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Among those verbally assaulting the State of Israel, there are Jewish academics who are, even in their own eyes, off the mainstreams of their respective disciplines. Their fulminations against the Israelis show a curious parallelism to their academic deviations.
Steven Rose, Professor of Biology at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, since its founding in 1970 and joint Professor of Physics at Gresham College, London, seems fairly typical of the breed.
In the biomedical and medical sciences, where discoveries and ideas are almost instantaneously communicated to others working in the same area, travel funds and open access to laboratories and conferences and to other scientists is indispensible. Rose has taken a leadership role in devising ways to prevent Israeli scientists from having such contact.
Rose is an English Jew. His undergraduate degree was in biochemistry, and he has a Ph.D. in the chemistry of the brain from the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Rose's research is in memory and learning. He established and has since directed the Brain and Behaviour Research Group. He was instrumental in establishing the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science at about the time he helped found the UK's Brain Research Association. He was co-convenor of the Science Engineering and Technology Policy Forum, which advised the Labour party on issues prior to the 1997 election. He has been a Council member of the Research Defence Society and a member of The Committee on the Public Understanding of Science. He was the 1996 President of the Biology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and has been a Director of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. He has written or edited 15 books and is a frequent guest and lecturer on radio and television.
He is much concerned about genes, or perhaps more accurately, he is opposed to the current view that genes are major determiners of our behavior, our very nature. In a paper called Genetics, evolution and human nature: beyond selfish genery delivered at the Forum on Science and Society, Rose sneered:
"There are genes available to account for every aspect of our lives, from personal success to existential despair: . . . And genes too to explain, as ever, the social inequalities that divide our lives along lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity . . . A 'new science' of evolutionary psychology, has emerged, claiming that 'human nature' has been formed by the evolutionary pressures of natural selection during the Pleistocene, and that this nature is now fixed and unchangeable."
He is even more severe on science as an enterprise. Rose doesn't see science as a way to gain knowledge of the universe or to understand ourselves. Rose believes Science was developed as " . . . a legitimator of bourgeois ideology. . .", when religion, the previous legitimator, stopped working.
He is asserting that the nature of science is intrinsically exploitative. It is a capitalist tool (a typical Marxist notion). He is willing to accept the results of the "hard" sciences; e.g., physics and chemistry. He draws the line at what modern biology is achieving: becoming a hard science. He rails at biological determinism, a concept basic to current scientific methodology.
Biological determinism is at the heart of the explosive growth and productivity of modern biology. Biology deals with populations, which are made up of individual organisms which in turn are made up of cells, which in turn are composed of organelles (nucleus, mitochondria lysozomes, etc.), which in turn are made up of molecules. Biological determinism is the systematic approach that requires that the analysis of phenomena at any one of these levels be explained by components and interactions at the next lower level. Thus for example the entry of a hormone into a cell must be explained in terms of the receptor (organelle) specific for that hormone, which in turn must be expressed in the protein structures and other molecules interacting at the subcellular molecular level. Genetics, where so much scientific activity is taking place, is at the lowest of these levels.
In Marxist theory, the class struggle that will lead to a socialist world would have to take place at the level of multiple populations, a level much above that of the groups of individuals with which population biology deals. To Rose, biological determinism or reductionism is a threat, especially when it is applied to the analysis of animal behavior, particularly human behavior.
In using genetics as one of the bases on which to build a science of human behavior, mainstream biology is obviously neglecting the class struggle. (Please don't laugh. This is serious.) Unless you are an out-and-out Lysenkoist (Lysenko believed you could influence gene structure by learned or repetitive behavior done over generations), there is absolutely no way that the class struggle can have an influence on the genes and their expression. Contrariwise, there are, at the least, suggestions that individual and societal aggressive behavior may have a genetically determined component; and this, for Rose, is unacceptable.
Notice, biological determinism doesn't assert that genetics is a complete explanation. "Why then", asks Richard Dawkins in his review of Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, a book Rose wrote with Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin,
"do Rose et al find it necessary to reduce a perfectly sensible belief (that complex wholes should be explained in terms of their parts) to an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)?"
Rose, in order to further an alternative to reductionism -- a system that he calls "dialectical biology" -- indulges in distortions. To quote again from Richard Dawkin's review, this is how Rose and his buddies see the function of the university:
". . . it is universities that have become the chief institutions for the creation of biological determinism . . . Thus, universities serve as creators, propagators, and legitimators of the ideology of biological determinism. If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers."
