The Evolution Of An Open Mind

Since Israel started their military actions in the Gaza Strip I have published several videos of Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talking about it. I don't work for him nor get paid by him for doing it, I do so because he says a lot of the things I would say if I had that kind of platform. But even Cenk in my opinion at first was making moral equivalencies so as not to take sides. I am sure part of that was due to our media's and our elected official's portrayals of how everything went down. But the great thing about him is that on most issues he will keep an open mind and as he learns new information he allows himself to evaluate it and not just dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't line up with his first impression.

One of the most frustrating things in the past week or so since all this started for me is that when I have had conversations with people whether on line or in person about it they simply do not want to hear anything that challenges their long held beliefs. I can link to/email/present however many fact based articles to them and rather than actually evaluating what is right in front of them they will just fall back to their original position even when they know and its apparent that they have nothing factual to support it. Well I thought it might be a good idea to contrast how Cenk was looking at the situation a week ago with how he has come to feel about it today.

First here is the video from last week. Now mind you he did feel that the response from Israel was disproportionate right off the bat, but he also somewhat felt that Hamas had been asking for it by their actions.



Now contrast that with his words today on the subject a week later and after he has done more research on the subject and therefore has a much better informed opinion.



Now I know that some of the subsequent actions by Israel has colored his opinion, of that there is no doubt. But also he now knows the real truth behind what precipitated this whole situation. And he allowed himself to allow for the fact that he might have been wrong to begin with. Honestly that's all I am asking for here folks. I don't want people to say that the people of Israel are evil or that they are murderers or anything over the top like that. From the beginning I have been clear on this, no matter what happened for years and years before Hamas got elected, in this situation Israel is wrong. Its as simple as that.

That doesn't mean they are bad people or evil or any other derisive term. What it means is the leadership in Israel are wrong and have been wrong and are continuing to be wrong in this particular situation. I said this on someone else's blog, but I will repeat it here. There is pretty much a consensus now that we never should have gone into Iraq and that we wrongly tortured some of our enemy combatants. Does that make America evil? Or does that make our leadership evil? If you can criticize President Bush over Iraq you should DEFINITELY be able to criticize the leaders of Israel for their treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It is what it is, truly.