On Indulgences and Torah Scrolls

Let's say that a Roman Catholic diocese needs to obtain a mortgage loan on its property. And let's also say that times are bad, that unemployment is high, and that the faithful of the diocese might find it hard to keep up regular contributions. That would mean that the diocese could find it difficult to make monthly payments on the loan. The church buildings, representing the security for the loan, are difficult to sell, making a foreclosure on the mortgage impractical. So here is an idea that might come up in the minds of the bank lawyers: have the diocese pledge not only the churches' real estate, but also its "personal property," property that is not real estate.

What sort of "personal property" does a diocese own ? Well, it could always sell indulgences, couldn't it ?

No, of course it could not. Canon law forbids it, and civil law, probably, forbids it also. Most of all, as far as I know, there is no active market in indulgences, so this lack of a market, if nothing else, would make the idea impractical. But before this fact was determined by the mortgage bankers, I think they might well have entertained the idea.

What makes me say this ? Well, I have before me an actual mortgage agreement that mortgage lawyers concocted for a synagogue, in which I find the following:

... which loan shall be secured by a mortgage on the Congregation's premises and a security interest on all items of personal property used at or related to the Congregation's premises ...

One of the reasons that lawyers like to use obscure legal terms is that laymen cannot understand them. The hapless congregants of this synagogue approved the language, but how many of them understood that they were mortgaging their sacred Torah scrolls ? As I said, "personal property" means all property that is not real estate. What does a synagogue own in this regard that has value ? Used books, used computers ? Hardly. But Torah scrolls have a market value of between $20,000 and $60,000 each, so in the case at hand the value of the scrolls might be half a million dollars. Furthermore, in case of foreclosure, Torah scrolls are a great deal more marketable than synagogue buildings ...

There is of course a catch to all this, but it isn't a catch that seems to have worried either the mortgage bankers or the congregation's board: Jewish law, halakha, forbids the trafficking in Torah scrolls, sifrei torah. Moreover, even to those who are either not versed in halakha or are fairly indifferent to its many provisions, there is something unusual in this piece of "creative financing" that should have raised red flags. As it happens, the involvement of "personal property" in connection with a real estate loan, especially in the case of synagogues, has so far been unknown.

Now I have to say something that I believe is generally true, but is also no doubt unfair to some honest and hard-working people. This is it: red flags are not popular among creative-finance lawyers. It is said about mortgage bankers (a good many of them), and their lawyers (a good many of these), that they each have one glass eye, and that you can always tell which eye it is because it is the one that inspires more confidence in its owner's probity.

Hate crimes USA: Jews are the most targeted

# of offenses = number of "hate crimes" reported by U.S. Department of Justice for 2008

size of target = for the "racial" groups, US Census data; for the religious groups, poll data of self-identified religious adherents, corrected to include both children and adults; all rounded to nearest million, except that for Jews and Muslims the rounding is to the nearest 100,000.

Interpretation: Proportionately, Jews were targeted more than three times as often as Blacks, more than four times as often as Muslims.

The Non-Accountability of Religious Groups

carlbrockstudio.com/Pawley_s_and_Fripp.html

No, it is probably not true that religious groups in this country are robbing us blind. But we cannot be sure, because, inexplicably, our laws have loopholes that prevent the government from effectively checking on the finances of churches, synagogues, and mosques, on how these groups manage or mismanage the very considerable public funds with which they are entrusted by way of tax exemptions and tax deductibility of donations.

Does it ever happen, for example, that a religious group will offer a receipt for a donation for a payment which was not in fact a voluntary contribution but rather a payment for some sort of service, say a church-catered wedding or individual religious tutoring ? Issuing a donation-receipt under such circumstances would be illegal but under current auditing rules of the IRS and state agencies, it would be almost impossible to detect.

I have outlined the contours of the problem in the first part of a law review article entitled "When the Constitution Fails on Church and State: Two Case Studies," 6 Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, 1.2 (2005). Here I reproduce Sections 5-15 of this article. I have omitted the numerous footnotes; they contain supporting detail and and can be consulted by clicking on the link shown above.

I. THE NON-ACCOUNTABILITY OF RELIGIOUS GROUPS

[5] The United States in recent years have seen well-publicized scandals in the
Catholic Church, primarily concerning sex, but also involving concomitant financial
irregularities. The public discussion surrounding this matter has not touched upon the fact the Catholic Church, like all other religious groups, is given very unusual immunity from financial reporting to the government and from most auditing by the government.

[6] The federal religious immunities in the IRC are found in Sections
508(a)(c)(1)(a), 6033, and 7611, and have a long history, going back at least to the
beginning of the twentieth century. They are noteworthy because they benefit religious groups and not other non-profit entities (except by way of certain de minimis provisions).

[7] Section 508 immunity provides that new religious groups (and small secular
groups that can qualify under a de minimis rule) need not file an application to qualify for tax exemption. Most non-profit groups must file a Form 1023 to obtain recognition as a tax-exempt entity. This form asks searching questions about the group's finances angovernance. But churches and synagogues need not file; they are considered tax exempt on their own say-so. This is a very significant exemption from accountability.

[8] However, Form 1023 may be filed by churches on a voluntary basis. A
church that takes this route will be asked, in addition to the questions that are applicable to all non-profits, a special group of questions contained in “Schedule A”, which are designed to distinguish bona fide churches from illegal schemes.16 The logic, if any, of Schedule A is not obvious. If a group considers itself a church or synagogue it need not file such information unless it decides to do so voluntarily, in which case it will have its bona fides questioned; those declining the voluntary filing have their bona fides assumed.

[9] Nor are the advantages of filing [to a church] obvious. A publication by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (the Reform movement) recommends voluntary filing, partly because it results in a listing by the IRS's Publication 78. Such listing does confer more visibility to a group, and perhaps enhances its credibility among prospective donors, but does not enhance a church's tax status or any other legal prerogative. Many churches and synagogues are listed in this mammoth book but many are not. There does not seem to be an easy way to estimate the extent of this voluntary compliance.

