Study: Violent Thugs Only Definitive Of Other Side’s Ethos

“The data are clear on this,” asserted Straw Mann, lead author of the study.

Tel Aviv, June 14 – Groundbreaking new research has confirmed a longstanding hypothesis according to which the violence committed by people or entities allied with your political position is an aberration, regardless of its frequency and intensity, whereas  violence perpetrated by anyone associated with your political opponents represents an essential and defining element of that political camp.

Scientists at Tel Aviv University reported today that they have succeeded in proving correct the widespread assumption that violence is merely an unfortunate peripheral characteristic of your group and an inseparable part of the other side. Thus, explained a researcher, you can truthfully describe the thugs who use violence in the name of your shared cause as “a few bad apples” or find other ways to excuse their behavior, but those who commit violence of any sort to support or protest the same thing you support or protest can safely be categorized as an authentic representation of the vision your political opponents hold.

“The data are clear on this,” asserted Straw Mann, lead author of the study. “They demonstrate that when your allies perform otherwise identical acts of violence or harassment to those performed by the dangerous radicals with whom your opponents have allied, save for the fact that they are performed by different parties, those acts can be dismissed, described as marginal, or simply branded ‘unfortunate,’ and be ignored after perfunctory condemnation. Whereas the violence of the opposition colors all of the opposition.”

“Furthermore,” he continued, “acts of violence by your allies, or by your own group members, can by nature be excused or rationalized as a response, understandable even if illegitimate, to the evils perpetrated by the other side, such that the opposition becomes the ultimate cause of that violence, and your side is absolved. On the other hand, your opponent’s violence represents the problem itself, or at least a significant symptom of it, and cannot be similarly dismissed or rationalized.”

“Thus, for example, if you’re from Meretz, violence by Palestinians is merely a response, resistance,” he added. “Where as violence by right-wing Jews is the problem. If you’re on the right, then Palestinian violence is the root cause, and Jewish violence is a response to that danger, but hardly essential to being right-wing.”

“Naturally, whichever side you, personally, are on, is manifestly correct, and the only defensible moral and political position,” he concluded. “That’s clear to anyone with half a brain – unlike the first eighty organizations that declined to give us a grant to conduct this study, for obviously political reasons. Fascists.”

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