File this under “I kid you not!” Those damned Zionist Jews – they are responsible for all the ills of the world (including the heart break of psoriasis and Erectile Dysfunction). If it is not the Jews it is naturally Bush’s fault. These truly are Orwellian times we are living in, Palestinian society – one of the most brutal and degraded “societies” out there – which glorifies in “martyrdom” operations, is not the reason for female abuse, it is the “occupation”. (Sounds like Amira Hass is writing their P.R.) I suppose the honor killings going on in Pakistan and Iran are Israel’s fault too. The Lancet is a highly politicized left-wing organization and they are to be taken as seriously as a Keith Olbermann “Speshul Komment”.
-Speranza
Phillis Chesler has an article at PJM about her thing – Islam, Israel, and how they impact women in particular. This article is entitled: Appalled yet? Lancet Study Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel.
If you recall, this is the same Lancet that grossly exaggerated the civilian death count in Iraq, and then CRU-like, resisted inquiry. Their left-wing anti-American and anti-Israeli bent is beyond any reasonable doubt. But it takes a special chutzpah from hell to blame Israel for Palestinian domestic violence.
The post-colonial academy is itself thoroughly colonized by the false and dangerous ideas of Edward Said (please read my dear friend Ibn Warraq’s most excellent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism). However, I once believed that Said’s paranoid perspective had primarily infected and indoctrinated only the social sciences, humanities, and Middle East Studies. We now see his malign influence at work in a new article, just out today, by professors who work at the Department of Medicine at Harvard University; the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at Minnesota University’s School of Public Health; The Boston University School of Medicine; the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
Jaw hits floor. Not only are a lot of big names in medicine in on this, including Harvard Medical School, but the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University? Are they daft?
Please refer to Dr. Chessler’s critique of the study itself; I don’t have room here, and I defer to her expertise. But here’s the thing that should be alarming. This was a peer-reviewed study in the literature. Lancet is “the literature”, an it is a glaring example of how the literature itself can become corrupted by political pollution. Can you see now why peer review guarantees nothing in terms of integrity?
The Lancet researchers operated in exceedingly bad faith both academically and politically. For example, they write: “Occupation policies, including a separation barrier that is being erected in various parts of the West Bank, affect family connectedness, depriving women of regular contact with their families who might otherwise intervene to prevent intimate-partner violence.”
I won’t go off into what this has to do with the IPCC and the climate issue, because it’s both vast and obvious. Peer review doesn’t mean squat if the process, and the peer-reviewed journals themselves are corrupt. And this one stinks to high heaven, in a way that is a lot more intuitively obvious than with all of the climate esoterica. Same shiite, different issue.
And this isn’t the extent of politically motivated science. Radical feminism is notorious for nonsensical studies on the inherent inferiority of men. Of course, there’s the notorious Mearsheimer and Walt book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. And on and on it goes. If it’s academic, and it’s political, it’s probably both wrong and junk.