[10] The Section 6033 and 7611 exemptions free churches from the periodic
financial reporting that is required of other non-profit groups. These exemptions
benefit "churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions and associations of
churches" (as well as secular groups with annual gross receipts of less than $5000) and are thus more narrowly drawn than certain other definitions of "religion." Obviously, a mosque and a synagogue is a "church" for this purpose, but certain other church-related groups are not.

[11] The § 6033 exemption is particularly significant and far-reaching because it
affects not only the targeted groups but also the public at large. At issue is the famous IRS Form 990, which for all other non-profit groups affords a revealing and very accessible picture of how non-profit groups manage their money. Secular non-profit groups are required to file this form annually, but churches are not. Most states require that the secular groups operating within their borders also file a copy of the 990 with the state government. Religious groups, however, are generally exempt from these state filings.

[12] The philosophy behind Form 990 is as follows: in return for the many
privileges that the government bestows on non-profit organizations -- income tax
exemption, exemption from property taxes, and tax deductibility of donations, the
government asks for the disclosure of financial information, akin to, but much less
extensive than the information required of publicly owned corporations. Since the
various tax privileges of these non-profit groups may be considered tax expenditures by government on all levels, non-profit groups may be said to receive considerable public funds and should be held accountable for such funds.

[13] The Form 990 filings of all the major non-profit organizations are now widely
available in various publications and on the Internet. They form the basis for ratings given to nonprofit groups by various "watchdog" groups who are interested in how efficiently the charities and other nonprofit groups are managed. The information required on Form 990 includes total receipts, sources of such receipts, expenditures by type and recipient, salaries of top officials, and information on self-dealing operations among board and staff members. The IRC provides penalties for self-dealing, for example a property sold by a board member to the organization at an inflated price. Churches do not have to file such information. Consequently, it is possible that the inappropriate expenditures surrounding the sex scandal in the Catholic Church could not have been as easily kept secret if the Church had been required annually to file Form 990.

[14] The Form 990 disclosure of salaries has attracted particular attention in a
report published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This kind of publicity is likely to
have a deterrent effect on excessive salaries. Again, this public disclosure is not required of religious bodies. In addition, the § 7611 exemption frees churches from routine auditing by the IRS. The Service can do audits, but only for cause, and then only with restrictions that do not apply to secular groups.

[15] Taken together, these Code exemptions create the impression that Congress
regards religious folk as more trustworthy than non-religious folk and less in need of
accountability. As we shall see below, most of the states have followed these Federal
exemptions from accountability. Concerning the state exemptions, Catherine Knight
observes:

[a] church officer who dips into the collection plate may be
held accountable on Judgment Day, but what about a
reckoning in this life? . . . The ability of the attorneys
general of the various states or of church members to
regulate the fiscal decisions of the church's corporate
directors or officers is mired in statutory limitations and
constitutional questions. As a result, religious corporations
are largely self-regulated.

Was Congress right to assume that, when acting under color of church, man's probity is beyond question? ...

While, as we have seen, IRS approval is not needed to qualify a religious group for 501(c)(3) status, obtaining such approval seems ludicrously simple. Professor Rob Reich of Stanford has issued a report on the topic: "Anything Goes." The report has an appendix listing 60 "most eccentric" groups that have managed to obtain IRS approval, for instance groups who impersonate nuns.

The New York Times tells the Swiss: You Are Disgraceful

Fifty-seven and a half percent of Swiss voters have approved an initiative that bans the building of minarets on Swiss territory. I personally do not see much merit in the proposal, and, had I been a Swiss voter, would probably have voted No. Now whatever the rights or wrongs of the proposal, it was a democratically-arrived decision, a peaceful action, subject, like all such decisions, to discussion and possible reversal in the future.

But to judge by the hysterical and incendiary editorial of the New York Times, this decision by Swiss voters was the moral equivalent of an Islamist suicide attack:

Disgraceful. That is the only way to describe the success of a right-wing initiative to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland, where 57 percent of voters cast ballots for a bigoted and mean-spirited measure..... the worst response to extremism and intolerance is extremism and intolerance.

No, this initiative does not constitute "extremism and intolerance" in the same way that, say, a suicide attack is "extremism and intolerance." The murder of innocent people is irreversible, while a democratic vote, in principle, is not.

The educated classes, in Switzerland and especially elsewhere, had condemned this initiative. Like the Sarah Palin phenomenon in the United States, the vote constituted a revolt by the Swiss electorate, more in the rural districts than in the cities, against the learned advice of their enlightened betters. The vote was also a response to perceived threats from Islamic immigrants to traditional lifestyles. The Swiss-based journalist Daniel Ammann, without in any way endorsing the initiative, does what the finger-wagging New York Times editorialists cannot get themselves to do; he provides some cultural context to the vote:

A majority of Swiss voters obviously feels that there are problems with Muslim integration into civil society at the moment. This vague sentiment was fueled by a number of incidents over the last years: The former Imam of a mosque in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, a Swiss citizen by the way, publicly justified the stoning of adulterers or the punitive amputation of the hand of a thief. Muslim parents prevented their daughters from attending swimming classes, gymnastics or summer camps in public schools because they didn't want their girls to be together with boys. Media reports about forced marriages, female genital mutilations and "honor killings" of Muslim women - all confirmed by authorities or in court -- came as a shocking surprise. A university professor even went as far as to suggest in an official publication of a federal commission to introduce elements of the Sharia, the Muslim legal system, into Switzerland.

To repeat, neither Ammann nor I would have voted for this initiative. But, at the very least, let's try to go beyond condemnation to understanding.

Standardized Testing and Mayor Mike

www.college-cram.com/study/rudy/files/30

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just announced that he will place still greater emphasis on the use of standardized testing in his administration of the public schools.

There are people, easily located on the Web, who oppose any and all use of standardized testing in the schools. I am not one of these. There is and there will continue to be an important place for the intelligent and critical use of standardized testing in education. But as I read the recent pronouncements from City Hall and the White House, I fear that the trend is away from intelligence and critical examination of these tests, toward an ever increasing acceptance of them at face value, as completely reliable measures of success in the schools. The about-face by Obama, from pre-election statements that signaled a much more critical approach, is especially worrying.

