The most powerful images in today’s pro-Palestinian campaigns aren’t new — they’re borrowed from Christianity. From the Madonna and Child to David and Goliath, centuries-old sacred symbols have been re-cast to portray Palestinians as modern saints and martyrs, reshaping Western sympathy through religious familiarity.
In this gripping conversation, Professor Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London), one of Britain’s leading medieval historians, joins Jonathan Sacerdoti to expose how the emotional grammar of Christian art has been weaponised for political ends — and how its echoes are visible everywhere from social media to pop culture, from the left to the right, and on the front pages of global newspapers.
What you’ll hear in this fascinating discussion:
🕍 How Jewish imagery shaped medieval Christianity — and its legacy in Western art
🕊️ Why Christian iconography still dominates moral storytelling today
📸 How propaganda reuses sacred imagery to provoke emotional reactions
🧠 The psychological power of the “mother and child” pose in photojournalism
⚔️ Why Palestinian PR borrows visual language from Christian Europe
💀 How medieval blood libels echo in today’s online antisemitism
🎭 What modern culture learned from the Church about emotional persuasion
📷 The blurred line between journalism, activism, and visual manipulation
🤖 How AI images will intensify the next wave of ideological propaganda
🎧 Listen to this episode and discover how the ghosts of medieval art haunt our digital age — and how understanding their origins helps us see modern imagery more clearly.
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👇 Comment below — Do you think ancient religious symbols still shape how we see modern conflicts?