University Professor Sacked for Telling-the-Truth
Peter Ridd as a first year undergraduate science student at James Cook University back in 1978 – forty years ago.
By Jennifer Marohasy | May 19, 2018
BACK in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor.
Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one university for forty years.
Since Peter was fired on 2 May 2018, the university has attempted to remove all trace of this association: scrubbing him completely from their website.
But facts don’t cease to exist because they are removed from a website. The university has never challenged the veracity of Peter’s legitimate claims about the quality of much of the reef science: science on which billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research is being squandered. These issues are not going away.
Just yesterday (Friday 18 May), Peter lodged papers in the Federal Court. He is going to fight for his job back! […]
Peter deliberately choose to frame the book chapter about the replication crisis that is sweeping through science.
In this chapter – The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Coral and Problems with Policy Science – Peter details the major problems with quality assurance when it comes to claims of the imminent demise of the reef.
Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.
Ex-professor Peter Ridd has also published extensively in the scientific literature on the Great Barrier Reef, including issues with the methodology used to measure calcification rates. In the book he explains:
Like trees, which produce rings as they grow, corals set down a clearly identifiable layer of calcium carbonate skeleton each year, as they grow. The thicknesses and density of the layers can be used to infer calcification rates and are, effectively, a measure of the growth rate. Dr Glenn De’ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science used cores from more than 300 corals, some of which were hundreds of years old, to measure the changes in calcification during the last few hundred years. They claimed there was a precipitous decline in calcification since 1990, as shown in Figure 1.2.
The LHS chart suggests a problem with coral growth rates – but the real problem is with the methodology. When corals of equivalent age are sampled, there has been no decline in growth rates at the Great Barrier Reef – as shown in the RHS chart.
However, I have two issues with their analysis. I published my concerns, and an alternative analysis, in the journal Marine Geology (Ridd et al. 2013). First, there were instrumental errors with the measurements of the coral layers. This was especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality. This forced an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s – falsely implying a recent calcification drop. Second, an ‘age effect’ was not acknowledged. When these two errors are accounted for, the drop in calcification rates disappear, as shown in Figure 1.2.
The problem with the ‘age effect’, mentioned above, arose because in the study De’ath and colleagues included data from corals sampled during two distinct periods and with a different focus; I will refer to these as two campaigns. The first campaign occurred mostly in the 1980s and focused on very large coral specimens, sometimes many metres across. The second campaign occurred in the early 2000s due to the increased interest in the effects of CO2. However, presumably due to cost cutting measures, instead of focusing on the original huge coral colonies, the second campaign measured smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter.
In summary, the first campaign focused on large old corals, while, in contrast, the second campaign focused on small young corals. The two datasets were then spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated – in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth…
Dr Juan D’Olivo Cordero from the University of Western Australia collected an entirely different dataset of coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef to determine calcification rates. This study determined that there has been a 10% increase in calcification rates since the 1940s for offshore and mid-shelf reefs, which is the location of about 99% of all the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. However, these researchers also measured a 5% decline in calcification rates of inshore corals – the approximately 1% of corals that live very close to the coast. Overall, there was an increase for most of the Great Barrier Reef, and a decrease for a small fraction of the Great Barrier Reef.
While it would seem reasonable to conclude that the results of the study by D’Olivo et al. would be reported as good news for the Great Barrier Reef, their article in the journal Coral Reefs concluded:
Our new findings nevertheless continue to raise concerns, with the inner-shelf reefs continuing to show long-term declines in calcification consistent with increased disturbance from land-based effects. In contrast, the more ‘pristine’ mid- and outer-shelf reefs appear to be undergoing a transition from increasing to decreasing rates of calcification, possibly reflecting the effects of CO2-driven climate change.
Imaginatively, this shift from ‘increasing’ to ‘decreasing’ seems to be based on an insignificant fall in the calcification rate in some of the mid-shelf reefs in the last two years of the 65-year dataset.
Why did the authors concentrate on this when their data shows that the reef is growing about 10% faster than it did in the 1940s?
James Cook university could have used the chapter as an opportunity to start a much-needed discussion about policy, funding and the critical importance of the scientific method. Instead, Peter was first censored by the University – and now he has been fired.
When I first blogged on this back in February, Peter needed to raise A$95,000 to fight the censure.
This was achieved through an extraordinary effort, backed by Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, John Roskam and so many others.
To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly. In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.
New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February. The core issue continues to be Peter’s right to keep talking – including so that he can defend himself.
In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter’s employment agreement. The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him. Peter disputes this.
Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice – to defend himself! All of the documentation is now being made public – all of this information, and more can be found at Peter’s new website.
Award-winning photographer shot by Israel soldier in the West Bank
Internationally-acclaimed and award-winning photographer, Tanya Habjouqa [Happeningarts/Twitter]
MEMO | May 17, 2018
An internationally-acclaimed, award-winning photographer was shot by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, reports the Art Newspaper.
