20 years after: Who attacked us?

Who attacked us on 9/11? Right, 19 Muslims, 15 of which were Saudis. Right, Osama bin Laden, may his name be erased. Right, terrorists. The “Islamic” ones.  Supported by Afghan “Islamists.” Is that it?

Suppose it is. Why then the said “Islamists” are again allowed full rein over Afghanistan, after being quickly defeated? Why are people who express the same ideas not pursued to their extinction but spread those ideas freely in Europe and the US? Why does a mention of the “Islamist” (not even “Islamic,” let alone Muslim) ideology call for accusations of “Islamophobia”? Why are those who sling those accusations exclusively progressive— in the US, mostly Democrats?

Many questions, all of which have the same answer. The enlightened Western world prefers to think of Islam as another “Abrahamic” religion. Almost entirely progressive as this world now is, it views all religions as backward. So Islam is on a par with the Judeo-Christian foundation of that world, even though it was the opposition to Islam that has brought about our civilization. Yes, there were crusades that killed eastern Christians and Jews along with Muslims who oppressed them. Yes, there was the Inquisition and other crimes of the Catholic Church (not that the Eastern Orthodox Churches were any better, given power). Those crimes and crusades, however, horrible as they were, were a response to what Islam offered to the world: full submission until the entire world becomes Muslim. And it did not just offer that—Islam has brought its vision on the tips of spears to virtually the entire world, with all Mideast, North Africa, and much of Europe and Asia conquered and subjugated by victorious Islam.

What is conveniently ignored is that it is irrelevant if Islam is a religion, a set of rituals, or a couple of now well-familiar incantations like “Allahu Akbar.” What matters is what Islam as an actively propagated ideology promises humanity. It’s easy if uncomfortable to find out. According to the ruling scripture of Islam—not some marginal interpretations thereof, not some murderous escapades of crazy Muslim potentates, and not the purely Western concoction of "Islamism"—the world is to become Muslim in its entirety, with the intermediate stage of complete subjugation or murder of those who disagree. The full Muslim harmony, when the entire world becomes the abode of Islam, Dar ul Islam, will not obtain until the Jews are completely exterminated. Muhammad, Islam's founder, promised that even stones and trees, with few exceptions, would help the Muslims in that.

This is not a Nazi catechism— this is a command of the “Prophet” and thus of the Muslim deity, equivalent to the Constitution in Islam because this ideology by design cannot be separated from the state. A command given directly, in simple words, this is not subject to ijtihad, interpretation. You can't reinterpret a call for murder. This is the plan—no need to invent any “Protocols” and nothing to debunk. It is all in black and white, for anybody interested to see.  Why don’t they, the rulers, the presidents, the premiers, the thinkers?

Because it means that the West faces 1.4 (or 1.9?) billion people, the carriers of that religion-mimicking ideology—not some lethally dangerous but ultimately manageable Germany with its narrow “Aryan” ideological focus. Even if a small proportion of Muslims are murderous followers of the above, it would be a war similar to which the world has not seen. Moreover, someone would have to take responsibility for “starting” it —even though it was started with Mohammad’s taking over Mecca in 630 CE. The 9/11 attack was one piece of it, and not the last one. Nineteen devoted followers of the "Prophet"—and 3,000 infidels are gone. Seeing this threat also means taking the side of the Jews—once and for all, even if reluctantly, admitting that they are the foremost target of that threat, the only Jewish defense against which is Israel.

That’s the fears. There is, however, an option that allows us, as Solzhenitsyn said, to live not compliant with the lie, hiding our collective head in the Muslim sands of deception, but facing the truth. Soviet communism, a mortal threat to the Western civilization, was never recognized as acceptable—but was dealt with accordingly (not counting the unfortunate dhimmitude of the detente). Hardly anybody in the West accepts Chinese communism (yet), despite China's population of ~1.5 billion. You could, apparently, move virtually all world manufacturing there without accepting communism as just another political ideology (even if the myopic pursuit of  cheap labor supports the communist regime). You can still buy oil from the savages—without waxing ”inclusive” about the “Abrahamic” character of Islam, which stole Jewish biblical personages while mutilating the sacred history to fit the primitive wishes of Muhammad, a highway robber, child rapist, and genocidal murderer. You can live in peace—but you must recognize that Islam's product is an empire of evil, one that is much older and much more dangerous than the newfangled Marxian garbage that has failed in similar designs while costing humanity 100 million lives.

