Cause and effect conclusions always are a problem for ideological zanies, both right-wing and left-wing.
Today’s discourse on the stock market deals with the pro-Arab lefties. They call themselves pro-Israel, which is like a talking Trojan Horse uttering praise for the country where it was brought with enemy soldiers.
The truth is that mass media are just as guilty, burying a nasty and misleading leftist agenda under the term “objective reporting.”
Here is Monday’s headline from Mondoweiss, one of the nastiest and most misleading Jewish anti-Zionist sites around: “SodaStream Stock Sinks, and Bloomberg Cites ‘Sanctions Over Jewish Settlements.”
Indeed, that is what Bloomberg also wrote. Its headline on Monday read: “SodaStream Drops Amid Sanctions Over Jewish Settlements.”
Facts: The stock dropped 3.3 percent on Monday, the same day that the Standard and Poor 500 fell 2.28 percent and the NASDAQ index dropped sunk 2.26 percent. SanDisk sank 3.1 percent, and Microsoft outdid SodaStream and fell 3.59 percent.
Maybe Microsoft dropped because settlers in Judea and Samaria bought Office?
Bloomberg concluded, “SodaStream International Ltd., the Israeli maker of home soda machines with a factory in the West Bank, sank to the lowest since 2012 in New York amid growing criticism for businesses operating in a territory that Palestinians seek for an independent state.”
The writer, Elena Popina, did not explain how she knows that is the reason, but she immediately followed up on her conclusion by noting that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned Israel about the boycott campaign and that Oxfam and Scarlett Johansson broke up their relationship because she is a goodwill ambassador for SodaStream.
Popina added, “The boycott debate comes after pro-Palestinian activists scored several successes in a campaign to blacklist businesses operating in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, land occupied by Israel since 1967 and claimed by Palestinians for a future state.”
After swallowing and regurgitating the media assumption that Israel “occupied” the land, which was previously occupied by Jordan, she reminded readers that a large Dutch fund announced in January it would not invest in Israeli banks because of their involvement in Judea and Samaria. Norway also said its own fund has reinstated a former boycott against two Israel firms active in parts of Jerusalem where Jews are deemed illegitimate and illegal.
It is an axiom that stock market analysts, like many psychologists, invent reasons for a past event, and for this shrinks charge $100 an hour or more.
Mondoweiss also does the same for free.
It wrote on Monday that last month “we reported SodaStream stocks had plunged that Monday morning after the announcement Johansson had signed on as the [SodaStream]corporation’s global ambassador. However, we noted at that time there was ‘no mainstream investment media mention regarding the growing boycott against the corporation.’”
Mondoweiss’ Annie Robbins gleefully wrote that the Bloomberg headline ”screamed” that the drop is because of its factory in the industrial area of Maaleh Adumim, where no one lived before Jews began to settle there 39 years ago.
Bloomberg came up with a cause and effect fallacy, and Mondoweiss ran with it off the field of reality.
“Finally, people are listening,” she wrote. “ And remember that John Kerry only made his offhand remark about ‘boycotts’ that hurt the stock, per the analyst quoted in Bloomberg, a day or so after SodaStream was the talk of the State House briefing. Methinks we’re having an impact. There’s been a massive shift in the discourse since we reported on Jan. 12 that Scarlett Johansson is the new face of apartheid.”
Now here is a little item, actually big item, from the same Bloomberg Business newspaper on January 14 of this year, under the headline “Even Star Johansson Can’t Help SodaStream as Stock Sinks 26%.”