Blinded to reality

Richard Landes has just published an insightful analysis that speaks to the knee jerk rejection of the video evidence that has surfaced over the past two days by those with an anti-Israel predisposition.
If you have been following the CiF comment threads, you will know that such rejectionism is prevalent and becomes more deeply entrenched with the emergence of more and more evidence to the contrary. Here’s one such example of the knee jerk rejectionism from the Seth Freedman thread yesterday, a comment that received a massive 551 recommendations:


As Landes observes:

I’d say, however, that far from “anybody,” these folks are all actually operating from a previously adoped paradigm. They have bought into a Palestinian-David/Israeli Goliath narrative in which the “resistors” are honorable victims and the “aggressors” are right wing oppressors. They look at the footage and project their narrative onto it: Palestinian victim, Israeli aggressor. They begin with their a priori judgment; they are, in the classic liberal expression, “prejudiced.”
So rather than say, “wait a minute, this doesn’t look like a pacifist organization humanitarian work, these are street fighters wailing on soldiers who are not fighting back,” they see people with whatever they have at hand following around the soldiers fending off their attack.

Sums it up nicely. Read the whole thing here.