Tanya Habjouqa, who won the 2014 World Press photo award, was struck in the leg by a rubber-coated metal bullet fired by Israeli occupation forces during a protest near Bet El checkpoint.
Habjouqa told the paper that she was some 40 metres from Palestinian protesters “when Israeli soldiers in the distance started shooting rubber bullets and tear gas in several directions”.
“She also saw soldiers aim at a Palestinian gas station where there were no protesters, just people filling up their gas tanks,” the report added.
“I was on the side with my camera at the beginning of the protest with cameras around my neck, so I feel I was definitely targeted though thankfully they chose not to aim for my head,” Habjouqa tells us. “It hurts like hell and the bruise is spreading front and back.”
Habjouqa is a founder of Rawiya, the first all-female photo collective in the Middle East, as well as a member of the Noor Photography collective, a Magnum Foundation grantee, and the author of the photo book Occupied Pleasures that the Smithsonian named one of the best photo books of 2015.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Institut du Monde Art in Paris.
Read also:
Media freedom watchdog warns of more Israel attacks on journalists in Gaza
Rights group: Israel arrested 500 Palestinians over Facebook posts
Reporting Israeli crimes against Palestinians is considered by Israeli judiciary incitement of terror.
Days of Palestine | May 9, 2018
Palestinian Prisoners’ Centre (PPC) said yesterday that Israel had arrested 500 Palestinians, including women and children, as a result of their social media posts, Al-Resalah newspaper reported.
PPC spokesman Riyadh Al-Ashqar said that the Israeli occupation began arresting Palestinians because of their social media posts following the start of the Jerusalem Intifada claiming such uploads incite terror against Israel.
Israel is using its recently formed “Cyber Unit” to monitor Palestinian social media posts, the centre said.
This unit, Al-Ashqar said, classifies any post that glorifies Palestinian martyrs, discloses Israeli crimes, supports resistance or mentions the words and phrases including “martyr” and “intifada” as “incitement of terror”.
In the recent years, Al-Ashqar said, Israeli occupation courts have issued hundreds of sentences against Palestinians on the ground of incitement on social media.
The sentences ranged between months and years in prison, house arrests or bans from using social media platforms and mobile phones. The terms were handed down to men, women and children.
Talk on “Extreme Weather and Extreme Politics”
By Roger Pielke jr. | The Climate Fix | May 1, 2018
Earlier this month I gave a talk at the University of Minnesota. It was my first public talk on climate since being “investigated” by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) in 2015.
It is also the first and only invitation I’ve received to give a public talk on climate at a US university since 2015.
Before that I received about 2-3 invitations per month.
Delegitimization works.
You can see my slides from Minnesota at:
Much of what I presented (and more) will appear in the 2nd edition of Disasters and Climate Change.
Below I document a key episode in my own experience that I have never looked back on in detail. The timeline is of use to me, shared here for anyone else who might be interested.
A Look Back at the Holdren-Pielke Debate of 2014
- One of the more bizarre experiences I’ve had in the climate debate was when President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, posted a weird, 6-page screed about me on the White House web site.
- Here is a reconstruction of and look back at those events, and an evaluation how they look from vantage point of 2018.
- This look back is mainly just for me, as when you are in the spin cycle it can be hard to see what has happened at the time.
- The Holdren episode ultimately led to me being investigated by a member of Congress with a major impact on my life and career.
- I’ve not taken a close look back at this episode, it’s time for me to document exactly what transpired. If you are not interested, this would be a good place to take the exit ramp.
- In July 2013, I testified before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on extreme events.
- You can see my 5 minute statement below and read my full written testimony here in PDF. That testimony was widely discussed.
- I followed that testimony up with similar testimony before the US House a few months later, in October 2013.
- I wrote a blog post explaining that the science on these issues was solid. Even so I argued that “zombie science” (to the contrary) would always be with us.
- On February 14, 2014, Holdren was quoted as saying: “We really understand a number of the reasons that global climate change is increasing the intensity and the frequency and the life of drought in drought-prone regions. This is one of the better-understood dimensions of the relationship between global climate change and extreme weather in particular regions. . . There are other, more subtle, ways climate change may be affecting the prevalence of drought; scientists are still arguing about those. The three I just described are more than enough to understand why we are seeing droughts in drought-prone regions becoming more frequent, more severe and longer.”
- Two weeks later Dr. Holdren was asked about these statements by Senator Jeff Sessions before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the same committee that I had testified before the previous July.
- The full exchange between Sessions and Holdren can be found here, but below are the key excerpts.
- After some sparring on what Dr. Holdren said or didn’t say a few week previous, Senator Sessions said:
- “Well, let me tell you what Dr. Pilkey (sic) said, who sat in that chair you are sitting in today just a few months ago, he is a climate impact expert, and he agrees that warming is partly caused by human emissions. But he testified “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate change time scales either in the United States or globally.”
