Why I am not believed - by Barry Chamish

      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 these 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