Only facing that truth would lead to understanding who attacked us on 9/11 and what is needed to prevent that in the future. Until then, there will be more “endless wars,” “Islamists,” and 9/11s. More Talibans. More PLOs. More murderous Islam.

Response to a Gil Troy article

 My response to a Gil Troy article praising the new Israeli government: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/reagans-lessons-for-gil-troy/

Article 70, Criminal Code of the RSFSR

 University of Pittsburgh School of Law announces creation of a KGB lab

If only KGB had the digital resources now in possession of their successors! Orwell  could only guess how good they would be.

Institutional racism: Quitting another scientific membership

Published by the Jewish News Syndicate, the story of my parting with Behavior Genetics Association I've been a proud member of for almost 30 years: 

https://www.jns.org/opinion/when-scientists-support-hate-racism-and-anti-semitism/. 

The editor thankfully made only few changes, except for deleting the paragraph below and moving a couple of sentences around. I also do not use the term "anti-Semitism," which implies that there is some "Semitism," or it has anything to do with Semites as a language group, which would then include Arabs. It pertains to the Jews only, and it's no-hyphen "antisemitism," just as I am used to it in Russian. No need to make it sound more "scientific" than what Wilhelm Marr did, introducing "Antisemitismus" to make Jew-hate sound more genteel.

The deleted paragraph:

An organization has never needed to consist entirely of antisemites to be antisemitic. Even in the Nazi party there were people like Schindler who were saving Jews rather than murdering them. Nonetheless, the entirety of Germany was a Nazi country, by virtue of being fully controlled by Nazis, a Jew-hating party. In the Soviet Union, when Stalin was preparing his own “final solution” for Soviet Jews, a token Jew held one of the top governmental positions.  When the leadership and founders of an organization are antisemites, it is safe to call it antisemitic. Denying BLM’s antisemitism is exactly what is now fashionably called “gaslighting.”

 

A Stranger’s Advice

Was that a conscious plan? Did the progressive intelligentsia in the United States  finally decide to get serious, study  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and  follow his article that every Soviet student at a higher education institution had to read, entitled «Советы постороннего», A Stranger’s Advice (aka “Advice of an Onlooker”—hard to translate)?  And what an advice that was. “Telephone, telegraph,” that is, the means of communication, information transfer, all that were available then—this is what Lenin held as a necessary condition for the revolution to succeed. That was not about just any revolution—it was the communist one, establishing a totalitarian rule. 

Lenin’s article was published a little over two weeks before what later was solemnly named the Great October Socialist Revolution, Bolsheviks’ following Lenin’s “advice” and seizing power from the legitimate but helpless Provisional Government. Soon establishing a power monopoly, they extended it to full political uniformity and ideological monopoly. The printed media, in turn, was to become “organs” of the totalitarian structures—labor unions, communist organizations, soviets—and the most prominent newspaper, Pravda, the Organ of the Communist Party. To be sure, there was resistance, real and imagined by the regime, which required repression—imprisonment and murder of millions. 

This country is lucky. Although the Democrat party has held its opponents as enemies to be eliminated, not to be argued with to establish a compromise, mass murder for accomplishing what Bolsheviks planned is not necessary here. The ideological monopoly has all but been established—long before the socialist revolution advanced to the power monopoly stage. The media and means of communication are carried by the information companies captured/created by communists, educated by communist teachers who had taken over the entire education system a long time ago. Who knew those companies would also be the richest corporations ever existed, monopolies in which Marx and Lenin saw the undertakers of capitalism? The communist classics thought that would be because the big corporations would produce an organized working class. They were right in one regard—not about the class (although race struggle has partially replaced class struggle demagoguery here) but, combined with the uniform ideology murdering democracy, about the ability to finish off the economic and political system they called capitalist. Ideologically monopolizing and blocking access to the means of information transfer—Twitter, Facebook, Internet in general—are critical in the totalitarian enslavement. It is not people that are canceled anymore—just freedom.

