Scientific Frauds, Academic Gangsters, and the Khazarian Theory Revisited

DISCLOSURE: VT condemns the horrific tragedy committed by the NAZI Party against Jewish Citizens of Europe during Word War II known as the "Holocaust". VT condemns all racism, bigotry, hate speech, and violence. However, we are an open source uncensored journal and support the right of independent writers and commentors to express their voices; even if those voices are not mainstream as long as they do NOT openly call for violence. Please report any violations of comment policy to us immediately. Strong reader discretion is advised.

by Jonas E. Alexis

We have written at least four articles over the past seven months discussing the moral and intellectual inadequacy of the widely held theory that Jewish behavior is genetic.

We have also seen how geneticists like Harry Ostrer have deliberately fudged data to pursue their own ideological agenda and to make sweeping assertions about behavior and moral responsibility.[1]

This did not really surprise me at all. For some scientists, ideology is prior to real research. Some scientists would even magically summon evidence out of thin air so that they could preserve and cherish their preconceived notions.

What if the so-called evidence is wild and ridiculous? It doesn’t matter. For some, the essential issue is that if the “evidence” seems to support their ideology, then it passes the “scientific” test.

Those scientists usually fudge data when no one is watching over their shoulders. Modern psychiatry is riddled with this practice.[2] Here are some glaring examples.

In 1991, the Chicago Tribune came out with a report entitled, “Institute: Gene Study Data Faked.” The so-called “gene study” was produced by Jewish molecular biologist David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975.[3]

The Baltimore affair is a long and sad story and we have much to cover in this article. Let us just summarize the story.

Margot O’Toole, a 38-year-old immunologist and post-doctorate fellow at MIT, actually discovered a deliberate fudging by her supervisor Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who was working with Baltimore. O’Toole asked Baltimore to retract.

Baltimore refused. Instead, he called O’Toole “a disgruntled postdoctoral fellow.”[4] O’Toole was immediately removed from her research position and was unable to find job anywhere. She recounted,

“I was devastated. I had tried for so long to become a scientist, only to find out it was just a board game.”[5]

O’Toole, who was born in Dublin and came to America at the age of 14, probably did not know that questioning the powers that be in America is a code red. O’Toole’s mother, after hearing about the news, said:

“It was like seeing an eagle flying, and then someone clipped her wings.”[6]

This was not an exaggeration, for O’Toole was a rising star. She graduated from Brandeis University in 1973, got a Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Tufts, and joined the MIT lab in 1985, which was then supervised by Thereza Imanishi-Kari, one of the key players who actually fudged the data.

All her career came to an abrupt halt because she did not keep her mouth shut. Late historian of molecular biology Horace Freeland Judson noted that “the Baltimore affair epitomizes, and on a grand scale, the arrogance of power.”[7]

But that the story did not end there:

“Walter Stewart, a self-appointed watchdog of scientific inquiry at the National Institutes of Health, obtained a copy of the disputed lab notes from O’Toole and brought the matter to the attention of Michigan Rep.

“John Dingell, the powerful chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. During three subsequent congressional hearings, Dingell was deluged with letters from scientists accusing him of conducting a witch hunt.

“However, Secret Service tests of the ink and paper used in Ishimani-Kari’s notes indicated that she had later inserted crucial data to cover up the original fabrications.

“At long last O’Toole was gloriously vindicated. Last month an NIH draft report censured the research, criticized Baltimore and called O’Toole’s actions ‘heroic.’

“O’Toole, moreover, has resumed her career as a scientist, working as a cancer researcher at the Genetics Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Her dismay with Baltimore, who has retracted the infamous paper but has yet to apologize to her, has softened. ”[8]

Yet Baltimore and his coauthor Thereza Imanishi-Kari never got dethroned from their position.

At the end of 2012, biological psychologist Pete Etchells of Bath Spa University and epidemiologist Suzi Gage reported in the British newspaper The Guardian,

“Science is broken. Psychology was rocked recently by stories of academics making up data, sometimes overshadowing whole careers…

“A recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that since 1973, nearly a thousand biomedical papers have been retracted because someone cheated the system.

