Humbug and humbuggers!

The more I read around the world, courtesy of the internet, the more I sympathise with Richard Littlejohn's  catch phrase "you couldn't make it up".  That summed up my head-shaking reaction to this tale from the mischievous Prof. Fred Gottheil as told by him in the American Thinker.  Gottheil had noted one of those tedious, self-important, political manifestos got up usually by academic nobodies, in this case some professorial prat called David C. Lloyd, and passed around the hallowed halls of academe for signature before, thus endorsed, being passed on, in this case to the incoming President Obama in January 2009.  No need to dwell on the contents of this particular petition, I will simply quote some key words and leave you to imagine the rest - "Israel ... racist regime ... crimes against humanity ... ethnocidal atrocities" and so on - you get the picture.  This one-sided pile of brown stuff attracted, as it always does, the academic flies and quickly accumulated over 900 signatures from over 150 campuses.

Prof. Gottheil decided to mount a similar exercise and he produced a Statement of Concern over the anti-gay and anti-women policies of various middle eastern states including Palestine:

The Statement provided evidence of both the practice and the condoning of the practice by religious, political, and even academic authorities of honor-killing, wife-beating, and female genital mutilations. Documentation was offered for specific countries, for specific practices, and referred to specific authorities condoning the practices identified.

He provided the sources for his accusations, including:

U.N. agencies, survey research units, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, scholarly journals, and social justice-related NGOs such as Asylum-Law and Human Rights Watch.

Next, he carefully combed the original signature list and removed anyone who was not a university teacher or a graduate student with teaching experience or published research.  This reduced the 900+ list of names to 675 and they were duly sent a copy of the Statement and a request for support.  You will not, dear reader, fall over dead with shock at the result:

Only thirty of the 675 "self-described social-justice seeking academics" responded, 27 of them agreeing to endorse the Statement. But these 27 signatories represent less than five percent of the 675 contacted. In other words, 95 percent of those who had signed the Lloyd petition censuring Israel for human rights violation did not sign a statement concerning discrimination against women and gays and lesbians in the Middle East. [...]

As many as 25 percent of the Lloyd petition-signing academics were faculty associated with gender and women studies departments. Yet of these, only 5 endorsed the Statement calling for attention to the discrimination against women in the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Put more bluntly, 164 of the 169 faculty who had chosen to focus their life's work on matters affecting women, and who felt comfortable enough to affix their names to Lloyd's petition censuring Israel, chose not to sign a Statement of Concern about documented human rights violations against gays, lesbians, and women in the Middle East.

What's that smell?  No, no, not that, it's humbug, I tell you!

 

Comments

[JK]

You've usually a theater review or somesuch up on the D&N page 1 but since, it would appear, things're slow comments wise I'll just drop this little item in right here. Perhaps "Ere be a strange..." would have been more appropriate but what the heck, the academics who refused to sign the second are likely reading this, your post and one might well expect drama based on real fiction non-fiction might increase ticket sales for:

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2010/09/theater-review-sink-belgrano.html

[David Duff]

God, they must be desperate for plays in Washington!