Not depriving the political opponents of life, oh no, but making life intolerable for them. What was proclaimed by Maxine Waters as needed to terrorize the Trump administration, “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station,” will be and is already being extended to half the US population. The Reichstag fire will be many little fires, lit by little “antifa” provocateurs, progressive Blackshirts, followed by increasingly draconian censorship, elimination of freedoms, and repressions. I feel lucky that the January 6 events were not planned in the way that would leave some members of Congress or Pence dead. Considering what the Democrats have been doing since, it would be easy for them in the aftermath of that to capture Trump and any supporter of his, declare martial law, and set up the terror regime with “re-education” camps. I guess, the most rabid ones have not yet floated up to the top of the cesspool. Then again, the Biden administration is not even gathered yet.

When Lenin gave his “advice,” just a little over two weeks remained before the Bolshevik revolution, throwing the country into the darkness for almost a century—not that it had been very bright before or has been after. That likely also was a cause of Nazi ascent, as if Communism was not enough. Just a week remains for Communists’ power monopoly in the US.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc presidency

I am not trying to sound smart, and I can’t really speak Latin. The expression is simply the standard term for a logical error. In vernacular, it means “after that, hence because of that,” as most of you know. It is common for humans to draw causal connections from temporal sequences. In my field, substance use and addiction, "gateway theory," based on the same fallacy, has ruled over research and policy. Hardly anybody cared that it does not matter which drug one starts with for the risk of poisoning or addiction. But it's not just that the false causes are used as guides for action. Once they are in play, the true causes are ignored.

Does anybody doubt Trump would win, hands down, over Biden if not for the Chinese virus? He almost did (or has won) despite the Democrat agitprop that spread the calumny of the virus deaths' being Trump's fault. Nobody cared that Trump's trump card was economics, his China trade measures were substantial part of its success, and the virus came from China smack at the good time to destroy Trump's advantage. The progressive media (a clear redundancy) ignored China's role  in the spread of the virus, while Trump was depicted as a Plague-time well-poisoner.

What is the connection between the China virus and Biden's creeping out of his basement to possible presidency, with his pothead sidekick aiming at the Resolute Desk? All that was thanks to the common human mistake of readily taking “after that” for “because of that”, Trump's presidency—hence COVID deaths, the false conclusion endlessly propagated by Democrats and their media, exactly the "Organs" of the Democrat Party, as their counterparts used to be honestly called in the Soviet Union. Who cares that those deaths have no relationship whatsoever with Trump, who has done the maximum he could to withstand the biological attack while fighting the sabotage of Democrat governors, the posturing of know-nothing buffoons from NIH and WHO, and the constant attempts of political assassination from the Democrat Congress and Biden's "xenophobia" accusations. The NY governor Cuomo has actively murdered seniors by his order for care facilities—nobody will charge him with the crime. It is Trump who bears its consequences. Who cares that the US, despite all the Democrat agitprop, is far from the worst corona-wise in the world. It’s Trump's fault just because he was the president when it happened—forget all the praises Cuomo has given him in a fit of honesty.

Forget that it has been and would still be Trump's team that has born the brunt of the Chinese biological attack—and this is what it is. Even if—and it's a big if—the virus were not cooked in that Wuhan "institute," it was definitely deliberately spread to kill the US economy and thus remove Trump, the enemy of China. The Democrat fifth column was only happy to help, busy with the same work ever since Trump had been elected. Those are the causes ignored. Forget what is at stake: America’s freedom, energy independence, peace, Middle East conciliation, trade fairness, and honesty with allies and enemies. Let’s just pray that the utopia that this country has been does not turn into another nightmare of the communist takeover and bread lines. That has been a true cause-effect relationship.

The party that fought for slavery, that has revived racial conflict in this country and supports pogroms, that has open antisemites as its vocal and unrestrained leaders, that has given Iran billions to fund world-wide terror and pave its way to nukes, that is ready to reinstitute your tax-funded payments for terror murders of Israelis, that has its projected president neck-deep in corruption and client connection with the true enemies of the US—it is now on the verge of gaining unlimited power. A one-party totalitarian state, partnered with its benevolent creditor, Communist China. No Latin needed.

