Accusation in a Mirror, in a Mirror
A Look at the Reactionary Propagandist of the 21st Century
Accusation in a Mirror,1 by Kenneth L. Marcus, is a 2012 paper that outlines a form of propaganda that appears to have become increasingly prevalent in recent years2. It is a noteworthy paper, but not for the reasons we might think.
What is Accusation in a Mirror
Marcus described Accusation in a Mirror (AiM) as a 'deceptively simple' concept and method of propaganda whereby propagandists 'impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do'.
AiM works 'by issuing false claims against a vulnerable population through repetition in a manner that listeners have already been primed by prior practices to understand as a call to arms', what some might call dog-whistling. Marcus notes repeatedly that to be direct does not mean that statements need to be explicit. Such techniques are 'sufficiently commonplace to be readily understood in its gruesome implications by its hearers'.
AiM is regularly among the 'central mechanisms' used by parties committing genocide because it is 'quite effective'. Marcus points out that it 'can be discerned not only in mass-murder but also in a host of lesser persecutions'.
AiM frequently incorporates 'the language of self-defense' or 'the pursuit of just goals'. Marcus notes that Heinrich Himmler 'argued that "we had the moral right vis-a-vis our people to annihilate this people which wanted to annihilate us"'. The US and Israel have repeatedly falsely claimed that Palestinians want to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ while the territory of Palestine vanishes under illegal occupation, siege and genocide.3 The 'propagandist' sees in AiM 'a collective self-defense justification for mass atrocities'. The narrative of “self-defense” is something that comes up repeatedly throughout much of the literature on the subject, not just Marcus’.
Although Marcus’ work leans heavily on the genocidal implications of AiM, he acknowledges that 'non-genocidal forms of AiM have ... been ubiquitous with other forms of persecution'. The LGBTQ community can attest to that; especially trans people. He provides examples of bigots who 'accuse gay rights activists of seeking "special privileges". Marcus points out that such ‘attitudes can be described as a secondary prejudice* because, to a certain extent, the resentment that these majorities experience arises from subconscious shame for their treatment of a disadvantaged minority. In general, secondary prejudice arises from the guilt or shame that non-minority groups experience in the face of their own present or prior hate or bias' [*my emphasis]. He describes secondary bias as 'any form of bias that is itself a reflection of the taboo of open bigotry'. A bigot almost never says proudly ‘I am a bigot’.
He uses the example of 'secondary anti-Semitism' to illustrate the concept. Secondary antisemitism is defined by the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights as 'any form of anti-Semitism that is in itself a reflection of the taboo of "open anti-Semitism"'. The phrase 'The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz' is described as an exmaple of secondary antisemitism . This is a striking example for Marcus to use, as it is reminiscent of Golda Meir who wrote 'When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.' To the propagator of AiM, victims are responsible for their own suffering and destruction.
Interestingly, Marcus notes that AiM serves 'psychological functions' for perpetrators of the technique — projection. "Projection" is the process of displacing unwanted feelings onto despised others, who may then appear to be external threats. While projection has been explained as the source of all prejudice, including antisemitism, it is never more conspicuous than when it takes the form of AiM'.
AiM falsely accuses the victim of 'the crimes that the perpetrator would visit upon him or her'. In the US, the offensive term "Indian giver" came to refer to 'one who takes or demands back one's gift to another' after years of Native Americans being portrayed by white Americans as 'promise-breaking ... a feature so defining of their character as to justify applying the name to the promise-breaking of all the world's peoples'. Actually, it has been the American capitalist class that has 'systematically broke[n] their promises to Native Americans...'. Israel and the United States apply this form of AiM when they repeatedly accuse Palestinians of "rejectionism" i.e. the accusation that Palestinians have continually rejected "reasonable" peace treaties. The contentious myth of Palestinian rejectionism was tackled in Noam Chomsky's work, the hefty Fateful Triangle in which he argued that meaningful, reasonable peace terms with Palestinians are seen as a 'threat' to Israeli interests, i.e. expansionism. Chomsky referred to it as ‘the continuing threat of peace’. Yet the myth of Palestinian rejectionism persists.
One effect of AiM is to wrong-foot its victims who find themselves going from campaigning for their rights to justifying and defending themselves from false and extreme accusations. Marcus highlights the experience of an Egyptian Coptic Christian, which readers may find it relatable:
'Suddenly we have shifted from complaints to self-defense, from demanding [our] rights to [trying to] convince the public that we are not depriving others of their rights. . . Before [Hurricane] Fitna we were known as the weak and attacked [party], and now we are being accused of amassing weapons… How have we suddenly turned from persecuted into persecutors, from the weak [party] into the strong and tyrannical [one], from the attacked [party] into the infamous attackers, and from the poor [party] into the rich exploiters? How did these lies become widespread, without us gaining any ground or improving our situation one whit? …'
Marcus also lists 'six interrelated functions' of AiM: 'to shock, to silence, to threaten, to insulate, to legitimize... to motivate or incite'. To confuse and to divide could also be added, especially concerning bystanders who are otherwise unengaged in politics.
Discussion
AiM describes a dog-whistling propaganda technique that the reader is probably already aware of, though perhaps has not put a name to. Marcus’s contribution is to write a factual description of it concisely and coherently. For this reason, Marcus’ work is a useful one, if limited4.
However, its narrow legal perspective is a superficial one, which does not sufficiently acknowledge power-relations or the influence of other socio-economic factors.
