo “political analysis” entertainment has flooded social media and YouTube in particular, about Israel’s “impending collapse,” or its inevitable destruction, doom, and the end of the Jewish state. YouTube serves me daily suggestions of highly produced videos, with ads, of various content creators, including those in Qatar who, during the Iranian bombardment of Doha just a few weeks ago, made a slick video about Israel’s imminent collapse, which is now a prolific theme across the “pro-Palestine” activist communities. Journalists, academics, advocates, politicians, humanitarians, students, social media influencers, aspiring figures, and vast numbers of diaspora Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and “allied” communities consume this content and use it to form their opinions and worldviews on how to think and speak about this issue.

What’s incredibly disturbing is that this is the third iteration of this fantasy and the associated imaginative hopes, all of which have been at the core of the Palestinian people’s destruction and perpetual suffering for 80 years. It began with the pan-Arabists and nationalists who failed miserably, then with the Islamists of the past thirty years, and now, with a new mutation that’s made up of the intersectionality left, elements of the right, “wokesters,” ignorant Arabs and Muslims, clueless Westerners, malevolent grifters, and opportunists. I grew up in Gaza with Hamas’s prophecies, including those of the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, that Israel would collapse by 2020 or 2028, and listening to Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood figure Tareq Al-Suwaidan saying that prophecies predicted “Jews having a state for 80 years” after which it’ll collapse.

The Palestinian people have been sold fiction time and again, by different ideologies, death merchants, failed nationalists, and others who used this cause to grift and achieve personal gain and glory. The last thing Palestinians need is another iteration of this delusional fantasy to keep the next generation trapped in radicalization, Jihad, violence, and hatred.

It should be clear to everyone by now. Israel is here to stay. Israel is not going anywhere. There will be no erasure of the Jewish State. There will be no mass killing, deportation, conversion, or forced subjugation of millions of Jewish Israelis. Instead, what is needed is a radically pragmatic understanding of how both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis can be part of this land, make peace, achieve mutually beneficial arrangements, and reject the notion that either one is going to destroy the other.

Do not be a participant in or consumer of the Israel destruction industrial complex if you actually care about the Palestinian people – be a builder and champion a future defined by what you stand for and want to see, not just by what you are opposed to and stand against.

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

.@ALionessWrites captures something essential: the ominous cacophony of violence around us isn’t random. It follows a pattern - a historic rhythm - and that pattern is more disturbing than the noise itself.

“The indoctrination has gone so deep that people are marching, week after week, in active support of this radical ideology that would dismantle every freedom they’ve ever taken for granted. Not inconvenience it. Dismantle it. Obliterate it. They would choose a world governed by jihad and jump in on the ambition of a global caliphate over a world that includes 15.7 million Jews. People who have never gone a single day without their rights are lining up to surrender them…as long as the Jews go first. And I keep waiting for someone in that crowd to stop, look around, and ask themselves what the fk they’re actually doing.”

https://t.co/FYsaokEs6w

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

“Hasan Piker finally found the line. Calling Jews in-bred and pig-dogs is one thing, but now that he's endorsed stealing lemons from Whole Foods we'll need to have a serious conversation before the midterms.” @SethAMandel

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

To Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, “theft is fine as long as you don’t have to look anyone in the eye when you do it, and as long as you get away with it,” @gcaw argues: https://t.co/tQhDnf8AaT

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

Thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with @hoffman_bruce and Haviv Rettig Gur. Clear, non-partisan look at terrorism—what it is, what it aims to achieve, and how it actually works.

Bruce was my boss when I was first starting out as a psychologist and consulted on terrorism at RAND Corporation. He’s a serious scholar, high integrity. Worth your time.

https://t.co/d3Xbo6SOST via @YouTube

[Orli Peter @orlipeter]

In this brilliant essay, Egyptian-born scholar @HusseinAboubak argues that we are watching Little Shop of Horrors play out in real time. His claim is that parts of the Democratic establishment have made a cold strategic calculation: concede Israel to preserve party unity and keep the broader agenda intact. Feed Israel to the beast, in hopes that the monster will be satisfied.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, and it is a catastrophic one, because it rests on a misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom.

link to full essay below