Much of the political language pushing the primacy of standardized testing borrows from economic notions of "efficiency." As Henry Ford found, an assembly line, based on interchangeable parts, allows for the building of more and cheaper automobiles. Make sure the line runs smoothly, make sure the right worker tightens the right bolt at the right time, and out it comes: the well-running Model T. Why not use such methods to get Johnny to produce mastery of the Three R's, efficiently, thoroughly, and without the bothersome interference of teachers' unions ? (Henry Ford thought of the UAW much as the standardized-test enthusiasts of today think of the UFT.)

Some standardized tests are better than others, some test more, others less, for underlying abilities that are relevant to what we want from education. In any case, each test, and each use of a test, needs to be critically examined: does it do what we want ? To what extent does it do this ?
But beyond the virtues, or otherwise, of specific uses of these tests, there are some inherent limitations to which its critics point. Here are just some of these:

1) Experienced teachers say that it is almost impossible to eliminate widespread cheating on standardized tests, by students, teachers, and even administrators. This does not mean that these tests should be abolished, but it does mean that greater caution needs to shown in their interpretation.

2) It is probably impossible to test, in the context of these standardized measures, for some of the most important results of a humane education:

a. A critical approach to book learning. No, it's not only Wikipedia that can mislead you -- any established source is error-prone, bias-prone. Our children need to learn, as a matter of intellectual habit, to check one source against many others.

b. A realization that appearance is not necessarily reality. A man has degrees, titles, positions; another has none. The two get into an argument. Who is right, and why ? Our children should learn, more and more as they progress through the grades, that not everything that glitters is gold.

3) The more there is an emphasis on standardized tests, the more teachers will be pressured to "teach for The Test." Here is a teacher, say of American history, who knows that a deeper and better understanding of the Civil War requires generous side-glances at European society, at the American and European literature of the day, at Africa and its cultures. But these things will not be "on The Test." What is he to do ? Furnish what he knows is the better education, or teach, as Henry Ford would no doubt counsel, to "produce results," efficiently, i.e. results on The Test ? What do you think he will do ?

Read statement by United Federation of Teachers

Dell Hymes, RIP

Dell Hymes, one of the great American linguists, has died at the age of 82.

Hymes was one of the great influences on me as I did my field work on Gypsies. He was a linguist, an anthropologist, and never wavered from his devotion to empirical research as the foundation of the study of language, that is to say language in the context culture. In this he differed radically from the speculative, armchair "linguists" of today.

Read Margalit Fox's obit in the New York Times of 11/22/09.

Read the article in Reed Magazine (Hymes was a graduate of Reed) by Rebecca Koffman, Winter 2008.

The Laogai of China

Chongqing (AsiaNews/CHRD)

New Yorkers who understand French can subscribe to the French TV network TV 5 Monde and often get information that American media ignore. So tonight we heard about the ongoing totalitarian repression in China, something that should not have surprised me, but it did, just because we do not hear much about it. It's not a secret, there is quite a bit of information on the internet, yet for all the American public knows, "Laogai" may as well be a secret. There are millions -- perhaps as many as seven million -- prisoners in forced labor camps all over China. The Chinese bureaucratic term Laogai, "reform through labor," has now entered European languages to mean what it in fact is: brutal political and cultural repression There is a Laogai Research Foundation, a Laogai Museum in Washington (whose founder was Harry Wu), and a small band of human rights activists who take an interest. The prisoners are persons suspected of political or cultural or religious incorrectness, or in some cases are people who have committed criminal acts.

Could we perhaps get Ms. Clinton to think about Laogai the next time she hobnobs with Chinese Communist diplomats ? Or perhaps Mr. Obama might keep it mind at some diplomatic cocktail party, while sipping a cocktail with the Chinese ambassador ? He should be warned that a Chinese Communist diplomat in Berlin became furious and abusive after the Bundestag voted to condemn Laogai a couple of years ago.

Update, Nov. 17, 2009. Harry Wu to Obama: remember human rights on your visit !

Moyers, Goldstone, and the Shackled Hands

Some six weeks ago, on Wednesday, September 23, Bill Moyers interviewed Judge Richard Goldstone on the PBS "Journal." The judge had just released his Report in which he had accused Israel (and, much less urgently, Hamas) of "war crimes" in the conduct of the 2008-9 Gaza war.

(It should be noted parenthetically that while Judge Goldstone has made numerous Recommendations to Israel for improving its behavior, his Report has nothing to recommend to Hamas, at least not to Hamas by name.)

As I listened to these two gentlemen in September, Moyers and Goldstone -- each more compassionate than the other, each more exuding compassion and good will than the other -- one accusation struck me as the most frightening of them all: it appears that Israel, in Goldstone's telling, had actually and deliberately shot prisoners to death whose hands were shackled behind them. The image stuck in my mind. No, I didn't believe that Jewish boys, even in the midst of war, would deliberately shoot captured and "shackled" men to death. And yet ... Jews, God knows, are no angels. Some are terribly cruel, not doubt. Could a terrible thing like this have happened ? I decided to look into the matter as much as I could. And I found out, as we shall see, that the best short answer to the question is that this alleged cruelty did not take place.

First of all, my memory played a trick on me. (I would suggest that others must have had the same experience.) I had remembered that, in the interview, Goldstone had actually used the words "shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them." It turns out that it wasn't Goldstone but Moyers who used the words, and that Goldstone -- shall I say merely ? -- that Goldstone assented to this telling of the story. Here (right below the video) is the relevant transcript:

BILL MOYERS: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: That's correct.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who'd been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it's a damning indictment of Israel's conduct in Gaza, right?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I've really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report.

Now, in his Report itself, the accusation by the Judge is very far from what it appears to be in this interview.

First of all, nowhere that I can see does the Report accuse Israeli soldiers of shooting "people" (i.e. plural) whose hands were shackled. I did not read every word of this 575-page report, but I looked at every use of the words "tied," "shackled," and "bound." There was only one instance that I could find in which the Report alleges that an Arab prisoner died while his hands were bound, the case of Iyad al-Samouni, which the Report takes up in paragraphs 739-742. These tell a confused story, completely based on Palestinian sources, about which Goldstone himself, it seems, had some doubts:

741. While the fire directed at Iyad al-Samouni [in shackles] could have been intended to incapacitate rather than to kill, by threatening his family members and friends with lethal fire, the Israeli armed forces ensured that he did not receive lifesaving medical help. They deliberately let him bleed to death.