Intersectionality of hate

The unwieldy word “intersectionality” is relatively new. The dictionary says it was invented in 1989 to describe the confluence of various forms of discrimination. That is possible, even though 1989 does not sound like representing a time period when the likely correlation between various expressions of xenophobia would manifest in a most pressing fashion. In reality, however, the term is much better defined as a confluence of various victimhoods. More precisely, it denotes an assemblage of accusations with assigned guilts—viz., the guilts of not belonging to a class of victims, regardless of  any actual guilt.  Those excluded from among the victim classes are ipso facto oppressors. This, naturally, graywashes real oppressors--they become part of the many, those who committed genocide in Poland or Rwanda, and those who are trying to stop Taliban terror. Thus, a “white” heterosexual male is by default “intersectionally” guilty of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. 

"Whiteness", the main defining concept in the determination of "intersectionality," also covers certain groups regardless of their race, despite what that color word would seem to mean. The Jews, for instance, are viewed as "white" irrespective of their color and non-European (Asian) origin. Hence, they are not victims anymore but, by the Manichaean default, oppressors. Linda Sarsour, a prominent Democrat activist, said that Jews can't be feminists, which is one of the intersectionality component groups. The Jews' oppressor status evidence is also in the firm defense of Congresswoman Omar by her progressive Democrat colleagues. Instead of getting her censured, Omar's antisemitic statements have brought  her an appointment to the Foreign Affairs committee. There she is able to translate her Jew-hate into US policy.

In contrast to Judaism, being Muslim places one into the "brown," hence "intersectional," category, whatever the actual skin shade. Linda Sarsour is a very lightly-pigmented co-religionist of Omar's. She is a shariah and terrorist supporter, aka Obama's "champion of change" and a leader of the intersectional Women's March. She is not concerned that her Muslim devotion is incompatible with anything feminism stands on, considering that Islam scripturally holds women much below men (e.g., Koran 2:282), and Muslims above all non-Muslims (Koran 3:110). Indeed, the March was disavowed by its Jewish organizer, Vanessa Wruble, upon learning that  she was twice disqualified from it, as "white" and as a Jew. Now, to be fair, when denying the Jews their share of coveted intersectionality, Sarsour was cautious to talk about those Jews who supported Israel. Then, everyone knows that Jews generally do support the Jewish state, and everyone knows what those "anti-Zionist" provisos are worth. Sarsour's activist colleagues from the March, who adore Farrakhan, make no such fine distinctions and hold all Jews responsible as white, slavers, and generally exploiters. 

As in card games or rock-paper-scissors, there is a system of victimhoods, one trumping another. I may not have fully figured it out, with all its contingencies, but being Muslim trumps homosexuality. You may be a homophobic antisemite, but in combination with being “black” and a membership in the Nation of Islam this brings you to sit two seats from a Democrat US president. 

Being “straight” "white" non-Muslim male is trumped by all, let alone by being a "Latina," as asserted by Sonia Sotomayor. Her remark on how her ethnic origin makes her better qualified than any "white" male has landed her in the US Supreme Court as a Justice, ironic as that may sound. Heaven forfend that male has wealth. Then, the only protection from being considered fully inhuman is his generous support of all progressive causes there are, always on the verge of being denounced for any infraction. That support, however, may keep even a wealthy Jew afloat on the sea of otherwise ineluctable guilts—that’s why Soros's water is fine. His hate for Israel is par for the course. Being conservative, on the other hand, is unforgivable and punishable violently.