The mainstream view of science, well-expressed by Edward O. Wilson, the eminent biologist and founder of sociobiology, holds that science is a meritocracy. He writes in Science and ideology, in Academic Questions, 06-01-1995:
"There can be no multicultural solution to the genetics of cystic fibrosis; the ozone hole cannot be deconstructed; there is nothing whatsoever relativistic or culturally contextual about the dopamine transporter molecules whose blockage by cocaine gives a rush of euphoria, the kind that leads the constructivist to doubt the objectivity of science."
In this same paper, Wilson describes how he was savaged by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, others of Rose's gang, who formed a group they called The Sociobiology Study Group. (SSG). Wilson writes:
"In a letter published in the New York Review of Books (one might ask, where else?) on 13 November 1975, the members [of the SSG] declared that human sociobiology was not only unsupported by evidence but also politically dangerous. All hypotheses attempting to establish a biological basis of social behavior, they wrote,
'tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex. Historically, powerful countries or ruling groups within them have drawn support for the maintenance or extension of their power from these products of the scientific community. . . Such theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.'"
So there you have it. Driven by Marxist theology, Rose et al have made it clear they don't like other religions, including the one they were born into. They don't like capitalism. They don't like democracy. They don't like current scientific philosophy. They don't like middle-class values. They don't like individuals succeeding by hard work and individual efforts. It is not surprising they are hostile to Israel.
Israel, though less than 1% of the size of the Arab countries, with few natural resources besides brains and enthusiasm, and with a relatively tiny population, has shown remarkable productivity, and in some areas leadership, in the sciences, in medicine, in the arts, in computer technology and in new ways to make the land bloom. This does not sit well with academics with Rose's indoctrination. Could that be a reason Rose devotes so much energy trying to cut Israel's ties with scientific organizations around the world?
Which brings up another question. Have they taken up the Palestinian cause because they genuinely believe it is "just" or is this a tactical ploy -- a way to destroy a small but scientifically important country that is obviously anti-totalitarian?
If there is one academic who is prominent in his field, Jewish by birth and virulent in his animosity towards Israel -- Israel can do no right, never, no way -- it is Noam Chomsky.
Steven Rose appears to have an all-consuming goal: to clear the way for his style of social justice. His politics and his science have a consistency; a single logic binds them. Noam Chomsky, who is much more acclaimed both as an innovative contributor to linguistics and as an outspoken political critic, is harder to characterize. Were he not so eminent, you might think he was stringing along a bunch of fancy phrases that sounded ok, even if they didn't seem to move you ahead in understanding language. In politics, he tosses phrases into bins labeled Israel, Palestine, USA: bad words into Israel or the USA, good words into the underdog container of the moment.
The son of a Hebrew scholar and linguist, Chomsky studied linguistics, mathematics and philosophy as an undergrad and received his doctorate in linguistics. After his fellowship years, he went to MIT, where he has remained ever since.
His politics are anarchistic and socialistic. He first came into prominance as a highly vocal critic of America's fight in Vietnam and he has remained anti-American ever since.
He is equally dedicated to seeing no good in Israel. Ideally, he'd like to see Israel as a bi-national state, a single state mix of Israelis and Arabs, with no Jewish character. Meantime, he is busy trying to persuade Harvard and MIT to divest themselves of their Israeli holdings. Simultaneously, he is involved in helping the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem rebuild homes destroyed in The Occupation and, oh yes, establish a Homeland.
It is not clear whether these Arabs are to have a Jew-free homeland and also share fully in what was Israel. Or are these Arabs to return to their old homes in Israel, keeping their current houses perhaps as summer homes? And what about the Jews from Arab countries who may be living in those houses in Israel? Do they get back their homes in the various Arab countries they were forced to flee? And what about the Arabs who might be living in those houses?
But then, details have never been a strong point in Chomsky's politics. Or his linguistics. On the website for his current Habitat for Hamas project, this is the answer to the question: Does the house-building campaign address terrorism?
"The Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes directly denounces terrorism through action more effective than words. Constructive resistance to the Occupation underscores the futility of violence and legitimizes those Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals willing to work together for a just peace through construction, not destruction."