“That’s a massive 67% of all biomedical retractions. And the situation is getting worse – last year, Nature reported that the rise in retraction rates has overtaken the rise in the number of papers being published.”[9]

Evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser of Harvard is our next example. Hauser is author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

Hauser spent much of his career arguing that the notion of right and wrong is simply a product of evolution.

Yet Hauser was found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct.[10] This actually stunned his colleagues and supervisors, who thought that he was on the path of discovering something in primate behavior and animal cognition. After all, he was viewed as “a rising star for his explorations into cognition and morality…”[11]

Yet Hauser’s dream came to an abrupt end in 2010. The reports state that Hauser intentionally fabricated and deliberately misinterpreted data from certain experiments studying monkey behavior and then pressured students to accept his research without examination.

Some students refused, however, and brought the data to his superiors as proof that he was forging evidence.[12] One of Hauser’s graduate students complained:

“The most disconcerting part of the whole experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science.”[13]

Finally, Hauser admitted that he had committed some grave errors. “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes,” he said. He moved on to say that he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.”[14]

Hauser subsequently resigned from Harvard in 2011[15] and went out of sight.

Yet Hauser was hardly the only one to have engaged in scientific misconduct. In 2012, the Scientist declared,

“University of Kentucky biomedical researcher Eric Smart was discovered to have falsified or fabricated 45 figures over the course of 10 years. His research on the molecular mechanisms behind cardiovascular disease and diabetes was well regarded, despite his having used data from knockout mouse models that never existed.

“Setting the record for the most publications up for retraction by a single author, Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii fabricated data in a whopping 172 papers.

“Beginning his career in falsification in 1993 while at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, he continued it at the University of Tsukuba, and at Toho University in Tokyo, where he was finally dismissed in February 2012.

“According to investigations, Fujii never actually saw the patients he reported in his clinical studies, failed to get ethical review board approval for his research, and misled co-authors, sometimes including their names without their permission or knowledge.

“The results from roughly 34,000 criminal drug cases were put into question earlier this year when forensic chemist Annie Dookhan at the shuttered Department of Public Health Lab in Massachusetts was discovered to have falsified records on samples she was assigned to process.

“Instead, she forged signatures and did not perform tests she recorded as complete, according to investigations.

“Suspicions may have first arisen due to her impressive output—she claimed to have processed 9,000 samples in a year, whereas colleagues only averaged around 3,000. As a result of her actions, a number of defendants may have been wrongly imprisoned, while others who may have been rightly accused were freed.

“Rather than falsify data in order to get published, researchers have taken a new tack this year by writing glowing expert reviews for their own papers.

“When asked by journal editors to suggest names of experts in their field who were not involved in their research, at least four submitting authors suggested names and emails that then forwarded back to their own inboxes.

“The trend, first reported by Retraction Watch, was caught by one journal editor when author Hyung-In Moon, assistant professor at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea, offered up names of reviewers with Google and Yahoo rather than university email accounts.”[16]

“A University of Connecticut researcher who has conducted hundreds of studies on the health benefits of compounds found in red wine has been punished by the school for faking data on numerous occasions throughout his career.

Moral Minds“Dipak Das, director of cardiovascular research at [University of Connecticut], fabricated data in 145 separate instances, according to an extensive, three-year investigation conducted by the school. The university has frozen all external funding to Das’s lab and has declined $890,000 in federal grants awarded to him.

“The university has notified 11 journals regarding Das’s misconduct, potentially triggering the retraction of several published studies on resveratrol, a phenol found in red wine.

“Das’s work formed part of the scientific foundation for the claim that resveratrol conferred cardio-protective benefits and could even increase longevity by activating proteins called sirtuins, which regulate transcription, apoptosis, and stress resistance in the human body.”[17]

Last year, China Daily reported,

“From 2010 to June 30, 2013, the [National Natural Science Foundation of China]’s disciplinary supervision committee received 468 complaints related to scientific misconduct, 152 of which were filed by complainants using their real names. In recent years, at least 80 cases of research misconduct have been uncovered by the foundation.

