Objecting to the truth

Eve Garrard, writing in normblog, objects to two statements regarding Jews and Israel.

The first is attributed to Richard Dawkins: “[the Jewish lobby] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.” (from an article in the Guardian. Incidently it’s unclear whether Dawkins actually said those words; in any case he is reported to have said them).

The second is from an unnamed person on a mailing list, which Garrard quotes as:

Issues of Palestine are now determining tenure issues in the States. Can we expect the Zionist lobby to go the same way here[?]… Bread and butter issues cannot be neatly compartmentalised so that we have separate arrangements for what is “safe” (and does not threaten Zionism) and “not safe” (in what actively opposes Zionism).

Garrard sees two problems with both statements. Firstly that they are evidence of anti-Jewish prejudice¹, and secondly that few people protest against these statements (and statements like them).

When I read these statements I start by asking myself: are they true? And it seems to me that both contain a fair degree of truth. The USA does have a very pro-Israel foreign policy; for example Israel is the USA’s largest recipient of foreign aid, even though it is a comparatively wealthy country. Many people do believe that the Israel lobby has a large influence over USA foreign policy in the Middle East. The Israel/Palestine conflict does affect whether someone gets tenure in American universities, as is demonstrated by the recent examples of Nadia Abu El-Haj and Norman Finkelstein.

Perhaps the reason for a lack of protest against these words is that they are largely truthful, and stating the truth ought to be — even if it is not — in Garrard’s words “normalized, unexceptionable, unworthy of remark”. Some people are opposed to the actions of the Israeli state and the Israel lobby, and these are perfectly normal and ethically respectable political positions to take. The majority of these people are not motivated by bigotry against Jews, though obviously some are, and it is wrong to suggest that someone is motivated by bigotry unless one has evidence that that person is.

Note:

1. Garrard uses the phrase “anti-Semitism” which properly analysed ought to refer to people who hate Semites; but the majority of people who speak Semitic languages aren’t Jews, and there are many Jews who don’t speak any Semitic languages. I find this term an imprecise and inaccurate way of refering to anti-Jewish bigotry, so I don’t use it. If you want to understand issues, you need to think clearly, and you should therefore aim to speak clearly and precisely too.

Richard Dawkins’ The OUT Campaign

Dichard Dawkins has launched a new campaign for atheists: the OUT Campaign. They have a logo you can put on your website:

Religion and academia

From David Bernstein:

Outrageous, If True: According to the Columbia Spectator, Barnard religion professor Alan Segal was asked by the university to provide a list of archeology experts to comment on the controversial tenure case of Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure–archeologists who “preferably” were not Jewish. Segal quite properly refused, noting that religion “has nothing to do with what you say as a professional.”

El-Haj’s “scholarly” work is premised on the idea that Jewish Israeli archeologists invented evidence of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel to justify Zionist claims to the land. Besides the issue of discrimination, which would be unthinkable in any other context related to any other group, the request to Segal seems like an implicit endorsement of her thesis, that Jewish archeologists cannot be trusted to be objective in their work related to Israel (which makes one wonder why the university would trust El-Haj, of Palestinian Arab origin, to be objective).

James Miller replies thus:

If I were Nadia Abu El-Haj I would prefer, all else being equal, that Jewish people not be among those evaluating my scholarship for tenure. So as not to be accused of anti-Semitism let me say that my mother and wife (although not my father or myself) are Jewish. But based on my experience, Jewish people on average have a far more positive view towards Israel than non-Jewish people do. El-Haj’s scholarship directly attacks Israel and so on average I would suspect that her scholarship would get a more favorable review from non-Jewish than Jewish archeologists.

In a world without bias the religion of El-Haj’s reviewers wouldn’t matter. But we don’t live in such a world. Given that this bias exists, it is rational to try to minimize the harm it might cause El-Haj.

Imagine that El-Haj’s research consisted of archeological evidence that she tried to use to disprove the historical accuracy of parts of the Koran. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to try to avoid Islamic reviewers for her tenure case?

Religious beliefs often cause people to be bias towards those who attack such beliefs. To deny this, or to assume that college professors are too professional to allow such bias to influence them, is silly.

Religious people are often biased towards their religion — almost always so. Academic scholarship, such as archeology, is (or should be) about analysing and collating facts about something and then dispassionately drawing conclusions from these facts.

Religion doesn’t work like that: people have religious beliefs either because they were brought up with them, or they converted to a religion. The first reason is an absurd reason to believe anything; if someone said that they believed that the number of prime numbers was finite, and they believed it because their father and his forefathers had believed that, we’d laugh at them. And the second reason is little better: to believe in something because you want it to be true, i.e. because it gives you some emotional satisfaction, is ludicrous; if an archeologist said they believed they’d found the tomb of King Arthur, on the grounds that they have an emotional attachment to Arthurian legend, people would be incredulous.

So religion can best be thought of as a form of diseased thinking, and religious ways of thinking are thus at odds with what academic ways of thinking ought to be. It may be that a religious person is capable of thinking rationally on subjects outside their religion, but on subjects close to their religion, they probably won’t be.

As well as religious bias, someone might have nationalistic bias towards their country. (Nationalistic bias is similar to religious bias, but differs in one respect: countries exist, and God does not. Religious people are in the business of building intellectual superstructures around an entity that doesn’t exist.)

There are many parts of the world where history is a matter of current political controversy — Israel is one of those places — and as James Miller says it’s silly to expect people with religious or nationalist sentiments to be unbiased when evaluating data relating to such history.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking at Columbia University today. Norm Geras questions whether he should have been allowed to:

Columbia President, Lee Bollinger, appeals to a number of different principles in getting behind the invitation, which was issued by the university’s School of International and Public Affairs.

One of these principles is ‘the development of freedom of speech’. On that score Bollinger says:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas.

He’s clearly right about this: listening doesn’t imply endorsement. On the other hand, there’s nothing in the principle of freedom of speech that requires you to help to promote or publicize views that you find deeply objectionable. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier and Holocaust-denial is one of the most poisonous forms of anti-Semitism, apart from being a brazen historical lie. Must Columbia, in the interests of ‘the development of free speech’, host avowed racists of every stripe, other genocide-deniers, men who think that women are, by their nature, born to be subservient, and people who think that homosexuality is a sin and should be punishable? Of course not. Would they host such people? I don’t know.

Geras is right that freedom of speech does not require one to facilitate speech you dislike. As to whether Columbia would host “such people”, they almost certainly have done in the past — such views were commonplace in the West in the mid 20th century.

(BTW I’ve no evidence that Ahmadinejad is a racist. If people are calling him a racist because he doesn’t like Jews, i.e. saying Jews are a race, then shouldn’t those people equally be condemning Israel as racist for being a Jewish state? Somehow I think they do not.)

As to whether Columbia should have invited him, the invitation came from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Since Ahmadinejad is a head of stat, he forms part of the School’s subject matter; it is thus as appropriate for the School to invite him as it is for the microbiology department to bring microbes on campus and study them.

Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier. Frankly I don’t think that’s a particularly big deal. All he has achieved by this is making himself (and by extension, Iran) look stupid, and playing into the hands of those in the USA who want to attack Iran. It’s not as if Iran was responsible for the Holocaust; if it had been then for that country to deny it would be something much more serious. But Turkey still denies that what they did to the Armenians amounted to genocide; and Belgium has only recently come to terms with Leopold II’s genocide in the Congo. Somehow I doubt there would be as much fuss if a Belgian or Turkish leader addressed a US university.