The nutroots are fond of talking about how everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. That's obviously true, but they have a little trick that lets them keep the facts they like and ignore the facts that they find inconvenient. When confronted with a demonstrably true statement - say, "the Palestinians have failed to live up to the vast majority of their obligations" - anti-Israel advocates (and many of its ostensible friends) will insist that we don't yet have enough information to conclude that this ostensible "fact" is something worth acting on.

The standard for proof imposed on inconvenient facts is impossibly high. Either what would count as proof is unrealistic (as in the case of conspiracy theories that stack the deck against disproof) or what counts as a conclusion is deferred indefinitely into the future.

What's underneath these not very complicated cognitive gymnastics may sometimes be genuine - we'll reserve our judgment on that question for specific cases. But the result is often a de facto embrace of elements that aren't precisely what we were taught to think of as progressive:

Drawing moral equivalences between Israel and its enemies is so mindbogglingly bad argumentatively that it's obviously driving by something different from clear and deliberate reasoning. It's just impossible to look at the study the situation closely and objectively and claim that the Israelis and their terrorist enemies are after the same thing or use the same tactics.

References:
* An Open Mind [SOUTALKUFFAR / YouTube]

Previously:
* How Many Times Do We Have To Go Over This? If Palestinians Keep Shooting At Israeli Schoolhouses, It's Not A Ceasefire.
* The Definition of ''Equivocation''
* Things That Piss Us Off About This Morning's Guardian Article (5) - The Total Lack of Any Thought About Anything. Ever. They Don't Even Know The Consequences of Their Own Stupid Moral Equivalence.