“A survey conducted by the China Association for Science and Technology in 2009 found nearly half of 30,000 respondents from scientific research institutes, universities and medical institutions across the Chinese mainland said academic fraud and cheating was quite common.”[18]

Other cases include Dutch cardiovascular researcher Don Poldermans, Japanese cardiologist Hiroaki Matsubara, Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax, Dutch psychologist Diederik Alexander Stapel, Italian immunologist Silvia Bulfone-Paus, Norwegian physician and medical researcher Jon Sudbo, German physicist Jan Hendrik Schon, South Korean professor of biotechnology Hwang Woo-suk, American physician and medical researcher John Roland Darsee, American biochemist Terry Elton, American molecular biologist H. M. Krishna Murthy, Eric T. Poehlman of the University of Vermont, Anil Potti of Duke University, biologist Luk Van Parijs of MIT, etc.[19]

German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt “used to be considered a leading researcher into colloids. He has been stripped of his professorship and is under criminal investigation for possible forgery of up to 90 research studies.”[20]

Those examples are very similar to what Ernst Haeckel did in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to perpetuate the idea of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that embryos in the early stages of life show evolutionary development.[21]

Haeckel, known as the “German Darwin,” called Christianity a “backward religion whose Creator-God was a ‘gaseous vertebrate,’”[22] and, according to former student Ludwig Plate, ridiculed Christianity “in every possible way.”[23]

When the Origin of Species came out, Darwin predicted that there would be evidence to back up his theories. When Haeckel could not find the necessary evidence, though, he began forging proof to match Darwin’s theory.

After all, Haeckel was a disciple of Darwin. After reading the Origin of Species in 1860, Haeckel seemed to have an intellectual rebirth—or reincarnation.

He declared that “the scales fell from my eyes” and that he “found in Darwin’s great unified conception of nature and in his overwhelming foundation for the doctrine of evolution the solution of all the doubts which had bothered me since the beginning of my biological studies.”[24]

Haeckel, then, precipitated toward a vitalistic view of life, which gradually morphed into the elimination of the weak of society. He said:

“What good does it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands of cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease? It is no use to reply that Christianity forbids [their destruction]…

“Hundreds and thousands of incurables—lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc.—are artificially kept alive…without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body [of society].”[25]

Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel later accepted Haeckel’s challenge: criminals and insane people, Carrel wrote,

“should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.”[26]

Haeckel was eventually challenged by his contemporaries.

Haeckel’s Embryos 2In modern times, his drawings “proving” his theory of embryonic evolution have been called “outright falsifications,”[27] and British embryologist Michael K. Richardson declared in 1997:

“It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.”[28]

Even Stephen Jay Gould called Haeckel’s drawings “fraudulent,” and added,

“We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!”[29]

Yet amazingly, as of 2004, Haeckel’s drawings were still prevalent in modern biology textbooks![30]

This again tells us that some in the academic world are willing to forge evidence, or at least distribute questionable data, to support their claims, so long as they don’t get caught. Even Gould hints at this practice, admitting that

“the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”[31]

If we are going to have a serious discussion on issues that matter to all of us, we have to be honest with ourselves first and then avoid fraudulent and irresponsible theories or hypotheses that have no substantive and moral backing.

In addition, we have seen the inadequacy of the theory that since people like Slomo Sand are people of the Left, their scholarship must be rejected out of hand. In philosophy, this is commonly known as the “genetic fallacy,” and every freshman in logic knows that it is a sophomoric way of reasoning.

Norman Finkelstein for example is a person of the Left. Should that be the sole basis for examining his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitations of Jewish Suffering? How about Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History or A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth?

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is also a socialist activist. Should we dismiss his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine on that premise? One has to be really desperate to appeal to this type of genetic fallacy.

Sometimes it is quite disappointing and frustrating to see people who style themselves as rational continue to use illogical assumptions and then force those assumptions upon their entire ideological canvas.

I sometimes have to ignore some of those people when I realize that their illogical leaps continue at an exponential rate and when they have little regard for evidence and truth.

A few months ago, a man sent me an email positing some ridiculous statements about Civilta Cattolica which he claimed to have read. He declared that it blamed Jews for ritual murder. I have read that particular article many times and I simply asked him to point out where exactly his claims could be found.

He never responded to that issue but then moved on to other topics. However, he suggested that he got some of his sources from David I. Kertzer, a Jewish professor at Brown University whose books contain fantastically gross misrepresentations, deliberate fabrications, and complete hoaxes.

