https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8020-0317
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ABSTRACT
To what extent do political orientation, racial beliefs, and media use contribute to explaining support for human rights violations? To address these question, we draw on Adorno's “authoritarian personality” theory by proposing the concept of “racial syndrome,” resulting in affinity for expressions of support for right-wing ideologies. Using a public opinion survey conducted among Jewish-Israeli adults (N = 1,001), we show that political orientation and racial beliefs contribute to explaining support for human rights violations and that racial beliefs mediate the association between political orientation and support for human rights violations, measured as support for child arrest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, the use of mainstream media moderates the association of political orientation with both racial beliefs and support for human rights violations, but the use of digital media does not. This study calls upon journalists, activists, and policymakers to engage responsibly in reducing racialized beliefs and promoting justice and human rights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For recent statistics about child arrests in East-Jerusalem see DCIP. Year-in-review: Violations against Palestinian children unremitting in 2020 (Palestine: DCI, 2020), https://www.dci-palestine.org/year_in_review_despite_covid-19_violations_against_palestinian_children_unremitting_in_2020 as well as Btselem. (2022). Statistics on Palestinian minors in the custody of Israeli security forces https://www.btselem.org/statistics/minors_in_custody.
2 The sample is representative of the major demographic sectors of the Jewish-Israeli population, as outlined in data published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.