An intellectual infection

An intellectual infection

Barbara Kay, National Post  Published: Wednesday, June 05, 2009

Last week York Humanities professor Martin Lockshin wrote a column in these pages, "You don't need credentials to bash Israel." The focus of Dr. Lockshin's critique was the blurred line between scholarship and political activism amongst "the Learneds" -- the Humanities and social sciences.

He cited a recent panel discussion at the Learneds' annual congress, "Palestine Solidarity on Campus: The question of boycott." Of the five participating scholars, all supportive of an Israel boycott, none was academically credentialed for authoritative commentary on Middle-Eastern affairs.

Sadly, the shameless exploitation of public trust inherent in academics' concealment of their ignorance and bias behind irrelevant bona fides is not an aberration, but a commonplace. Indeed, as Professor Lockshin notes, activist academics consider such duplicity in the cause of Israelbashing "privileged discourse."

It's concerning that an expert on Canadian feminism and a teacher of English as a Second Language may commit academic adultery with impunity, but it seems intuitively worse when hard scientists also take as their "privilege" the manipulation or suppression of facts as a justifiable means toward ending Israel's existence as a Jewish homeland.

A representative illustration of a current demonizing strategy -- that of falsely portraying Israeli occupation as a risk to Palestinians' health -- was on view May 5 at the University of Toronto during a public presentation billed in benignly objective terms as "Medicine, War and Occupation: The Case of Gaza."

The guest speaker was UK Dr Ghadi Karmi. According to witnesses, Karmi used the occasion to rant against Israel. A physician in the audience attempted during the Q and A to question Karmi's Israel-damning medical statistics by quoting Israel-positive statistics from UNICEF and the WHO. He reports that cries of "racist" from the partisan crowd drowned him out, with no intervention from the moderator. He has lodged a complaint with the university.

The complainant's inability to introduce objective data into "discussion" around Israel is unfortunately the norm at these proliferating pseudo-academic events, where the casual bandying about of fevered, but unsubstantiable tropes like "genocide" and "apartheid" evokes the academically meretricious excesses of Israel Apartheid Week.

More alarmingly because far more influential, the "privileged discourse" syndrome is now colonizing normally disinterested medical literature. According to critics, a just-published five-part series on Palestinian health issues in The Lancet features bias and shoddy scholarship, as well as medically uncredentialed and unreliable authorship, notably an article by the reflexively anti-Israel Jimmy Carter, not exactly a household name in medicine.

In a controversial 2004 Canadian example, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (CJP) published an article by molecular epidemiologist Dr. Paul Hamel -- the same high-profile political activist who presided over the May 5 U of T event-- and three other writers, called "Prevalence of psychological morbidity in West Bank Palestinian Children." Its thrust was to blame Israeli occupation for the psychological problems of Palestinian children. None of the four writers is academically accredited in psychology or psychiatry.

A past president of the American Psychiatric Association queried the wisdom of publishing an article of such "poor quality." Distinguished scholars in the field diligently critiqued the article's methodology and selection bias -- evident, most notably, in the authors' failure to consider Palestinians' systemic encouragement of child martyrdom as a "risk factor" for morbidity. Yet the CJP editor declined to publish their analysis; only after a complaint to the Canadian Psychiatric Association was a 500-word letter published almost two years later.

Ironically, lost in the ideological shuffle is the reality that by any standards, the health of Arabs under Israel's authority is markedly better than that of their surrounding brethren. Palestinians in the territories boast the lowest age and sex standardized mortality rate per 100,000 of all Middle Eastern Arab populations; since 1972 immunization coverage in the occupied territories has reached 99%; polio and measles have been eradicated; life expectancy rose from 54 in 1970 to 73 in 2007; major sanitation and disease-control projects have reduced morbidity and hospital admissions.

Truth is no defence on this unlevel playing field. University administrations always present as earnestly troubled over anti-Israel bias within their academic ranks. But it seems that whenever the campus clock strikes Israel, the mindless cuckoo of "academic freedom" pops out to justify their failure to uphold academic standards.

Cultural malaise begins in universities and ripples throughout society. Our universities are incubating viral intellectual infections. Anti-Israel bias is the worst symptom, but it is not the disease. Effective treatment, a willed commitment to academic probity, can only be dispensed from within the groves of academe. Physician, heal thyself.

 
bkay@videotron.ca