Like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and in some instances Walter Laqueur, Kertzer fudged much of the evidence and produced inaccurate translations to marshal his views. Since time constraints, let us cite just two examples:

“In 1913, during the reign of Pius X, at what Kertzer himself calls ‘the most famous ritual murder trial of the twentieth century,’ the Vatican was asked by various Jewish groups for documents that would exonerate the accused Jew on trial in czarist Ukraine.

“These documents were willingly provided by the Vatican’s secretary of state, but when the historian—on whom Kertzer has been exclusively relying for his step-by-step description of these events—writes that ‘the Russian Ambassador in Rome did everything possible that the document should arrive in Kiev too late to be submitted as evidence,’ Kertzer omits that sentence altogether, and without any annotation or validation simply proceeds to say that it was the papal secretary of state who was the responsible party.

“The intent of that hoax was explicitly to show that the Vatican deliberately refused to save the life of an innocent Jew—and thus to prove to the reader that the popes indeed were ‘against the Jews.’”[32]

This has happened all throughout his books:

“After reading a given pope’s mind and literally putting words into his mouth, Kertzer then criticizes the same pope for saying the assorted malign things that in fact were conceived by none other than himself, the author of The Popes Against the Jews…

“Neither did Pius IX say the words below that were attributed to him through the happy medium of Kertzer’s own fantasies…

“[Kertzer]: ‘ By 1861 all that was left of the Pope’s temporal kingdom was Rome and the area immediately around it. Throughout the peninsula, a new secular Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed. For the Pope, the collapse of the Papal States was but another trial sent by God.

“‘But the Papal States had fallen to impious forces before—indeed, more than once in the nineteenth century alone—and each time the church had ultimately triumphed and the forces of darkness were defeated. This time, with God’s help, thought the Pope, the same would happen.’”[33]

In a letter to the editors of the New York Review of Books, scholar Justus George Lawler wrote that “Kertzer is an ideologue who rigs arguments and doctors texts” to buttress his point.[34] I am beginning to see why.

Kertzer beats the Catholic Church over the head saying that the popes were largely anti-Semites and that they were the main forces behind physical persecutions of Jews over the centuries, culminating in the “Shoah.”

But the actual historical accounts by both Jewish scholars and Philo-Semitic historians tell us otherwise.[35] This has been a perennial principle in many of Kertzer’s books and indeed the ideological substratum of Goldhagen’s and Laqueur’s reasoning.

Laqueur, without any reference or historical context, quotes Augustine as saying “How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews) with your two-edged sword so that there should be none to oppose your word…Gladly would I have them die to themselves?”[36]

From that highly edited passage, Laqueur deduced that Augustine desired to inflict physical persecution on the Jews. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is the actual quotation from Augustine’s Confessions:

“The enemies thereof I hate vehemently; oh that Thou wouldest slay them with Thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies unto it: for so do I love to have them slain unto themselves, that they may live unto Thee.”[37]

That Laqueur eliminated the rest of the quotation—“that they may live unto Thee”—is suspect. Surely this would destroy his view, and he was careful not to let his readers know about this.

antisemitismWe have to keep in mind that Augustine was a scrupulous and erudite exegete and chose his words carefully throughout his Confessions. After all, the book of Hebrews declares,

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

Augustine was simply saying that God should pierce the Jews with his two-edged sword—the truth—so that they would be able to “live unto Thee” in full.

As an example, Augustine could have cited St. Paul, who “saw the new movement that referred to Jesus of Nazareth as a risk, a threat to the Jewish identity, to the true Orthodoxy of the fathers”[38] and who “persecuted the Church of God.”

But the same Paul ended up converting to the new movement and becoming its foremost defender. Paul’s conversion, as Pope Benedict XVI put it, became

“the raison d’être of his life….This turning point in his life, this transformation of his whole being was not the fruit of a psychological process, of a maturation or intellectual and moral development.