The result is that his AiM interpretation of propaganda is not much more than a kind of “he said, she said”, whereby vulnerable, actually victimised groups can be accused of AiM by powerful ones who are actually victimising them, at least in Marcus’ portrayal of it. This can (and has) lead to an absurd manipulation of AiM itself; accusation in a mirror in a mirror5.
This might seem far-fetched, but the author of Accusation in a Mirror has himself engaged in such extreme hypocrisy that puts the sincerity and purpose of his work into question. Marcus has been a central figure in campaigns to malign students and workers who show sympathy towards Palestine. Given this, one can reasonably ask, “is the Accusation in a Mirror publication sincere or has it had an ulterior agenda?” As Marcus himself observed, ‘before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed’. Such gaslighting has the effect of throwing us into a dizzying Orwellian spiral, where we can no longer be sure of up from down. Naomi Klein’s work Doppleganger elaborates on that experience. Is Marcus such a Doppleganger? Who are we to believe? Supporters of Palestinian human rights or the Zionist author of the famous AiM paper with a history of “civil rights” work?
It is important to reiterate here that his work AiM is largely true, but its superficiality allows it to be manipulated by disingenuous actors - the author himself being one of them.
Marcus’ reactionary credentials were outlined by Mondoweiss in a 2019 article entitled, ‘The Department of Education has launched a campaign against pro-Palestine voices on campus. Many saw it coming’. Despite being written five-and-a-half years ago, the piece warned that ‘Marcus’ will use charges ‘of “anti-Semitism” to quell free speech on Israel-Palestine on campus…’ The United States is now experiencing that reality. 6
The reason such a limited work as AiM is given such space and energy here is because it exemplifies the methods of the reactionary propagandist of the twenty-first century. They drag us through the looking glass, into a world of inverted reality; antisemitism exists in forms and places where it does not and does not exist where it does. Where it actually exists, it is excused, often by actual antisemites posing as defenders of civil rights. 7
Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and references are from Marcus, K. L. (2012). Accusation in minor. Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, 43(2), 357-394.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=accusation+in+a+mirror&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false
An example of such repetitively false claims used by Israel and the United States is that Palestinians (who have been made synonymous with Hamas by Israeli and US media) want to 'wipe Israel off the map' while Israel and the United States has been doing exactly that to Palestine. Noam Chomsky had this to say when he was asked about the claim in a 2015 interview with David Barsamian:
“DB: One of the things that Israeli officials keep bringing up, and it’s repeated here in the corporate media, ad nauseam, is the Hamas charter. They don’t accept the existence of the state of the Israel, they want to wipe it off the map. You have some information about the charter and its background.
NC: The charter was produced by, apparently, a handful of people, maybe two or three, back in 1988, at a time when Gaza was under severe Israeli attack. You remember Rabin’s orders. This was a primarily nonviolent uprising which Israel reacted to very violently, killing leaders, torture, breaking bones in accordance with Rabin’s orders, and so on. And right in the middle of that, a very small number of people came out with what they called a Hamas charter.
Nobody has paid attention to it since. It was an awful document, if you look at it. Since then the only people who have paid attention to it are Israeli intelligence and the US media. They love it. Nobody else cares about it. Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Gaza years ago, said: look, it’s past, it’s gone. It has no significance. But that doesn’t matter. It’s valuable propaganda.
There is also — they don’t call it a charter, but there are founding principles of the governing coalition in Israel, not some small group of people who are under attack but the governing coalition, Likud. The ideological core of Likud is Menachem Begin’s Herut. They have founding documents. Their founding documents say that today’s Jordan is part of the land of Israel; Israel will never renounce its claim to the land of Jordan. What’s now called Jordan they call the historical lands of Israel. They’ve never renounced that.
Likud, the same governing party, has an electoral program — it was for 1999 but it’s never been rescinded, it’s the same today — that says explicitly there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan. In other words, we are dedicated in principle to the destruction of Palestine, period.
This is not just words. We proceed day by day to implement it. Nobody ever mentions the founding doctrines of Likud, Herut. I don’t either, because nobody takes them seriously. Actually, that was also the doctrine of the majority of the kibbutz movement. Achdut Ha-Avodah, which was the largest part of the kibbutz movement, held the same principles, that both sides of the Jordan River are ours.
There was a slogan, “This side of the Jordan, that side also.” In other words, both western Palestine and eastern Palestine are ours. Does anybody say: okay, we can’t negotiate with Israel? More significant are the actual electoral programs. And even more significant than that are the actual actions, which are implementing the destruction of Palestine, not just talking about it. But we have to talk about the Hamas charter.”
For more substantial work in this area of propaganda see, for example:
Hronešová, Jessie Barton; Kreiss, Daniel; Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump; September 2024; Cambridge University Press Volume 22, Number 3,
also, Mann, Itamar; Yona, Lihi; Defending Jews From the Definition of Antisemitism; UCLA Law Review, Issue 71; 2024;
also, Englert, Sai; Capital's Genocide: A Conversation on Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Possible Worlds after Gaza; 2024; from the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies
or the works of Naomi Klein (especially Doppleganger) or Noam Chomsky, which deal extensively with this topic.
See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3688043681
If one wishes, read the interview with Kenneth L. Marcus here: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/an-interview-with-kenneth-l-marcus-fighting-antisemitism-on-campus-and-beyond/
See, for example, the naked antisemitic raving of Steve Bannon in February 2025, or the ADL apologists for Elon Musk’s fascist salute. https://www.reddit.com/r/Global_News_Hub/comments/1ividh7/steve_bannon_after_performing_a_nazi_salute_at/