Hate for conservative opponents, for Israel, and for religion—except, Allah forbid, Islam—comes in one neat intersectional package. That is the modern Democrat ideology, which has evolved from its slaveholder KKK racism and statism of old times to race-, sex-, and other identity-baiting, with overt socialism on top. Long gone are the times when socialism was viewed as a swear-word, to be strenuously denied if accused of, like a shameful secret habit. It is now the mainstream ideology of the party that won popular vote in the last presidential elections. It is as mainstream and flaunted as admitting to drug abuse, also no longer a secret, to be "I-did-not-inhale" coy about. Consider Bernard Sanders. He sounded slightly off calling himself “Democratic Socialist” when running for Democrat nomination in 2016 (beware of the need to use “Democratic,” same as in DPRK or GDR). Despite the comforting adjective and the expectedly overwhelming support by the younger and entirely ignorant generation, by Obama's henchman's admission, the establishment was not ready yet to employ his communist demagoguery in full. There is no such reticence anymore in the Democrat Congress, whose members expound wild agitprop slogans and describe their drug abuse as the most natural experience.

Intersectionally with hate for capitalism, which is in a word hate for economic and political freedom, almost as many Democrats "sympathize more" with Palestinian Arabs as with Israel. An almost the same proportion, 35%, predominantly the young ones, hold an unfavorable (mostly or very) opinion of Israel, more than double that of Republicans. In another poll, a measly 27% of Democrats sympathized with Israel vs. 78% of Republicans. As Tuvia Tenenbom notes in his "The Lies They Tell," choosing "Palestine" over Israel is as certain for a progressive in the US as belief in man-made climate change. It is irrational to demand from the Congress Democrats to act against antisemitism, when their young and cool colleagues, representing the new generation of their electorate, are Jew-haters, the recent Deputy Chair of their party was a member of the Mein-Kampf-strength antisemitic Nation of Islam, and the entire Black Caucus, including Obama himself, happily met with Farrakhan, the preacher of Jew-hate whom Democrat presidential candidates reverentially call "minister." (The kompromat picture was immediately stashed away and remained hidden not just before Obama's presidential nomination but to the end of his second term.)

In their hate, they intersect with Farrakhan’s and his friend Rev. Wright’s morbid racism and antisemitism, and with the Jew-hating Palestinian Arabs—93% of their population, according to the recent poll. The hate-filled Arab population of the land illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt before the Six-Day War, governed by its two grotesquely corrupt and murderous regimes of their own choice, Hamas and the PLO, are the ultimate victims, intersecting victimhoods from colonialism, imperialism, Jews, whites, Crusaders--you name it. Regrettably, they also intersect with Jewish quislings who, like Bernard Sanders, faithfully follow their Bolshevik predecessors in their hate for capitalism, Jews, and freedom. Antisemitism, including its Jewish variety, is inevitable on the way to the totalitarian uniformity of progress.

It is Communism, now comfortably conjoined with another totalitarianism, Islam, that is the final intersection to which "intersectionality" leads. As a century before, parallel totalitarian movements gain strength around the world that does not want to remember. The Communist and National Socialist flags differed only in the small emblem on their bloody background. Today, the entire spectrum can be found in the colors of the vanguard of the immense expanse of humanity rolling in the same general direction: to squash freedom, whatever idiosyncrasies individual groups entertain, Muslim, feminist, progressive, socialist. Paraphrasing a little, "Intersectionalists of all stripes, united!"

Nobelists and I

Honestly, I’ve never hoped to be listed among Nobel prize winners—just not my caliber, for many reasons. Nonetheless, I have recently been. You may be surprised, but that was no cause for joy. You won’t be surprised that it was unwarranted, in more than one respect. Let me dispense with the suspense. The events occurred in an online discussion of a statement by the leadership of the National Prevention Science Coalition, of which I had been a member. Along with the audience of over 500 coalition members, I was informed by an authoritative scientist that he had heard “such rhetoric” as mine from “some very smart people like James Watson and William Shockley, and frankly, it scares the shit out of [him].” 

So, as you can see, although the discussion was among scientists (you could be misled by my opponent's coprolalic lexicon), my joining the Nobelist ranks had nothing to do with science. As you likely know, the gentlemen I was made to share company with are known not only for their discoveries, but also for their prejudice against the intellectual abilities of people of African descent, which those Nobel laureates viewed as not only inferior but genetically so. You’d think that Watson should have known better, considering that there is no surefire way currently to know if the IQ differences between the poorly defined racial groups have anything to do with genetics. You may also ask how I, knowing that and having a history of public objections to those views among scientists, could be such a troglodyte as to share those very views—not only in my mind but in my public rhetoric, in our times—and before securing a Nobel prize. You’d think I must be hopelessly deranged. 