“Rather it came from the outside: it was the fruit, not of his thought, but of his encounter with Jesus Christ. In this sense it was not simply a conversion, a development of his ‘ego,’ but rather a death and a resurrection for Paul himself. One existence died, and another, new one was born with the Risen Christ…

“This event alone, this powerful encounter with Christ, is the key to understanding what had happened: death and resurrection, renewal by the One who had shown himself and had spoken to him. In this deeper sense, we can speak of conversion.”[39]

The last sentence here, by the way, is the key to understanding the “Jewish question.” Conversion—not bloodshed, not extermination, not hatred, not even physical persecution—is what will bring a change in the world.[40]

This is a completely different worldview. Whenever I see people talking about radical extermination to solve the “Jewish question,” it is an infallible sign that those people are no different (perhaps worse) than their enemies.

Moreover, whenever I see people implicitly suggesting that their solution to the “Jewish question” would not be amenable to the rule of law because it would probably be inhumane, it is also an infallible sign that we are in the presence of monsters we cannot and should not trust. The “Jewish question” can be solved overnight if Western societies abide by the rule of law.

For example, if Ted Kaczynski commits a crime, we find him, prosecute him, and place him behind bars. As I have argued in the past, people like Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, among the neoconservatives who propagated the Iraq war in the media, should be prosecuted as well.

There is really no need to appeal to frivolous solutions which would end in a vicious cycle. A casual look at history should tell us that it never worked.

Ask yourself this question: who now benefits from the events that happened during Nazi Germany? The civilian population in Dresden? The Germans who got raped after the war? The German soldiers who were literally tortured to death?[41] The poor peasants in Russia? America which progressively became a Zionist state after the war?

You tell me: the Times of Israel reported in 2012 that “Germany has paid $89 billion in compensation for Nazi crimes since 1952.”

With no regard to other tragedy in human history—most vividly Stalin’s mass extermination—the Times of Israel propounded this idea:

“Most Holocaust survivors experienced extreme trauma as children, suffered serious malnutrition, and lost almost all of their relatives — leaving them today with severe psychological and medical problems, and little or no family support network to help them cope.”

I guess Stalin’s survivors did not experience those traumas. They were of different species because as far as we can tell, they received no compensation. Benjamin Netanyahu even made the West a laughing stock by declaring in 2010 that he wanted to build a monument to the Red Army.[42]

Germany still has not gotten out of that reparation sinkhole.[43] In fact, one can say that Germany has been politically and ideologically crippled by the Zionist weltanschauung since World War II.

One can also say the same thing about America. With respect to the current crisis, the Times of Israel again reports that

“Legislation introduced in Congress would post a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of the killers of Naftali Fraenkel, the Israeli-American teen abducted with two others and murdered last month in the West Bank.”

Jewish member of the United States House of Representatives Brad Sherman “co-sponsored the legislation in the House.”

So how much money would be allocated for the capture of the killers of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian civilians since 1948?

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has recently put it, what about the “Jewish hate of Arabs”?[44] What about six Jews burning a 16-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammad Abu Khdeir alive?[45] What about Israel’s real purpose: to kill Arabs in the recent Gaza attack?[46] What about sending Gaza civilians to the slaughterhouse?[47] Haaretz declares,

“The Israel Police was quick to label the murderers ‘Jewish extremists,’ meaning they aren’t part of the herd, they are outliers, ‘wild weeds.’ This is the police’s way of trying to justify a sin, to ‘make the vermin kosher.’

“But the vermin is huge, and many-legged. It has embraced the soldiers and other young Israelis who overran the social media networks with calls for revenge and with hatred for Arabs.

“The vermin was welcomed by Knesset members, rabbis and public figures who demanded revenge. Nor did it skip over the prime minister, who declared ‘Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.’

“Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not ‘Jewish extremists.’ They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of ‘the Jewish state’:

“Those for whom every Arab is a bitter enemy, simply because they are Arab; those who were silent at the Beitar Jerusalem games when the team’s fans shouted ‘death to Arabs’ at Arab players; those who call for cleansing the state of its Arab minority, or at least to drive them out of the homes and cities of the Jews.”[48]

Here is the rub: even if a solution is proposed to isolate the dreadful few to a country specifically for themselves, that still would not work. Don’t they have bad DNA? And according to that principle, would they not try to corrupt other countries as well through sophisticated means?

Moreover, if we follow this idea to its logical conclusion, it suffers very badly. Even if the dreadful few turn out to possess the whole Middle East, they still wouldn’t be satisfied because their DNA is corrupt, which means that they would probably seek to overthrow other countries, and which means that we would have endless wars.

