Forcing a perpetrator to confront his victim’s humanity can dissolve hatred into compassion.

Evidence

The transforming effect of perceived common humanity is further illustrated in a daughter’s mission of vengeance (Blumenfeld, 2002). Her father, a New York rabbi, was shot and wounded in Jerusalem by Omar Khatib, a Palestinian militant. Twelve years later, the daughter set out to exact revenge by forcing Khatib to confront his victim’s humanity. Concealing her identity, she exchanged letters with the jailed gunman. The militant gunman, the victim, and the filial avenger were humanized through this process. In a dramatic courtroom parole hearing, the daughter identified herself to Khatib as she pleaded for his release from prison, vowing he would never hurt anyone again. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 665

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s vault theme of ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy — here is the mirror-image: moral re-engagement through deliberate humanization, complementing Bandura’s disengagement mechanism and the Islamophobia-adjacent claims about dehumanizing out-groups. — connects to: Structured face-to-face accountability with a harmed individual catalyzes recovery from hate. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 430
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 665