So, it turns out, there was no cold-blooded deliberate killing of "people," or even of one person, as far as the Judge's actual Report goes.

Judge Goldstone's Report, relying on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources, paints the al-Samouni family as totally pacifist and innocent of terrorist activities. Other reports have claimed that this family has been involved in terrorist activities. On the whole, Judge Goldstone relies on biased sources, makes light of Hamas terror, and, overall, falls short of the blind justice that he is sworn to uphold. All that has been documented in the sources that I cite below. But in this case of "shackled hands" he has colluded with Bill Moyers in something that goes far beyond bias: a truly dreadful allegation, made orally on national TV, for which he could find no evidence in his own Report.

UPDATE (Feb. 3, 2010): Israeli Government Reply to Goldstone

Watch the debate at Brandeis University between Judge Goldstone and former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold

Read more about Goldstone and his Report:

goldstonereport.org

thegoldstonereport.com
Dershowitz's detailed case against Goldstone
Update 2/9/10: The Goldstone Report relied heavily on the work of extreme leftist groups in Israel. These groups were largely financed from abroad. Among their most important financial sources was the New York-based New Israel Fund, headed by the American-educated former member of Knesset, Naomi Chazan. Here is a full report of how NIF-financed groups contributed to the Goldstone bias.

Update 3/15/10: A very detailed response to Goldstone -- about 350 pages -- is now available from the Intelligence and Terrorism Information, an Israel NGO: "Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from Gaza."

Update 5/7/10: The Israeli press has uncovered sordid details about Goldstone's past, especially how, as an appellate judge for the apartheid regime, he routinely approved death sentences against Blacks.

Hannah Arendt

I was 26 years old in 1952 when I devoted several weeks to a close study of Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism," which had appeared the previous year. I was a college graduate by then (from the then-famed CCNY), but otherwise innocent of the world of scholarship. "Origins" made a tremendous impression on me, as it did on many others at the time. Nobody was aware of, or would have cared if aware, her strange love life as the mistress of Heidegger.

First and perhaps foremost, "Origins" boldly proclaimed an equivalence between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. ( Since then specialists have pointed to the pitfalls in insisting on equivalence in history: two things are never exactly the same, and, it is now argued, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, while similar in many ways, were different in others.) To her great credit, Arendt went against the fashions of her time, a time when prevailing moods held the Soviet Union to be somehow on the Left and the Nazis on the Right. Of course, Arendt was neither the first nor the most incisive of the writers who insisted on the striking similarities between Soviet and Nazi domination.

The other noteworthy feature of Arendt's book, it struck me then and still strikes me now, was her observation that neither of the totalitarian movements could be explained by the self-interest of its supporters. The Marxist "materialist" explanations needed to be exposed. She was foremost in describing these movements as irrational and, in that sense, selfless. (Recent research, of course, has shown both self-interest and selfless "idealism" in these movements.)

Beyond these enduring aperçus, the book was full of what seemed to me erudite references to historical events and movements. Huge sections of the book were devoted to British and French history, and, I was led to believe, all this detail showed how profoundly educated the writer was, how deep a thinker. Now, more than half a century of commentaries by specialists, it is obvious to one and all that much if not all of Arendt's book place her into that category of know-all writers who start with having an idea (sometimes quite a good one) and then dress it up with whatever footnote references they can find to prove this idea. She had strong opinions, many of them valuable, but she had neither the inclination nor the scholarly habits to test these opinions.

A year or two after I studied her book, I enrolled in a graduate seminar with her at the New School. I thought then, and I think now, that she was the most arrogant person I ever met in my life, or at least tied for that position. She insisted that every one of her thoughts, no matter how fleeting or obviously ridiculous, be accepted as truth beyond any doubt.

Eleven years ago now, Walter Laqueur, in an indispensable article "The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator," shows many instances of a petulant narcissism in her personal and professional life, and also demonstrates the irrationality of the admiration that her writings have inspired since her death. He also shows how prone she was to anti-Jewish prejudices (being Jewish herself was no inhibition).

So what is new ? Plenty. The Times Literary Supplement of October 9, 2009, carries a lengthy article entitled "Blame the victim. Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: the historian and her sources," by the distinguished historian Bernard Wasserstein (I have not been able to find an on-line version of this piece.) Much of Laqueur's older criticism is amplified here, with much new detail of Arendt's personal anti-Semitism, her haughty relations with others, the unscholarly nature of her "Origins of Totalitarianism:"

Her conception of the dynamics of historical change was confused, a mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. She was painfully ignorant of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy and had little grasp or interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. She snapped up unconsidered trifles of evidence and inflated them into richly coloured balloons of generalization.

But Wasserstein's most telling criticism comes when he details Arendt's ignorant use of anti-Semitic sources to reach her generalizations about the nature of the Jews. Sometimes she relies on such sources just carelessly, but more often she seems malicious. We all know, of course, that some years after writing her "Origins," Arendt repeatedly insisted that groups of Jews, particularly those incarcerated by the Nazis, collaborated with Nazis in ways that, presumably, she herself never would. She didn't much like Jews, and she didn't seem to care that her personal tastes and prejudices, and not only about Jews, ruined her objectivity as a writer.

UPDATE, March 13, 2010: read "Where Hannah Arendt Went Wrong," by the distinguished Israeli scholar Shlomo Avineri, in Haaretz Books of March 2010.

UPDATE, Nov. 11, 2013:  read Gertrude Ezorsky's "Hannah Arendt Against the Facts." (1963), and Michael Ezra's "The Eichmann Polemics:  Hannah Arendt and Her Critics" (2007).