You’d be mistaken. I have never said anything that could be considered “such rhetoric.” What I did say is that I had not seen any evidence that Officer Chauvin killed George Floyd because of racism, to use as a pretext for the ongoing social disorder, and that “implicit bias,” a current buzzword, is an Orwellian thoughtcrime, which requires telepathy to be proven. That is, even if the studies that have produced that concept register the objective phenomenon of different expectations associated with different population groups, some real, some false, those statistical data, i.e., population sample-derived, cannot be applied to any particular individual—or to all, to summarily accuse them of prejudice. That accusation would be as wrong and prejudicial itself as accusing all “black” males of inclination to murder because the frequency of murder in that vaguely defined population is higher than that in some other groups.

One does not need to be a scientist to understand that, but scientists, who are supposed to understand that perfectly, are guilty of despicable dishonesty when they pretend they don’t, drawing wrong conclusions from questionably designed statistical studies, translated into imaginary dystopian concepts. There is, however, nothing uncommon in creating those concepts among scientists or in their insisting on falsehoods even when proven otherwise: science has often been remarkably dogmatic. That has always been the case when scientists followed a totalitarian ideology. Under the Party’s protection, they have even outlawed whole branches of science, getting rid of scientific competitors, be it genetics under Stalin or relativity physics under Hitler. Totalitarian ideology, displacing morality with virtuous phraseology, is capable of permitting not just lies, but murder—be it for the sake of class struggle for communists or race struggle for Nazis.

In fact, where a totalitarian ideology, which is what the current progressive social-justice-structural-racism set of cliches strives to be, controls a scientist’s mind to convert scientific opponents into enemies, when the opponents’ views are perceived as opposing that ideology, nothing coming from that scientist can be trusted. The enemies’ theories and results will be at best ignored. Discussions are verboten, and that precludes scientific process. 

That is what has happened with the prevention scientists I communicated with. The NPSC director quickly “turned off the spigot,” as she put it. Her self-contradicting explanation: “I’m not making a unilateral decision to dismiss your perspective simply due to the points you are arguing.  However, they are inconsistent with the values of NPSC and so, as director, it is at my discretion to determine when to step in.” Understandably, she did not object to my being accused of racism, a calumny that in our times is akin to a Soviet citizen’s being publicly denounced as a Zionist lackey of capitalism.

The last time my perspective has been officially inconsistent with any values was back in the USSR I fled from. People accused of that thoughtcrime and attendant invented sins (they had to be invented, just like my racism) were blacklisted at various levels. It may be a small consolation that a recent editorial in one of the top scientific journals, Nature, nightmarishly declares the entire “enterprise of science” racist—even though I am not sure that white(black)washes my individual crime. Just as back in the USSR, I am happy about my inconsistency with those "values," even though that has forced me to leave—this time, the NPSC. I only wonder what kind of blacklisting I should expect.

CMU Osher: Teaching hate unopposed

It has been almost 30 years since I immigrated in the US as a refugee from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is no more, but I am experiencing a déjà vu of my Soviet past. One of the standard responses of the Soviet authorities to any request of the citizens, including that for allowing emigration, was that it was "inadvisable." That meant simply "no" in the Soviet bureaucratese—with no further discussion possible. Attempts to appeal were hopeless. It was particularly so when the decisions had anything to do with Israel or Jews. A standard way to prevent a Jew from enrollment in a college, in order to maintain its Jewish quota, was to grade poorly the composition entry exam, with the comment that the topic was not sufficiently explicated. One could not appeal such a decision—there was no way to prove the opposite. You can imagine my feelings when I received, after my repeated inquiries and long wait, the same kind of response from the leadership of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

To wit, that response was about the non-renewal of the 5-lecture volunteer course that Stuart Pavilack, the executive director of the Zionist Organization of America-Pittsburgh, and I had presented, entitled "Israel's War and Peace: Past, Present, Future." As we described it in the Osher catalog, the objective was to discuss the causes and consequences of hostilities that have accompanied Israel’s existence. Opposing hateful ideology is always important, especially these days, when threats to the Jewish state and individual Jews are at a peak not seen since before WW2. I stated this goal in the interview about the course  for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle (1/4/2019, p. 2). Osher Institutes offer their fee-paying members, largely retirees (aged reportedly over 70 on average in Osher at CMU), numerous courses (140 at CMU) given pro bono "by members, volunteers, faculty from CMU and other regional colleges and universities, and representatives from community organizations, all eager to share their expertise and engage in dialogue with their peers."