The sentence structure is easy. The grammar parses. The words are polysyllabic but in common usage. But what do rebuilding houses and other architectural necessities -- bomb factories and armament warehouses -- have to do with the Arabs renouncing terrorism?
Understanding Chomsky's linguistic theories of language suffers from the same kind of problem. Stripped of subtlety (something Chomsky would never do), people talk in the grammatical ways that they do because they can. These surface grammars are manifestations of -- and can be transformed into -- one basic grammar built into us by a non-existent Deity.
He ticks off many linguists who care about language. Alexander Gross and Sergio Navega present cogent arguments against Chomsky's views in an essay entitled Forty-Four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken. Read it below. (Incidently, before you dismiss the article as the work of rabid right-wingers, visit Alex's blogsite: http://language.home.sprynet.com/home.html. You'll find that, politically, over the years, he's usually been to the left of Chomsky. A summary of Gross' book in progress about language can be viewed on Hammond Guthrie's website: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/thirdpage/alex2.html.)
With reference to Chomsky's linguistic theories, Alex has pointed out that
"many people assume that his accomplishments in that field are unassailable and somehow add stature to his political views. Quite the reverse is true. If anything, his linguistic theories may be even more riddled with errors than his political pronouncements. One of the great scandals among intellectuals today may be their readiness to accept his views on either topic."
On his blogsite, John Lawler of the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan talks about chomskybot, a program that generates text paragraphs from phrases taken from the syntactic works of Noam Chomsky. You can read some output by going to the chomskybot website.
"Chomskybot," Lawler explains, "is a demonstration of a peculiarly primitive variety of computational linguistics. . . . it just hovers at the edge of understandability, a sort of semantic mumbling, a fog for the mind's eye."[some of the] "most interesting effects are in the mind of the beholder, especially since its output not infrequently induces a strong feeling of inferiority in the unsuspecting, a sense of 'I just don't get it, so I must be dumber than I'd thought.' This is the Turing Test in reverse, and humans should resist allowing themselves to fail."
In a world of change, Chomsky's attitude towards Israel has never wavered. As Alex Gross puts it:
"Chomsky. . . . blames Israel for everything. The true source of all evil, the ultimate original sin, is the State of Israel. Everything that is wrong in the Middle East and often even beyond goes back to Israel and its failure to set up a regime that treated Arabs fairly and tolerantly.Quite a few of us, myself included, have long considered ourselves good liberals in blaming the Israelis for not treating the Arabs better. But over the last 20 years or so, this position has become harder to defend, and a slow, quiet buildup has grown against Chomsky for this reason alone.
In a sense, Israel has played the role in Chomsky's politics that Universal Grammar has played in his linguistics. In a complex world Chomsky's mind may be deeply simplistic."
Rose is a biologist, Chomsky a linguist. Rabbi Michael Lerner lives in a different realm: the spiritual, the visionary, the mythic. You may remember he was Hilary Clinton's spiritual guru. If I spend time on a representative group of visionaries, the Bioneers, bear with me. It's because I think it will help us understand him better.
It isn't at all clear that Lerner is a Rabbi in the ordinary sense of being ordained by a recognized Rabbinical group. He did (according to Steven Plaut) take some courses to become a Jewish Sunday School teacher. Plaut's article, Rabbi Moonbeam, appeared in Front Page Magazine in April. If it isn't accessible, read the plain text version from the 60's list. (Plaut's has also written a delightful satire on Lerner; THE BOOJOOS is available on the Freeman Center website.)
Marc Rauch, a TV writer, director and producer, describes his own failed efforts to confirm Lerner's rabbinical credentials in an article entitled Michael Lerner: A Man Out of Touch With the Truth.(Site no longer active: retireved from http://www.chronwatch.com/featured/2002-05-16mr.asp,16 May 2002.)
But there is no doubt of his reputation as a spiritual force among many a seeker of the Higher Truth. To begin with, Lerner is a Bioneer. The Bioneers is an actual organization that, in its own words:
has as it's [sic] essential goal: "improving the environment by changing the world."[Their programs] "are solutions-based approaches to environmental restoration that encompass not only technological means, but also reflect economic strategies, social justice concerns, and a spiritual connection to the natural world."