The NSA is a case in point. Why would the Israelis want to snoop on innocent civilians throughout the world? William Binney, mathematician and former intelligence official with the NSA, has recently declared that

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”[49]

They will not be satisfied until they reach that goal. And since the folks behind the NSA are “contrary to all men,” they will disregard every single rule of law in order to get their diabolical work done. If the Constitution says that the government ought not to snoop on American citizens without a warrant, they will do the opposite.

We are indeed facing a formidable enemy, and it takes serious caution and serious reflection to formulate a reasonable response. But we will not do justice to the problem if we too have to disregard the law in order to respond to the enemy. We will provide some of the steps that the West can take in a future article.

To return to Laqueur. He cannot consider the possibility we have explored above because according to his logic, Augustine and most of the early church fathers were ipso facto anti-Semites.

Once again Laqueur proved himself to be an unruly historian when he declared that “there had been physical persecution of the Jews under the Roman emperors; reading the Torah, practicing circumcision, etc. were banned in the year 135 CE, and Judaism ceased to be a legal religion.”[50]

What Laqueur failed to mention was that this was the year the Bar Kochba rebellion ended! Jewish rebellions were rampant during that era; from 66 to 70 A.D. the Jewish War led to a bloody confrontation which culminated in the destruction of the Temple.

Likewise, in 115 Jewish revolutionaries slaughtered 240,000 Greeks on the island of Cyprus; the Greeks in return rose up and slaughtered virtually every Jew on the island.[51] The Roman emperors finally had to ban Judaism. All of these historical events are omitted in Laqueur’s analysis because Laqueur lives and moves and has his being in ideology.

Screen-ShotMy correspondent made another preposterous claim, saying that “the Vatican is a major player in fomenting Ukrainian unrest and separatism in Russia.”

Now that is an extraordinary claim. My response was simple: where is the evidence? To clarify the issue for him, I added that if Mr. X posits an affirmative claim, Mr. Y is under no obligation to provide evidence for Mr. X’s claim. For example, suppose Mr. X argues that “Hitler killed six million people.”

Mr. Y gets up and says, “Your honor, where is the evidence for the proposition?” Suppose Mr. X says in response, “Where is the evidence that he didn’t”?

Would you be satisfied with this frivolous and obviously dumb response? Would you not say that Mr. X is a madman?

Sadly, for some ideologues, an assertion without evidence is itself evidence!

My correspondent finally admitted that he didn’t have evidence to support his claim. He kept moving from one subject to another and I had to pick up his trail and ask for evidence. He finally burst out,

“I don’t know about official documents…Why do we need documents to verify the reality that the Catholic Church granted monopolistic banking privileges to Jewish moneylenders and frequently availed herself of these services, thereby amplifying financial power?”

At one point, he wrote unambiguously,

“Who cares what the ‘official documents’ say when the behavior is so clear? This bad behavior I think speaks loud and clear. Like actions speaking louder than words.”

At that point, I threw in the towel. I then realized that reason and cogent arguments are not everyone’s intended destination.

Yet to my astonishment, the same person went around sending emails to academics and professors and saying things like Alexis “insists that Jews exclusively are to blame for the evil doctrine of evolution,” a morally and historically repugnant idea that I never claimed and which I had previously explained to him very clearly.

Going back to the original issue, I am particularly flabbergasted to see that whenever people like Ostrer write books such as Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, people who support the faulty assumption that Jewish behavior is genetic are quick to jump on the bandwagon and imply things like, “You see. I told you Jewish behavior is genetic.”

But when stronger evidence seems to refute the same claim, you never hear those people talking about it. For example, last March, historian Jim Wald declared in the Times of Israel:

“A blue-ribbon team of scholars from leading research institutions and museums has just issued a secret report to the government, acknowledging that European Jews are in fact Khazars. (Whether this would result in yet another proposal to revise the words to ‘Hatikvah’ remains to be seen.)

“At first sight, this would seem to be the worst possible news, given the Prime Minister’s relentless insistence on the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ and the stagnation of the peace talks. But others have underestimated him at their peril. An aide quipped, when life hands you an etrog, you build a sukkah.