A new website devoted to the "Goldstone Report"

There is a new website, Understanding the Goldstone Report. I find the site marked by sobriety and restraint, and think that it is an important resource that you will wish to consult. The site's sponsors outline the conclusions that they have reached about the Report, as follows:

• The report violates international standards for inquries, including UN rules on fact-finding, replicating earlier UNHRC biased statements.
• The Commission systematically favored witnesses and evidence put forward by anti-Israel advocates, and dismissed evidence and testimony that would undermine its case.
• The commission relied extensively on mediating agencies, especially UN and NGOs, which have a documented hostility to Israel; the report reproduces earlier reports and claims from these agencies.
• At the same time, the Commission inexplicably downplayed or ignored substantial evidence of Hamas’ commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of terror, including specifically its victimization of the Palestinian population by its use of human shields, civilian dress for combatants, and combat use of protected objects like ambulances, hospitals and mosques.
• The Commission openly denies a presumption of innocence to the Israelis accused of crimes (while honoring Hamas’ presumed innocence) and acknowledges that it made accusations of crimes without proof that would stand up in court.
• The report contains numerous gratuitous digressions into issues beyond the purview of a fact-finding commission that are inaccurate and profoundly hostile to Israel and Jews.
• The Commission distorted legal standards, imposing on Israel standards that reverse their generally understood and applied meaning, while ignoring important rules of international law that put the onus of responsibility on an organization as base, by Goldstone’s own standards, as Hamas.

Here is the testimony of Col. Richard Kemp of the UK Army, Ret.

When the Authority Figures Improvise

If a person doesn't know, should he improvise an answer, or should he admit that he doesn't know ?

Here is an example from the field of Jewish studies, one in which I am not expert at all. It concerns a problem I have encountered in the Hebrew prayer book, and I have made an effort to consult a number of experts with whose help, and that of books they recommended, I found what I believe to be the correct answer.

The problem arises from the daily Amidah prayer, part of which I reproduce here:




(Text, transliteration, and translation courtesy of a Christian group).

Now here is the problem. In the first line shown above, the prayer addresses G'd twice, each time asking, rhetorically, "who is like you ?," each time using a personal, second person pronoun-suffix. The first time the pronoun-suffix is used, " in "khamokha," G'd appears to be addressed as a male, but the second time, in "lakh," G'd appears to be a woman.

How is this apparent inconsistency to be explained ?

Ask people charged with being knowledgeable about such things, and you will get one of three answers:

1) I do not know.

2) Since G'd is neither male nor female, the writers of this prayer here indicate the gender neutrality of the deity by alternating the grammatical gender indicators. Some variation of this is the most commonly elicited answer. It happens to be ignorant, wrong, and unacceptable from one whose professional responsibility is to either know better or, at least, to understand the limitations of his own knowledge.

3) The correct answer, which I will not fully give away here, can be found by consulting a work on pausal forms in the history of the Hebrew language, for example pp. 96-98 of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, Second English Edition, 1910.

The problem with improvising knowledge about materials that come to us from the past is that this improvisation tends to be in the direction of what is now, currently, fashionable. In the case at hand, the improvised interpretation looks at the ancient text in the light of current, fashionable "gender fairness." Historians call this error one of anachronism.

Why is this kind of error so bad ? To put it most briefly, it robs us of understanding the text at hand. It suggests meanings to the prayers we utter that these prayers do not contain. In short, in this case, it reduces the actual Hebrew text to a mumbojumbo of phrases that are recited by rote without understanding.

For a stimulating discussion of gender in Jewish prayer, see the article by Lois C. Dubin

A Lesson from the Torah

Rabbi Wolpe, whose mini-column I read every week in the Jewish Week, had a particularly important lesson last month. Here is an excerpt:

The Dubno Maggid told a story that should be learned by every Jewish child. He told of a father in a small Eastern European village who was walking his child to cheder, to school. Suddenly they heard a fanfare of trumpets and an elaborate coach pulled by beautiful horses rode down the road. The coach stopped right by them and out stepped a man wrapped in lush furs and dripping with jewels, dazzling the onlookers.

The father whispered to his son: “Take a good look, my child. For unless you learn and live Torah, that’s what you are going to look like!”

Learning Torah — and living Torah — can save us from the excesses that masquerade as meaning. How many of us are wise enough to whisper those words to our children — or heed them ourselves?

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. His latest book is “Why Faith Matters” (HarperOne).

From: Jewish Week, Sept. 15, 2009

Peace Now -- Peace in Our Time

Mr. Neville Chamberlain (center), Pg. Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), Führer Adolf Hitler, Sept. 28, 1938

History has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. The agreement with Hitler that he so proudly displayed on his return to Britain proved to be worthless. In a way, mutatis mutandis, Chamberlain was the Barack Obama of his time: confrontation is noxious and dangerous, he believed, negotiation is the only reasonable way to go. Of course the situation then was not the situation today, and today's foes are not identical to the foes of 1938; Obama's path today may yet prove to be the wise one that his admirers hope it will be.

But there is something eerily similar between then and now. Hitler's Nazi movement made an appeal to dark human passions that sweet reason could not assuage. Sweet reason -- can't we all just get along ? -- does not solve all issues, pace Chamberlain, Obama, and the bien-pensant liberals of our day. Today, I fear, our (mostly liberal) chattering classes, so intent on getting on with negotiation and avoiding confrontation, simply fail to notice that Islamism, in this respect not unlike the Nazism of yore, appeals to passions that are not provided for by rational-man images of bourgeois society.

Today's New York Times tells us that "at least 6 die as Islamists clash with Hamas" in the Gaza territory. The story of bloody mayhem, members of one Islamicist faction killing those of another, is buried on page 7, with the front page taken up by more important news: "retailers see slowing sales in key season," "idle Iraqi date farms show decline in economy," a shooting in Harlem, etc. But the violence of Palestinian Islamicists against one another gets swept under a page-seven rug. And New York Times's readers are spared a confrontation with uncomfortable reality.

The sweet-reason, can't-we-all-just-get-along movement in Israel is called Peace Now, and is promoted by left-wing parties like Meretz. Peace Now was founded some thirty years ago with the proposition that if only Israel were nicer to the Arabs, the Arabs, in turn, would be nicer to Israel. If Peace Now has a guiding principle, it is that radical, uncompromising Islamicism is to be strictly ignored. But, alas, while Israel has tried to be as nice as possible to the Arabs (most notably at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001), more or less following Peace Now prescriptions, there have been no positive results, peace now being more elusive than ever. Consequently, as explained by Carlo Strenger in a recent issue of Haaretz, Peace Now has virtually disappeared from Israeli politics.