Lerner was a presenter at a conference of the Bioneers. This biography accompanied the announcement:
"Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor of the groundbreaking political/social/spiritual magazine TIKKUN, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, and author of, among other books, The Politics of Meaning and most recently Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul, is one of contemporary America's most important socio-political/spiritual thinkers."
As a group, Bioneers are concerned about eco-feminism, ecological architecture, our alienation from nature, our cultural and spiritual connection with the natural world. This has the feel of the once-upon-a-time improbable but real linkage of theosophy, anti-vivisectionism, vegetarianism and spiritualism. But don't dismiss these practitioners as a bunch of Pereses. Rabbi Lerner is in interesting company.
Caroline Casey is another Bioneer. She describes herself as a 'visionary activist astrologer' and runs a Center for Visionary Activism. (Would I kid you?)
Her description of her radio show (done in the third person) proclaims that it "is a constantly evolving experiment in radio magic. Her show provides the mythological news, the themes of now, and has as guests anyone with a piece of the puzzle for dreaming, conjuring and implementing a more lovingly ingenious world."
Don't you love it?
And then there are the slogans scattered like glitter over the site:
There is a darker side to their activities. Almost immediately after 9/11, almost as soon as Peter Jennings got busy on damage control lest Americans blame the misunderstood Arabs, some of the visionaries came out strongly for putting the blame for the attack where it belonged -- on us in the USA.
Layne Redmond, a drummer and a member of the Bioneers, worried about the effects of violence on the future of the planet. In a piece done on Casey's website, she urges everyone to read an article that
". . . delineates the CIA's funding and creation through Pakistani Intelligence of the Taliban, and its cultivation of the Golden Crescent Drug Trade to finance CIA encouragement of a fundamentalist Islam --- in order to take out the Russians... And now what the US Government was complicitous in creating turns back against the US population. Crucial to be informed so that we need not face off with anyone. . .""I know that the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon are a call to action but I am hoping that the actions we take will begin to heal the causes of terrorism rather than lead to an unending cycle of violence that in the end could destroy us all."
Just a week after the attack, and in much the same vein but including Israel and the Palestinians among the culprits, Lerner, in a Tikkun magazine article called A World Out of Touch With Itself: Where the Violence Comes From, proclaimed
"There is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians--it is the quintessential act of dehumanization and not recognizing the sanctity of others. The violence being directed against Americans today, like the violence being directed against Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists, or the violence being directed against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army occupying the West Bank and Gaza, seem to point to a world increasingly irrational and out of control."
But almost immediately, he does justify the attack:
"We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us--that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage; anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives."
In other words, we were bombed because we didn't pay attention to the suffering of Palestinian refugees and the oppressed. Lerner must have been prescient. Bin Laden at the time was saying the attack was punishment for the USA treading on sacred Saudi soil. Bin Laden didn't discover his affinity with the Palestinian cause until much after September 11.
Lerner had more to say. Others have pointed out that bin Laden went for the throat -- to destroy the center of our Government, our military leadership and the center of our financial world. Lerner sees them as symbols.
"We don't even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's military center and our trade center--we talk of them as buildings, though others see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world so much pain."
In October, Lerner complained there was pressure on Tikkun to change its position that Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the "fundamental source of the problem." Hundreds of subscribers had cancelled their subscriptions, and donors stopped donating money.
By December, 2001, Lerner's vision had given him a true understanding of what was actually going on in the Middle East. His insight was broadcast over the net, including the free will astrology website. This version appeared in an article entitled The Chanukah Miracle We Need This Year on the World Council of Churches website.
After the obligatory "...we have not learned that the anger which brought the attacks of Sept 11th had everything to do with our insensitivity to the pain of people around the world", he writes
"In the week before the latest set of terror activities, Israel assassinated one of the leaders of Hamas. Of course they knew that Hamas would respond with new terror attacks. In fact, it is reasonable to assert that there is a covert alliance between Hamas and Ariel Sharon: both want the PLO destroyed. Sharon wants to be able to eliminate the PLO's insistence on negotiations leading to a Palestinian state -- he has never wanted such a state, and his interests would be far better served by a Palestine dominated by Hamas (he could use their terrorism as adequate excuse to re-occupy all of the West Bank and create many more new settlements and once and for all make any kind of Palestinian state impossible). Hamas would be delighted to have Sharon eliminate the Palestinian Authority, so that the fundamentalists would become the dominant power in Palestine -- and they would be willing to endure another 20 or 30 years of Israeli rule, certain that eventually they will get the weapons and power to destroy the Western infidels."