Plenty of the course material had been collected, and I had presented parts of it in Men’s Club of the Tree of Life congregation in years past (by invitation—I was not a member). Nevertheless, it took quite a long time to write it up and create slides for 7.5 hours of talking, updating them until the last moment. The talks were interspersed with lively discussions, largely initiated by the listeners with a certain, let’s call it “anti-Zionist,” ideological bent. That bent was also obvious in the negative opinions about the course.

It is those opinions, from a small minority among the listeners, that were used as the purported reason to dismiss the course from the curriculum. All the detailed arguments in my attempts of email communication with the chair of the curriculum committee and the president of the Osher board have been quite rudely dismissed as well, without as much as a word about their substance, and eventually left with no reply. While stating that the decision to not renew the course was based on attendees’ evaluations, no criteria have been given in response to my requests. Any possibility of appeal has been denied in the manner one does not expect from an academic institution, albeit neither the curriculum committee chair nor the Osher board president is an academic.

Meanwhile, I was not surprised to find in the Summer 2019 CMU Osher curriculum a rerun of another course, by one Tina Whitehead. Its description states that it is presented "from the perspective of the Palestinian people." That could suffice to characterize the course’s content: according to the latest poll, that perspective is 93% antisemitic. I do know, however, that hers is also the perspective of the organization she represents, Sabeel. That is a “liberation theology” group, with the center in Jerusalem. It is antisemitic as well, under the currently common guise of being peacefully anti-Israel/anti-Zionist. A telling quote, from an Easter message of Sabeel's founder and leader, Rev. Ateek:

Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.

This is a resurrection indeed—of the familiar image of the satanic deicidal Jew now murdering children, the foundation of Jewish persecution now cloaked in plausible deniability: well, it’s about Israel not Jews. Ateek’s book, “A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine,” contains traditional antisemitic calumnies, such as Jews’ not considering non-Jews human. In his view, “the creation of the state of Israel has been a settler colonial enterprise by Zionism that sought to dispossess the Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—of their land and replace them with Jews.” The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh cut its partnering with Pittsburgh Theological Seminary after the seminary hosted Ateek.

Sabeel sees Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, which was renamed "Palestine" to erase its Jewish connection and meaning, as evil and affront to Christian theology. Sabeel’s goal is for the millions of descendants of the Arabs who fled from Israel in 1948-9, as well the Arab population of the territories that were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt until the Six-Day War, to flood Israel and eradicate it as the Jewish state. It does not matter to Sabeel, a Christian group, that Israel is the only Middle East country where Christians flourish instead of disappearing. While paying obligatory lip service to non-violence, Sabeel's doublethink website quotes the call for violence by a terrorist poet and threatens violence to the "Israeli people" (obviously, Jews, although 20% of Israelis are Arab) who dare visit Jerusalem. Demanding self-determination for Arabs, who have been self-determined in 21 states, all intolerant Muslim monarchies and dictatorships, it denies the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in a single democratic state with equal rights for all.

Sabeel approves Hamas terror as “the message of the rockets [that] addresses the core issues and the root causes of the problem.” Indeed it does, as those issues and causes are one: implacable Jew-hate. Unsurprisingly, Sabeel calls for support for an American antisemite, a Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, as it did for the communist antisemite Angela Davis and the academic antisemite Marc Lamont Hill. It also supports the "Great March of Return," Hamas’s ploy to use human shields to penetrate from Gaza into Israel and proceed with mass murder of Israelis in their homes.

