“Bullies know that the key to dominion always lies in the first conciliating act of submission.” –Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and foreign affairs editor of the Wall Street Journal.

When Palestinian official Murad Al-Sudani called a booth for the upcoming Jerusalem Wine Festival an attack on Jerusalem’s Islamic heritage he knew exactly what he was doing.

Al-Sudani, the registrar for the National Palestinian Committee for Education, Culture and Science blasted the upcoming erection of a booth for the Jerusalem wine festival at an upscale open air mall on the grounds that part of the mall is built on an old Palestinian cemetery.

He asserted the site was of historical and religious significance since it contained the bones of some of Mohammed’s companions and accused Israel of attempting to “bury” the Muslim history of Jerusalem.

Al-Sudani further termed the move "a dangerous escalating step” by Israel.

Never mind that the mall is frequented by Jews, Arabs and tourists from around the world, or that restaurants and bars sell alcohol there regularly and have done for years.

This was a chance to use a classic bullying tactic and attempt to use a minor event as a means of exerting dominance and control.

This particular instance works on several levels at once. Firstly, it is a crude power play which destabilizes the wine festival and prevents it from operating in a normal fashion. The organizers will now wonder if they will be permitted to put the booth in the Mamilla mall and, if so, they will have to worry about security.

The Psychological Harassment Information Association lists one forms of bullying as “wearing the individual out tactics that mainly consists of trying to induce as much stress on the person as possible.”

Another form of bullying is to humiliate the victim in front of others, in this case in the international arena. As this event garners media attention, other nations and individuals, who only hear part of the story will hear the bully’s side and blame the victim.

“Often, emotional abuse builds over a long period of time until it becomes so unbearable that victims lash out in frustration and anger, only to appear unstable and aggressive themselves,” says psychiatrist Marie-France Hirigoyen.

When Western powers do react and use violence in an attempt to halt Islamist bullying, the bully then cries victim and uses dramatic media footage to play for sympathy and heap further blame on the victim.

A further example of such abuse tactics took place in France, where two men have just been sentenced for violently assaulting a young couple after telling them they would “go to hell” for eating a pizza with ham on it.

One began stroking his hand through the woman’s blond and hair and then stuck his fingers up her nose until he fainted. When her boyfriend tried to intervene, he was beaten up by the two until a nearby security guard saved him.

This abuse tactic seeks to control the actions of non-Muslims to act in accordance with Islamic principles even if they don’t convert to Islam. FortRefuge, an abuse survivors community, describes the abuse tactic of control as “taking control of the aspects of your life that normally you would have the freedom to control yourself, such as monitoring your social interactions, checking your phone, supervising your career, diet, even what outfits you wear or which hygiene products you use.”

This instance is just one example of how Islamists exert control as an abuse tactic. The most obvious is the controversy over cartoons containing caricatures of Mohammed.

Islamist use jihadist violence in conjunction with exhortations to get the media to stop publishing cartoons in the name of sensitivity. This tactic prevents most media outlets from even depicting, much less criticizing, the Muslim prophet Mohammed. This is in stark contrast to the irreverent bemusement with which secular media outlets treat the religious figures and scriptures of other faiths.

We should also not think of abuse as something that only happens between individuals. When people form groups, their identities become pegged to the status and success of the group. It’s why people are happy when their sports team wins and why even people not normally interested in sports can celebrate a national victory in the Olympics.

The social psychologist Henry Tajfel and his associates conducted a series of experiments in 1971 assessing the extent to which even perfect strangers were willing to perform acts to benefit their in-group at the expense of an out-group, even when those groups were completely artificial constructs set up for the purposes of the experiment.

They found that people were willing to do this and postulated the reason as being that a person’s self-image becomes associated with the status of the group as related to other groups.

“As our group membership forms our identity, it is only natural for us to want to be part of groups that are both high status and have a positive image,” psychologist Dr. Jeremy Dean wrote on his popular psychology blog Psyblog. “Crucially though, high status groups only have that high status when compared to other groups. In other words: knowing your group is superior requires having a worse group to look down upon.”

Because people associate group identity with self-identity, they can and do engage in the same abuse tactics one might use in an interpersonal conflict on a macro-scale.

Unable to defeat Western militaries in the field, this is precisely what the Islamists are doing, pulling tactics from the abuse playbook in order to wage psychological warfare against the West.