Update on the intra-Islamist violence in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/09):

Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said 24 people were killed, including six Hamas police officers and an 11-year-old girl. At least 150 people were wounded, he said.

When Everything is Black or White: Caldwell's book on Islam in Europe

In the Photoshop program for editing photographs, there is a facility by which one can increase or decrease the contrast of an image. I took a black-and-white portrait of my youngest granddaughter, and then dialed up the contrast to a maximum. The result is a picture, interesting in itself, but lacking all nuance of shading. Everything is black or white.

I thought of this ability to rev up contrast, with its result of utter distortion, as I read the book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell is upset by the large Muslim populations in Europe, and, indeed, there are real enough problems. But Caldwell sees everything in black and white. The Muslim populations, he claims, have not assimilated, AT ALL, to European culture. Caldwell is not a scholar, and his use of statistics (and other data) is tendentious and naive. I think that he does point to things we need to worry about, but his highly contrasty portrait will not help us think about the problem intelligently.

I have reviewed this book for Amazon.

Sotomayor: My Mom Doesn't Get It

Celina Sotomayor (AP)

The Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court were bland and brought little to surprise anyone. Certainly, if I were a US Senator I would vote to confirm. That said, I must report my unease at her response, which I heard on CSPAN, to comedian Al Franken's question: why do you want this job. I have so far been unable to obtain the transcript of her response, but the NY Times blog The Caucus gives an account very close to what I remember:

Franken and the Job | 12:16 p.m. Why does the judge want to join the Supreme Court? asks Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

This prompts a lengthy story from the judge, in which her mother, Celina, and her stepfather, Omar, play a role. As she tells it, her mother couldn’t understand why she would take a job that involved a sizable pay cut from her lawyer’s work in private practice, would limit her foreign travel and would prohibit her from having friends who might come before her in court. Her stepfather apparently, at the end, turned to his wife, and said in Spanish, “You know you daughter and her stuff with public service.”

And the judge continued: “That really has always been the answer given, who I am, my love of the law, my sense of importance about the rule of law, how central it is to the functioning of our society …” Those have always created a passion in her, she added. “I can’t think of any greater service I could give to the country.”

As I recall the Judge, she said "all this was in Spanish," wink wink, suggesting, when taken together with her verbiage here, an unpleasant condescension toward her mother --how cute, my old mom, but alas lacking in the sophistication of all those Eastern schools where I learned my selfless morality. There is no doubt that the judge has great affection for her mother, whom she has praised repeatedly in the public record. But condescension nevertheless.

As it happens, Celina Sotomayor achieved graduation from college in New York and became a Registered Nurse, passing her RN boards in English, so the Judge's condescension is doubly misplaced.

Doubly: even if her mother had not had American higher education, or English proficiency, it is a bit outrageous to suggest that our immigrant parents and grandparents cannot be trusted with making ethical decisions as good as ours.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me"

And as he tries to "explain," the Rev. Wright becomes even more rabid. See the New York Times treatment.

The Menace of "Alternative Medicine"

Daniel David Palmer (1845-1914), Father of Chiropractic

There was a time, some thirty or forty years ago, when the elite medical schools and hospitals warned patients away from self-styled healers who lacked medical training. Then as now, "chiropractic," "naturopathy," "acupuncture," and many others, were popular and offered their wares, but then they were rejected without equivocation by established medical authorities. But oh, how things have changed.

To give but one example, New York University's Langone Medical Center now offers naturopathy, acupuncture, and herbalism among its treatments for a long list of ailments, including, yes, cancer. Unbelievable ? Click here to see for yourself.

The gradual change in attitudes by leaders of the medical profession is documented in a 2005 article by the sociologist Terri Winnick, "From Quackery to 'Complementary' Medicine: The American Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Therapies." The article is as much a symptom of the change as a description of it, thereby offering some clues to attitudes that caused it.

To Winnick, changes in medical positions seem all to the good. Her narrative is mainly one of sordid political power plays by the AMA in the 1960's, replaced by more reasonable positions now. Some fifty years ago, she tells us, the medical establishment had more power and could therefore fight off the claims of the rival "modalities." Today organized medicine is constrained to be more reasonable, and, she suggests, has therefore come to see the light of cooperation with "CAM" ("complementary and alternative medicine").

The striking shortcoming in Winnick's article, and in the many similar books and articles on the subject, is absence any sort of hard-headed examination of the claims made by these "alternative" practitioners and of their scientific credentials.

As for the claims, the short answer is that, now as before, there simply is no evidence that any of these alternatives to scientific medicine have any merit whatever. This may seem a harsh and intolerant thing to say, but it is the conclusion reached, despite much pressure in opposite directions, by the very government agency set up to find any and every possible scrap of merit in these "alternatives," namely the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

As for scientific credentials of the "alternative" practitioners, it is instructive to look at those of the man hired by NYU to cure cancer (among other ailments) by "alternative" methods. This is what we read

Dr. X, N.D., joins NYU Urology from the Center for Holistic Urology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. X. holds a four-year naturopathic doctoral degree and a two-year acupuncture degree from the University of Bridgeport. His clinical practice and research focus on integrative, holistic appraches to urological conditions.

Readers should ask themselves how these credentials compare to those of Board-certified medical practitioners. And they should ask the people in charge of NYU and Columbia whether they themselves, personally, would entrust their health and that of their families to the man from Bridgeport.

To be sure, there still are clear voices of warning. Edzard Ernst has recently written a no-nonsense book, and then of course there is Quackwatch. But given the prevailing anything-goes attitudes of our elite medical institutions, these voices seem to be coming from the wilderness.

On dotty judges, doctors, professors ...

Humph, by Roger B.

There are two compelling reasons for the timely retirement of people in sensitive professions:

1) Institutions like courts, hospitals, and universities need new blood; they need those who have been trained in up-to-date science and technology to be in charge. True, the aged incumbents have experience (and, some would say, wisdom) that younger people may lack. This experience, where it exists, needs to be available to these institutions, but in advisory capacities. It is also a fact that the younger and more competent scientists and scholars receive lower salaries than their less competent seniors. So these seniors constitute not only an intellectual but also a fiscal drain on some of our most crucial institutions.