Curiously, in an interview on December 11th with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera (reported on many web sites including al-bushra.org), Yasser Arafat said
"We are doing everything to stop the violence. But Hamas is a creature of Israel which at the time of Prime Minister Shamir [the late 1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques."
Arafat laid out the reasons for this support for the Italian daily L'Espresso.
"Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we have been limited, even to build a tomato factory."
From which we may conclude: Sharon is indirectly responsible for the killing of Israeli civilians. And his purpose is to keep Arafat and his loyal troops down. Just because Hamas has long been part of Arafat's cabinet, some of you may have thought that that benevolent peacenik, Arafat, was working hand in glove with Hamas. Clearly untrue.
As he has over the years, Lerner continues to see himself as a man of unique vision. Howard Fienberg in a February 26th posting in the Kesher Blogspot commented on a newspaper story on Lerner: "The San Francisco Chronicle spins a crusade on Anti-Israeli Jews". Fienberg pointed out that " [t]he Chronicle paints Lerner as a lonely brave soul amidst a sea of Jewish conformity."
The Chronicle story quoted Lerner as saying: "There is a PC view toward Jews, but real friends would stand up and criticize Israel when it does something self-destructive" Kesher commented: "Yeah, no one criticizes Israel, ever."
Lerner may see himself as a one-man bastion of truth contra establishment Jews. Maybe he feels rejected by Jews of limited vision. (Shoot, here I'd promised myself, no psychobabble.) Whatever the reason, over the years, he has participated in a large number of Jewish groups, all of which can be described as far left and anti-Israel.
There is, for example, Jewish Voice For Peace, a group in the San Francisco Bay Area. It recently had a teach-in on the Middle East conducted by Lerner. Actually, they have an unusually broad agenda and run Dialogues for Peace. At the last Dialogue, they took the positions that not only must "the Israeli State stop the brutalization of the Palestinian people" but India "must commit to a secular and democratic society that addresses the entrenched oppressions based on caste, tribe, class, gender, religion, ethnicity." Further, "[t]he international community must support Afghanistan in her reconstruction." Finally, "those in the United States working with social and environmental justice must call for citizens action and governmental resolve in the US toward domestic justice and ethical foreign and trade policy." The Palestinian Arabs and Pakistani Muslims were not asked to stop murdering people.
Names of several of the groups associated with Lerner seem to begin with Jews and end with Justice. There is Jewish Unity for a Just Peace. Professor Tanya Reinhart, who promotes kicking Israelis out of international conferences and having universities divest themself of their Israeli holdings, serves on its Advisory Board. Jews Renewing Justice is or was run by Lerner's friend, Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center as of 1996. The Shalom Center currently runs Teachings, taught by Lerner and people from the Jewish Fund for Justice and other like-minded groups. They teach "spirituality and politics." Jews for Racial and Economic Justice appears to be defunct.
There are of course several groups whose names are bracketed by Jews and Justice that are unrelated to Lerner, except in ideology. There is, for example, Jews For Justice in the Middle East. This supposed Jewish group has had one accomplishment; it has written a book entitled Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict. The book has no named author, no editor, no physical residence other than a post office box in Berkeley, and no sales by the usual booksellers. Except for the unsigned Introduction and Conclusions, it is a collection of quotes from revisionist Israeli and conventional Arab sources. It is unlikely that it was written by Jews. I say this because the tone is wrong. The sentiments and the words, sad to say, could come from any of the Jews (fill in the blanks) Justice groups.
In January of this year, Lerner formed the Tikkun Community, "a progressive, pro-Israel [sic] alternative to AIPAC." Its mission is to advance peace in the Middle East. It would create an uncontrolled Palestinian state and install peacekeepers. (To make sure Israel doesn't retaliate the next round of terrorism?) In the Community's resolution, blame is evenly distributed. Some of the vocabulary is traditional: peace, healing, the sanctity of human life. But the focus is on methods and means. The proposal is crisp and not at all fuzzy-minded. If I didn't know better, I'd wonder whether Lerner has had a large infusion of money from some not-so-visionary backer.
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