It's a question that has haunted me for years.
I use traditional journalistic methods, I demand
corroborated testimony, seek only solid, indisputable
evidence, don't fall for rumors and yet, the mainstream
seldom, if ever, believe me.
I don't get it.
Now, one piece of research has made things so much
clearer to me. I speak of ("
We
Can't Handle the Truth"), a National Magazine Award
nomination for
Chris Mooney. Finally, I understand why people
don't want to believe the objective truth.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney
"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to
change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him
facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to
logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the
celebrated Stanford University psychologist
Leon Festinger...
And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in
psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our
preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew
our thoughts and even color what we consider our most
dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward
so-called "
motivated
reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized
over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal:
It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political
scientist
Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push
threatening information away; we pull friendly information
close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to
predators, but to data itself.
Or that we never change our mindswe do. It's just that we
have other important goals besides accuracyincluding
identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of selfand
often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs
when the facts say we should.
And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to
persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact,
head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a
backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their
minds when confronted with the factsthey may hold their
wrong views more tenaciously than ever.
For Israel, this analysis is really bad news. For
those who have a serious Jew problem, the facts be damned,
Israel is an occupier, Arabs are its victims, and no amount
of appeasement by Israel will ever change their minds.
Caroline Glick was once a gung-ho Bush rooter, sent to Iraq
to praise the American army for its unquestioned good
intentions. She has clearly grown up since then and asks why
American Jews primarily vote Democratic, even when the
Democratic President clearly means no good for them or
Israel:
Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
Obama went on to say that he expects his
American Jewish supporters to take his side in his attacks
on Israel...
What does Obama have to do for these liberal American Jews
to accept
that he is no friend of Israel's?
And liberals are not the only ones wearing
blinders. Everyone is wearing them:
They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as
well as a statement in which George W. Bush himself denied
his administration had "said the 9/11 attacks were
orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda."One study showed
that not even Bush's own words could change the minds of
Bush voters who believed there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
As it turned out, not even Bush's own words could change the
minds of these Bush votersjust 1 of the 49 partisans who
originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim changed his or
her mind...
I was invited to speak at the 5th alternative 9-11
conference in New York. My lasting effect was to make
Building 7,
the unarguable, indisputable issue
proving that the WTC was blown up, not by airplanes, but via
pre-planted explosives. At 5:20 PM, 47 storey Building 7 was
ordered collapsed in a perfect controlled demolition. It was
supposed to have been hit by UA 93 but it didn't show up for
the world's first event where 3 skyscrapers all fall down in
an hour. So Building 7 was destroyed all by itself before
the explosives within were discovered.
How much more logic is needed to prove internal foul
play? But if you're convinced that the Americans are
incapable of such treachery, that fact slides down like
water on a duck's back. It simply
cannot be accepted,
barring a change in worldview, which know-it-all people from
all political stripes are incapable of doing.
And I speak not just of what we call the mainstream
left or right. I have entered the worlds of "extreme
conspiracy," and they're just as stubborn and blind as
anyone else. The
really bad anti-semites believe Jews
are Khazars, based on one speculative book by Arthur
Koestler before the days of DNA. But DNA has proven beyond
doubt that Jews are a unique people with no Khazarian
genetic traits. But as Mooney's study proves, the bigots
along with mainstream get their feathers up and hang on to
wrong opinions as if their lives depended on it.
And those who are certain that Masons are behind the
push for a third world war, cite as proof the purported
letters of 19th century masons Pike and Mazzini, outlining
the ultimate plot. Unfortunately the letters were a figment
of the imagination of author William Guy Carr, a former
Intelligence Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. My message
to these believers is a simple challenge; show me a copy of
the letters. Since they are a hoax, they can't be found.
Like that matters!
Just for the money, at first, I investigated a group
of Israeli women who, in 1993, insisted they were visited in
their homes by almost human giants. The women were middle of
the roaders who gave the same description of the beings and
who did not know each other. It was impossible that
they hatched a plot. The reaction of Israelis, common to all
sectors of the public, was the women were hysterical and
Chamish is a known conspiracy nut. The facts be damned.
Mooney notes:
"People who have a dislike of some policyfor example,
abortionif they're unsophisticated they can just reject it
out of hand," says Lodge. "But if they're sophisticated,
they can go one step further and start coming up with
counter-arguments." These individuals are just as
emotionally driven and biased as the rest of us, but they're
able to generate more and better reasons to explain why
they're rightand so their minds become harder to change.