“Speaking off the record, he explained, ‘We first thought that admitting we are really Khazars was one way to get around Abbas’s insistence that no Jew can remain in a Palestinian state. Maybe we were grasping at straws. But when he refused to accept that, it forced us to think about more creative solutions.

“The Ukrainian invitation for the Jews to return was a godsend. Relocating all the settlers within Israel in a short time would be difficult for reasons of logistics and economics. We certainly don’t want another fashion like the expulsion of the settlers in the Gaza Hitnatkut [disengagement].’”[52]

I have been studying this issue for a while now, and I still cannot understand how those genetic theorists say that Jewish behavior is genetic and then condemn that same behavior on moral principles and responsibility. The current risible trend is that genes influence our political beliefs![53]

[youtube 6VUw-25X0p8]

gideonlevyWhat we are saying is that the “Jewish question” is based on a historical and theological conflict that has affected the Jewish people from time immemorial and that conflict still exists today. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy could have spoken for many when he said,

“There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel that really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else.

“[We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us…

“So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.”[54]

In the same vein, Stephen Steinlight declared years ago:

“I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist…I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us.

“We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.”[55]

Michael Chabon of the New York Times concurs:

“As a Jewish child, I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people.

“And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics.”[56]

If the issue lies in good or bad DNA, why would Jewish parents have to teach their children about their geniuses? Isn’t “greatness”—or “corruption”—already in their genes?

And if bad DNA is actually the issue, what do we do with decent people like Michael Polanyi, Mortimer Adler, John J. Mearsheimer, Norman Finkelstein, Brother Nathanael Kapner, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, to name just a few? (And how did they get rid of their bad DNA?)

If we want to be brutally honest, what do we do with Christ and his disciples and later Jewish followers?

Well, several months ago, another correspondent sent me a message saying that Christ and his disciples—and even Paul!—were not ethnic Jews, either. He even had nice pictures to prove his point!

This is what happens when you have an incoherent theory that gets you into trouble.

CITATIONS

[1] I pointed this out to one correspondent who kept positing that Jewish behavior is genetic, and he went on to believe that Ostrer was still right after the fact!

[2] See for example David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Pharmageddon (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012);The Creation of Psychopharmacology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Allan V. Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Broadway Books, 2010); Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper Perennial, 1974); Peter Breggin, Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999); Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (New York: Nation Books, 2005).

[3] “Institute: Gene Study Data Faked,” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1991.

[4] Eileen Garred, “When Lab Researcher Margot O’toole Caught Her Boss Fudging Data, She Lost Her Job-but Not the Will to Fight Back,” People Magazine, April 15, 1991.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Horace Freeland Judson, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 193.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Pete Etchells and Suzi Gage, “Scientific Fraud Is Rife: It’s Time to Stand Up for Good Science,” Guardian, November 2, 2012.

[10] “FAS Dean Smith Confirms Scientific Misconduct by Marc Hauser,” Harvard Magazine, August 20, 2010.

[11] Nicholas Wade, “Harvard Finds Scientist Guilty of Misconduct,” NY Times, August 13, 2010.

[12] Ibid.

20, 2010; Tracy Jan, “Hauser Found ‘Responsible’ for Eight Instances of Misconduct,” Boston Globe, August 20, 2010; Tom Barlett, “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2010; Carolyn Y. Johnson, “Author on Leave After Harvard Inquiry,” Boston Globe, August 10, 2010; “Irony Alert: Did a Harvard Morality Expert Falsify his Research?,” Week Magazine, August 31, 2010.

[13] Nicholas Wade, “Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher,” NY Times, October 25, 2010.

[14] Wade, “Harvard Finds Scientist Guilty of Misconduct.”

[15] Tom Barlett, “Marc Hauser Resigns from Harvard,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 19, 2011.

[16] Edyta Zielinska, “Top Science Scandals of 2012,” The Scientist, December 17, 2012.

[17] Bob Grant, “Wine Research Caught Faking,” The Scientist, January 13, 2012.

[18] Shan Juan, “Cases of Scientific Misconduct on the Rise,” China Daily, October 24, 2013.