The course we presented was the only one in CMU Osher's annual curriculum that, based on the rich factual material, could counter the antisemitic/anti-Israel propaganda by the Sabeel emissary and inform the audience of the complex history, current status, and potential outcomes in one of the most important points of contention in the world. The brief "explanation" of its cancellation, from the curriculum committee chair Circe Curley, contained falsehoods, such as that my "extensive discussion of anti-Semitism in one of [my] classes differed from the original course outline and the published course description." It certainly did not. Moreover, the very idea that a discussion of antisemitism in a course about Israel could be somehow outside of its scope is preposterous and illustrates the mindset of the committee. Most importantly, the committee ignored the clear ideological bias of the negative evaluation statements, despite my repeated pointing that out and the committee chair’s recognition that they "normally do not experience that [negativism] in course evaluations."

Given CMU Osher’s continued support for anti-Israel antisemitic lecturing, the cancellation of my course—after its first presentation and based on no objective or, indeed, known criteria—should have been expected. It also cannot be viewed as other than support for the views that historically have led to pogroms and terror around the world. It is those views, propagated by the likes of Sabeel ideologues, that have led to the resurgence of lethal antisemitism lately. In effect, CMU Osher has become an antisemitic propaganda platform, a tool of hate.

In this light, it is hardly a mere coincidence that the CMU Osher board president, James Reitz, is an active member of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, which is partnered with Sabeel and supports the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The ideological predecessors of Sabeel, including the Soviet KGB that contributed so much to "the perspective of the Palestinian people," would be happy to know that their views are now mainstreamed unopposed from American university podiums.

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The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle's take on the story is published at  https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/cmu-osher-course-on-israel-canceled-palestinian-perspective-course-renewed/ (in the print edition: May 17, 2019, vol. 62, No. 20, p. 4 )

Tucker Carlson's conspiracy theories

In his FoxNews segment "Tucker Carlson Tonight"on May 1, 2018, with Col. (ret.) Douglas MacGregor, Carlson asked, “Is it in our strategic interest to have a conflict with Iran?” It's a straw man, because conflicts are hardly ever in anybody's strategic interests, but also because the US is, in fact, in continual conflict with Iran, strategic interests notwithstanding. Even if Carlson meant armed conflict only, the US has had it with Iran ever since the 1979 attack on the sovereign US territory of the embassy in Tehran and holding its personnel hostage for 444 days. Carlson’s interlocutor is happy to confirm his worst suspicions, naming the “two smaller allies, one is Tel Aviv, the other  is Riyadh”, apparently forgetting that Israel’s capital, that can colloquially replace the name of the country if pronouncing it is unpleasant, is Jerusalem. He did that twice in the conversation, so it’s not a slip of the tongue. “Both of them,” he continues, “clearly, would like to see Iran end up as a smoking ruin at some point”. This, of course, turns the situation entirely upside down, as it is Iran that has promised — daily —to erase Israel off the face of the earth. It is they, in MacGregor’s opinion, the dastardly “smaller allies”, that will do “whatever they can do to persuade us to abandon this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. They will do that to clear away the obstacle for military confrontation… The bottom line is that they want us to effectively reverse the strategic outcomes of the last, what, 15-16 years. That’s not possible without, frankly, a major war.” Carlson does not object to this inversion of truth, he “understand[s]  why both of them would want that.” MacGregor then veers off into another realm of fantasy about how “Iran is not isolated” because it allegedly has support of Russia and China (as if those two were willing to confront the US in an open conflict - for Iran, no less). Then Carlson introduces a duplicitous and disingenuous argument, “I don’t remember a lot of Shiite-inspired terror attacks on our soil… it seems like all the terror attacks in this country are Sunni!”, as if Shiite attacks on the US elsewhere—in fact, the long war with both Iran’s proxies (Hizballah) and Iran itself (in Iraq and Syria)—were to be disregarded.

Jihadi Islam is dangerous in any flavor, Sunni or Shia,  —all hate the US and its allies. Attacking and slandering Israel, presenting it as aggressor willing to entangle the US and the world in “another” needless war, is a common antisemitic canard, grounded in the Nazi calumny that all wars are caused by Jews. The JCPOA, shown to be based on wrong assumptions of Iranian compliance and gradual moderation, is not “the last obstacle on the road to war”, as MacGregor asserts, with Carlson’s full agreement, — it is the road to war.