Jerusalem, September 3 - Scientific research has confirmed a long-held assumption prevalent among the civically engaged, a new study claims, to the effect that constructive, beneficial acts, policies, or decisions that a government adopts become wrong when that government is run by your ideological opponents.
An article in next week's issue of the journal Hypocrisy Today lays out the details of the research, which examined numerous instances of the wrong people supporting the right things, thereby making the right things the wrong things even though they would remain the right things were the right people to do those things. The study arrived at what the authors call a workable model to explain the phenomenon, which observers are calling an important milestone in the age-old endeavor to comprehend what makes people such schmucks.
"Many of us had sensed the truth of this hypothesis intuitively," explained lead author Dr. Sel Fintrizt of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We knew it was unremarkable when the Obama administration kept illegal immigrant children in cages, but when the Trump administration revived the policy, it became evil. In a similar vein, Obama administration attempts to influence elections in Israel through a series of NGOs caused little stir in Washington, but the charge of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections in the US sent the Democratic Party and mainstream media into a frenzy. We discovered it's less about the what and almost all about the who."
The phenomenon occurred with the greatest frequency, the article notes, in international treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arrangements from the 1990s that granted Palestinians limited self-rule in certain disputed areas also barred either side from a number of unilateral actions that might prejudice the outcome of a still-elusive final status agreement; nevertheless, European and other foreign governments either turn a blind eye to, or directly fund, Palestinian efforts to establish such facts on the ground even as those governments and NGOs rail against Israel for pursuing the same type of behavior.
Similarly, making the desert bloom generally registers as a positive among humans, but for opponents of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland, when Jews do it there it becomes rape of the landscape and the upsetting of important ecological balance.
Scientists agree the mechanism of the phenomenon remains in large part a mystery, but some tantalizing hints have emerged, revealed Dr. Fintrizt. "We know as soon as Jews appear in the picture somewhere, the probability of this phenomenon occurring quadruples," he noted. "That's likely a huge clue, one we do not yet understand. But it's probably the Jews' fault."