[19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Poldermans; Larry Husten, “Prominent Japanese Cardiologist Accused of Scientific Misconduct,” Forbes, March 13, 2012; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Bulfone-Paus; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitaka_Fujii; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darsee; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-Suk; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Sudb%C3%B8; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Elton; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.M._Krishna_Murthy; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luk_Van_Parijs; for other reports, see “Vioxx Maker Is Accused of Scientific Misconduct,” LA Times, December 4, 2005; “An Array of Errors,” The Economist, September 10, 2011; Thomas H. Maugh, “Physicist Is Found Guilty of Misconduct,” LA Times, July 19, 2008; John Crewdson, “Gallo’s Case Could Lead to Better Reviews,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1993; Peter H. Stockton, “Report Found Scientific Misconduct,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1995.

[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Boldt; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitaka_Fujii; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel;

[21] See Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism, 37.

[22] Quoted in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Norton, 1991), 538, 543.

[23] Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 273.

[24] Quoted in De Marco and Wiker, Architects, 105.

[25] Quoted in Ibid., 110.

[26] Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown (McPherson, KS: Agnus Dei Publishing, 1935 [and 2014]), 277.

[27] Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (WA: Regnery Publishing, 2002), 94.

[28] Quoted in Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 304; Richardson indeed moderated his comment once he began to see that creationists were using it to debunk the theory of evolution. Richards and others give the impression that Richardson seems to be wrong for pointing out errors in Haeckel’s drawings.

[29] Wells, Icons of Evolution, 108-109.

[30] Wells, Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism, 28.

[31] Stephen Jay Gould, The Richness of Life (New York: Norton, 2006), 263.

[32] Justus George Lawler, Were the Popes Against the Jews?: Tracking the Myths, Confronting the Ideologues (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), xiii.

[33] Ibid., xv.

[34] “Were the Popes Against the Jews?,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 2014.

[35] For historical contexts, see for example Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Theodore S. Hamelow, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); David G. Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: Pope Pius XII and His Secret War Against Nazi Germany (WA: Regnery Publishing, 2005); Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Age of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950); Ronald J. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2005); Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1930).

[36] Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48.

[37] Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: Empire Books, 2011), 247.

[38] Pope Benedict XVI, Saint Paul (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 14.

[39] Ibid., 21, 24.

[40] As I will argue in a future article, this is not to say that revolutionaries should not be put on trial for the crimes.

[41] See for example John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

[42] Herb Keinon, “PM: Israel to Erect Red Army Memorial,” Jerusalem Post, February 16, 2010.

[43] “Holocaust Reparations: Germany to Pay 772 Million Euros to Survivors,” Spiegel International, May 29, 2013.

[44] “Jewish Hate of Arabs Proves: Israel Must Undergo Cultural Revolution,” Haaretz, July 7, 2014.

[45] Chaim Levinson, “Israeli Police Arrest Six Suspects in Murder of Palestinian Teen,” Haaretz, July 6, 2014.

[46] Gideon Levy, “Israel’s Real Purpose in Gaza Attack? To Kill Arabs,” Haaretz, July 13, 2014.

[47] Amira Hass, “Gaza Civilians Waiting ‘For the Slaughterhouse,’” Haaretz, July 13, 2014.

[48] “Jewish Hate of Arabs Proves: Israel Must Undergo Cultural Revolution,” Haaretz, July 7, 2014.

[49] Quoted in Antony Loewenstein, “One Of The NSA’s Original Whistleblowers Says The Goal Is ‘Total Population Control,’” Business Insider, July 10, 2014.

[50] Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, 50.

[51] Solomon Grayzel, A history of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Establishment of Israel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 180; Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, 2: 396, 397.

[52] Jim Wald, “Leaked report: Israel acknowledges Jews in fact Khazars; Secret plan for reverse migration to Ukraine,” Times of Israel, March 18, 2014.

[53] Thomas B. Edsall, “How Much Do Our Genes Influence Our Political Beliefs?,” NY Times, July 8, 2014.

[54] Quoted in Johann Hari, “Is Gideon Levy the Most Hated Man in Israel or Jus the Most Heroic?,” The Independent, September 24, 2010.

[55] Stephen Steinlight, “The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2001.

[56] Michael Chabon, “Chosen, but Not Special,” NY Times, June 4, 2010.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

• Read Jonas Alexis’s latest posts here >>>