Quote of the Day, The Palestinian Effect edition.

The Wall Street Journal, on the uncritical willingness for administration officials to simply swallow Hamas’s agitprop whole:

Maybe [Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications] knows all this and was merely caught out mouthing the sorts of platitudes that are considered diplomatically de rigueur when it comes to the Palestinians. Or maybe he was just another victim of what I call the Palestine Effect: The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning, skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering arises.

I’ve noticed a similar* neurological problem showing up in people who spend too much time and personal energy trying to impose gun control. I wonder if the two conditions are related?

Via

The magical number: 82 percent. Bret Stephens explains. http://t.co/a3QMgLOlhc

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 29, 2014

*Not identical: sufferers from acute hoplophobia mostly seem to just lose about twenty IQ points off of the top and indulge in risky personal behavior while brandishing firearms (I assume that the latter is aversion therapy).