2) The diminution of human capacities in old age is very common indeed; it seems that by age 75 a majority of people have experienced some substantial drop in their mental acuity. When the very old still occupy positions of great power and influence, the decrepitude of the elders has proven to be a public menace. In response, and rather than rely on questionable tests of continued competence, many institutions have enforced mandatory retirement (but universities have been forbidden to do so by federal legislation). The oldest still-existing government in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, retires its priests at age 70, its bishops at 75, and forbids its Cardinals to vote in papal elections after age 75. The Supreme Court of Canada retires its justices at 75; the Israeli Supreme Court at 70. But there is no mandatory retirement at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The United States Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Its membership is small but it enjoys tremendous public attention. We know more about its Justices than we know about almost any other group of human beings. And some of these Justices stayed in office until they were old, very old. From my observations in my last paragraph, I expected to find that more than a few of these Justices became mentally decrepit while in office, and this proved to be the case: dozing during arguments, not knowing which side of an issue they supported, sometimes not knowing the difference between appellant and respondent.

The most complete accounting of this Supreme Scandal is now nine years old: Professor David J. Garrow, "Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment." Writing in 2000, Garrow finds evidence of decrepitude in twenty justices (roughly 20% of all) since the beginning of the republic. (We do not know how many more he would have needed to list had he written today.) In the more modern history of the Court, Garrow lists the following Justices as among those who showed signs of mental decrepitude while sitting on the Court: William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frank Murphy, Sherman Minton, Charles E. Whittaker, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, William H. Rehnquist, Lewis F. Powell, William Jr. Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall. (Again: would he have had to add any names from the Court of today ?) Quite reasonably, Garrow supports a constitutional amendment to control the open-ended tenure that obtains now.

The Medical Profession

Once a physician obtains a license to practice, it is extraordinarily difficult to withdraw this privilege from him, no matter what his age. It is not uncommon to see practicing physicians who went to medical school more than half a century ago. How much do they know about modern medicine ? Very few jurisdictions, if any, have procedures for re-examining the holders of medical licenses at regular intervals.

There is a general problem about licensing a person to perform a potentially dangerous act. Driver's licenses, among others, tend to be valid indefinitely, with very few restrictions. The person who performed well at age twenty at a driver's test is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to have his youthful driving abilities intact at age ninety.

If this is a problem in dotty drivers, so much more in dotty doctors. They can do a great deal of harm, but, unlike Supreme Court Justices, their cases do not enjoy great notoriety. In December of 2007 I reported on the famous inter-war German Doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch whose great prestige among his peers as a young man prevented the German medical establishment from coping with his senility when he continued to practice, and endanger his patients, as an old man. While the aged Justice Thurgood Marshall didn't know who was appellant and who was respondent, the aged Doctor Sauerbruch didn't know, in the operating room, which organ needed surgery. Since then, my family has had a number of sad experiences with dotty doctors, some of which endangered the health and even the life of the patient.

No physician should be allowed to practice (other than, perhaps, in a consultative capacity) at an age at which a substantial number of persons have been found to be impaired in their judgment. The self-policing by the profession, through voluntary referrals, etc., seems to have fallen far short of preventing substantial abuses. I think that the unlimited license to practice should expire at a reasonable age, say seventy, with perhaps some limited privileges allowed after that.

The Universities

Dotty professors are less conspicuous in the harm they do than their fellow-dotties behind the wheel, on the bench, or in the operating room. But even consider the not-dotty over-70's, do we really need so many elderly gentlemen teaching the students of today from a perspective, largely, of their own graduate studies in the 1950's ?

Some six years ago history professor Henry Huttenbach of City College in New York was seventy-three years old, and he explained for the Chronicle of Higher Education why he does not at all feel like retiring:

As long as one has something vital to contribute -- half a century of classroom experience, decades of research still filled with unexpressed ideas in as yet unwritten articles and books -- why stop? Why abandon the satisfaction of the daily give-and-takes with students and colleagues? For golf? For Florida? For full-time grandchildren-sitting?

And frankly, he also says, the money is better if you don't retire. He does not mention any need for new blood in the academy. Nor does he mention any new facts, or insights, or techniques that the graduate schools of today may have to offer to younger scholars that were not available in his graduate training. Nor the fact that, with his full professor's salary, his college could hire more of these younger people. But, by all means, read what he himself has to say by clicking here.

Where is the burden of proof ?

The argument against mandatory retirement is often phrased roughly as follows: If a person attains a certain chronological age, say sixty-five or seventy, or whatever, that fact alone does not prove that he is no longer competent to perform in his profession. He or she should be allowed to continue unless he is proven incompetent.

My argument is the opposite. Given the fact that society has a strong interest in competent judges, doctors, professors, etc., and given the fact that a substantial number among the aged suffer from at least some degree of mental diminution, the burden of proof should be on the elderly individual to prove his continuing capacity. If the eighty-year old physician can pass the equivalent of his specialty board once again, and can prove his mental competence, by all means, be my guest, keep practicing. But for all the others, for all those elderly doctors and judges and professors, etc., unwilling or unable to pass the tests that their younger colleagues need to pass, I say, please, it's time to move over, to make room for the young, to protect the patients and the litigants and the students.

Khalidi: At it Once Again

www.daylife.com

Khalidi's new book, "Sowing Crisis," once again uses propaganda instead of history, and, worse, trickery in the guise of documentation. All this, at least, according to a review in the New York Times Book Review, dated March 15. Click here to read the review.

Even in retraction, the NY Times shows bad faith

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher, NY Times
Portfolio.com

It is now seventy-six years ago to the day that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. And the New York Times, as if to mark the event, has been caught red-handed in publishing outright falsehoods against Israel. Now the paper offers a vaguely worded "Editor's Note" in which it says that, well, maybe we were wrong, maybe we were right, but since the "original source has not been found," the alleged quotation from an Israeli general "should not have appeared."

As readers of this blog know (see postings below), the offensive material appeared on January 8 in an Op-Ed piece by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Today's "Editor's Note" does not mention Khalidi, who, after all, was the one who made the original false allegation against the Israeli general. Let me try to guess why the NYT is so solicitous about the professor's reputation: so as to run more Op-Ed pieces by him in the future ?