I wrote a book called
Bye Bye Gaza. Within, I
documented how the Israeli government utilized the
weaknesses described by Mooney to break up all dissent to
its expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their homes without even
having to provide compensation to the new refugees. In its
last great act of defiance, the Women in Green gathered over
2000 protesters at a Gazan hotel. Then, on assignment, an
infiltrator named Itamar Ben Gvir arrived at the hotel with
his gang of thugs. They provoked civil disobedience from
local Arabs, providing the police with an excuse to expel
the protesters from the hotel, while imprisoning hundreds of
them, some for months on end. Protest leader Nadia Matar
called Ben Gvir "a Shabak agent" sent to destroy her
protest.
Now look who the sophisticated Matar has hired as her
attorney:
We appealed to the court to investigate the event,
that smelled of an Argentinean kidnapping, and to act
against the illegal arrests and violence by the police.
We came to the court this past Thursday, this time as
plaintiffs and not as defendants, but this was not what
was so dazzling, but our lawyers, Noam Federman and
Itamar Ben Gvir. The sight was uplifting. Itamar came to
the courtroom with a sal-kal baby carrier, holding a
baby, in order to aid his neighbor, the plaintiff
Avishag Leibman. It was a pleasure to see how the
attorneys Itamar and Noam exhibited such outstanding
mastery of the material. They stood like lions against
the immaculately dressed State's representative.
This most unsophisticated fit of blindness got me so
angry that I sent Matar a letter: "Itamar Ben Gvir is your
attorney? Remember Gush Katif. What, are you nuts? He
wrecked the WIG demonstration and got dozens of women
arrested. WiG has been infiltrated. No wonder barely anyone
supports you."
All, however is not lost. I had a recent success:
If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to
present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a
defensive, emotional reaction...In other words,
paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to
convince. You lead with the valuesso as to give the facts a
fighting chance.
I managed to get the country, and the diplomatic
world, to finally find out if Gilad Shalit (an IDF soldier
kidnapped to Gaza) is dead, as I more than suspect, or with
a faint glimmer of hope, is somehow alive. But I had help
from unknowing allies by expressing my views on an Israeli
television interview. Now, with no credit, acknowledgement
or thanks, the search for Shalit's life has begun anew:
http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname%3Dlatest/data/2011-06-24-07-52-06.htm
The International Committee of the Red Cross has called
on Thursday
to provide evidence that Shalit, captured by the movement
five years
ago, is still alive.
The committee said, in an unusual public appeal, that the
Shalit
family has the right under international humanitarian law to
communicate with her son, aged 24 years and held since June
25, 2006.
The Committee added "because it did not show sign of life
about two
years since Shalit, requests the International Committee of
the Red
Cross now prove that Hamas to be alive."
Mooney's article can't help itself asserting the
Right's information delusions. But he doesn't leave the Left
unscathed:
Seth
Mnookin, author of the new book
The Panic Virus, notes that if you want to find vaccine
deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.
And I had my problems with the liberal/Left in
Israel over the crock of lies disseminated about the Rabin
assassination. In the last poll of the issue taken seven
years ago, conducted by Maariv, over half of religious
Israelis but fewer than a third of the secular, thought that
my book Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin was accurate. Taken to
its conclusion, whether the pollees realized it or not,
President Shimon Peres organized the murder of Rabin. And it
only took me some 300 lectures with rock solid evidence, in
the face of often hysterical crowds, to get the message
through the blinders. According to Mooney that is because I
was a secular, Hebrew-speaking Israeli with no apparent
motive other than the truth. And my work will not just go
away. This recent news item is self-explanatory to Israelis,
Left and Right:
Yigal Amir, in prison for the murder of Prime Minister
Yitzchak Rabin, has filed an appeal that seeks to have him
released from solitary confinement. The appeal is based on
similar appeals by Arab terrorist prisoners who have
successfully appealed in similar circumstances.
Shlomo Amir, Yigal's father, said at the beginning of his
son's hearing that the family “has no faith in the courts,
which issue rulings just to please the public. Yigal is kept
in isolation because the authorities do not want him to
spread his ideology, they say. What ideology? Yigal has
never hurt anyone. He did try to murder the Prime Minister
but there is no evidence that he succeeded in doing so,”
Shlomo Amir said.
However, the American radical liberal mindset
will not be moved by beliefs in Israel. A few months ago,
the editor of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hetzberg, yes, a Jew,
wrote a disgusting and ignorant article on Amir and the
Rabin assassination. I sent him and the New Yorker a
complaint and a revision. Here is the result; in the June 6
edition, Hertzberg goes at it again, declaring that,
"Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination in 1995, by a right-wing
fanatic..."
Thanks to Mooney, I realize, you can't change
Hertzberg nor most American liberals, no matter what the
objective facts. If God Himself appeared on Hertzberg's
death bed and told him Amir didn't do it and Peres did, he
would die believing that God was a right-wing fanatic.
end
*
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