This Editor's Note is completely disingenuous from beginning to end. It says that an "original source has not been found" when, in fact, there is a publicly available original source for General Moshe Ya'alon's views, and that these views are the very opposite of what Khalidi and the NY Times claimed them to be. (See my posting below). I nominate the Times, and Khalidi, for the Anti-Pulitzer Prize for Disreputable Journalism.

CAMERA has published a useful history of the Khalidi hoax.

See also Michelle Sieff's informative account of this whole affair.

Professor Rashid Khalidi Had Access to What General Yaalon Really Said

Further on Professor Khalidi's piece in the New York Times (see my previous posting).

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has shown just how Professor Khalidi obtained his (false) quotation from General Moshe Yaalon. It would seem from this that Professor Khalidi had access to what General Yaalon really said, but chose, apparently deliberately, to turn the General's words into their very opposite. Here is part of CAMERA's article (click here for the whole piece):

Perhaps most egregious is Khalidi's conclusion of his column with a fabricated quote. He writes:

"Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: 'The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.'"

Khalidi uses the same fabricated quote in his book Resurrecting Empire, citing in the footnote an interview with Ari Shavit in Haaretz Magazine, August 30, 2002, as quoted in Arnaud de Borchegrave, "Road Map or Road Rage?" Washington Times, May 28, 2003.

But, in fact, Ya'alon said no such thing in the Shavit interview. On the contrary. He said that Palestinian Arabs must understand that terrorism would not make Israelis into a defeated people. Khalidi, in other words, reverses the meaning of Ya'alon's words with a fabricated quote.

Below is Shavit's question and Ya'alon's answer:

Shavit: "Do you have a definition of victory? Is it clear to you what Israel's goal in this war is?"

Ya'alon: "I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us."

Ya'alon repeated in the same interview:

"The facts that are being determined in this confrontation — in terms of what will be burned into the Palestinian consciousness — are fateful. If we end the confrontation in a way that makes it clear to every Palestinian that terrorism does not lead to agreements, that will improve our strategic position."

The story of how Khalidi first came to use this alleged Yaalon quotation, in his book "Resurrecting Empire," is described in more detail by Alex Safian in his contribution to the pamphlet "Israel's Jewish Defamers," Boston, CAMERA, 2008, pp. 42-44. For all those of us who had regard for Khalidi over the years, these disclosures of his sleight of hand will be profoundly disquieting.

Professor Rashid Khalidi and the Method of Indiscriminate Quotation

Professor Rashid Khalidi
photo by Bryn Mawr Now

Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Middle Eastern expert at Columbia University. At various times of his life he has also been active in various Palestinian causes. His scholarly writings, not always uncontroversial, have earned him an international reputation. Whatever his political commitments, he has always maintained cordial relations with people of other persuasions. His friendly relations with Barack Obama, when both lived in Chicago, have become a matter of public notice. He has an enviable reputation for civility in personal and professional relations; in a recent interview, Professor Khalidi remarked that he has about a thousand Jewish friends.

On January 7, however, he published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that has caused consternation to at least some of his well-wishers. Not only does Khalidi here do what scholarly practice forbids -- use indiscriminate quotation as a method of proof -- but he also, as we shall see, claims a quotation is genuine when, in fact, it most likely is a forgery.

Khalidi's piece is entitled "What You Don't Know About Gaza," and suggests that Hamas had no part in causing any difficulty in the Gaza situation. Israel's Gaza operation, according to Khalidi, has no justification at all that he can detect:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

So the war, according to Khalidi, "isn't really about rockets" but rather, exclusively, about the malice and the evil intentions of Israelis. This strong assertion, it would seem, needs strong evidence.

But what does he offer ? Nothing but a single quotation which, he says, stems from an Israeli general, some seven years ago. He does not tell us how he obtained the text of this alleged statement, nor does he give any information about the circumstances under which it is said to have been made. Nor did he seem to have searched for statements by other influential Israelis that may be relevant. ( Nor does he address himself to the question of a possible relevance of statements by Hamas leaders, who routinely threaten all Jews with death; but that is another matter.) In other words, he did not do what a scholar must do under the circumstances, viz. determine, assuming the statement is genuine, whether it represents Israeli policy today, as he claims it does. I am afraid that Professor Khalidi, to the dismay of those in academia who wish him well, has here abandoned the method of the scholar to embrace the method of the propagandist: the notorious Method of Indiscriminate Quotation (MIQ).

MIQ is bad, and routinely earns graduate students failing marks. The reason that MIQ is so disreputable is that literally anthing can be proven with it: the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese. But quite often, when lucky, practitioners of MIQ can get away with it in the non-scholarly public because, on its face, the method looks so persuasive. Often its practitioners are even praised by their friends as great researchers, "scrupulously," as it is sometimes said, "documenting" all kinds of outrageous assertions. Unfortunately, people often do not ask whether quotations are presented with adequate context.

But in this case, Professor Khalidi is not so lucky. It turns out that the quotation on which he has so carelessly relied is most likely wholly specious. We now know, thanks to the excellent detective work of Jason Maoz, that Generally Yaalon apparently never said what Khalidi claims he said. (Please read the whole article by Maoz; just click on his name above.)

Remember, this is what Khalidi claims Yaalon said:

The Palstinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Here, according to Maoz, is what Yaalon actually said

I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us….

What Yaalon wants Palestinians to understand, deeply, is that Palestinian violence will not defeat Israel. Professor Khalidi turns that into something completely different, viz. a desire by Yaalon to have Palestinians see themselves as defeated. As Maoz shows, other anti-Israel propagandists, before Khalidi, have twisted Yaalon's words in the same way, and it appears that the distortion is being handed around from one to the other. Perhaps Khalidi sincerely believed in the accuracy of what he was quoting, but that certainly does not explain away his irresponsibility of passing on this deception without checking the sources.

Professors are human, professors sometimes enter the political fray, and yes, professors sometimes discard all scholarly probity when they allow themselves to be propagandists. These are facts, but not facts that can make us happy. I do worry about that campus up on Morningside Heights and other such places (which, by the way, use up a great deal of public money in the form of grants and tax privileges); I worry about what is happening to the ethos of scholarly responsibility.