- Holdren replied with a delegitmization effort, saying that I was
- “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion on this point. And again, I will be happy to submit for the record recent articles from Nature, Nature GeoScience, Nature Climate Change, Science and others showing that in drought-prone regions droughts are becoming more intense.”
- Of course, Holdren was incorrect.
- My views are 100% consistent with those of the IPCC, the very definition of “mainstream scientific opinion.”
- Holdren promised to submit scientific evidence for the hearing record in support of his views, Sessions said he looked forward to it.
- Three days later Holdren’s missive about me was posted on the White House website, titled Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr ” (here in PDF).
- Holdren singled out just 2 statements that I had made in my testimony:
- “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”
- Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”
- The quotes in blue above are from the US National Climate Assessment (former) and a Nature paper (latter) on global drought trends.
- Holdren explained his objections:
- “I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke … were not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references. “
- The slide below shows the entirety of my discussion of drought in my 2013 Senate testimony, which consisted only of quotes from the IPCC, the US CCSP and an image from the CCSP report.
- Holdren did not mention hurricanes, floods or tornadoes in his 6 pages of response.
- Holdren’s response blew up the internet (or at least the tiny part of it involving issues related to climate).
- When the White House posts 6 pages about you, it gets noticed.
- For my part, in response I wrote a blog response which you can read here.
- In that post I noted:
- “It is fine for experts to openly disagree. But when a political appointee uses his position not just to disagree on science or policy but to seek to delegitimize a colleague, he has gone too far.”
- This was, as far as I am aware, the first time that a Science Advisor to the US President used his platform to seek to delegitimize an academic with whom he disagreed.
- I am aware of no such comparable use of the authority and reach of the White House against a researcher.
- The fact that I was singled out by the president’s science advisor was not reported on or commented on by the mainstream scientific media. Leading scientific organizations said nothing.
- I found this pretty amazing, but c’est la vie.
- If John Marburger, say, had gone after James Hansen, it’d have been a story.
- I responded more forcefully in an article in The New Republic a few days later.
- None of this mattered, I quickly learned that a lone academic is no match for the bully pulpit that is the White House and the powerful echo chamber of the online climate debate.
- A few weeks later the campaign to have me removed as a writer for 538 was underway and 11 months later the investigation motivated by Rep. Raul Grijlava (D-AZ), which he indicated was the result of Holdren’s missive, was launched.
- One of my close colleagues said to me at the time: “I’d love to come to your defense, but I don’t want them coming after me.”
- Fair enough.
- Let’s quickly take a look at the state of the science in 2018 on drought.
- The 2017 US National Climate Assessment, prepared under the direction of John Holdren in the last months of the Obama Administration and released after Donald Trump became president concluded the following about drought:
- “drought statistics over the entire CONUS have declined … no detectable change in meteorological drought at the global scale”
- “Western North America was noted as a region where determining if observed recent droughts were unusual compared to natural variability was particularly difficult.”
- Right.
- It was an interesting experience.
- I’m still here.
Atlantic Council Explains Why We Need to Be Propagandized for Our Own Good
By Caitlin JOHNSTONE | Rogue Journalist | May 4, 2018
I sometimes try to get establishment loyalists to explain to me exactly why we’re all meant to be terrified of this “Russian propaganda” thing they keep carrying on about. What is the threat, specifically? That it makes the public less willing to go to war with Russia and its allies? That it makes us less trusting of lying, torturing, coup-staging intelligence agencies? Does accidentally catching a glimpse of that green RT logo turn you to stone like Medusa, or melt your face like in Raiders of the Lost Ark ?
“Well, it makes us lose trust in our institutions,” is the most common reply.
Okay. So? Where’s the threat there? We know for a fact that we’ve been lied to by those institutions. Iraq isn’t just something we imagined. We should be skeptical of claims made by western governments, intelligence agencies and mass media. How specifically is that skepticism dangerous?
Trying to get answers to such questions from rank-and-file empire loyalists is like pulling teeth, and they are equally lacking in the mass media who are constantly sounding the alarm about Russian propaganda. All I see are stories about Russia funding environmentalists (the horror!), giving a voice to civil rights activists (oh noes!), and retweeting articles supportive of Jeremy Corbyn (think of the children!). At its very most dramatic, this horrifying, dangerous epidemic of Russian propaganda is telling westerners to be skeptical of what they’re being told about the Skripal poisoning and the alleged Douma gas attack, both of which do happen to have some very significant causes for skepticism.
When you try to get down to the brass tacks of the actual argument being made and demand specific details about the specific threats we’re meant to be worried about, there aren’t any to be found. Nobody’s been able to tell me what specifically is so dangerous about westerners being exposed to the Russian side of international debates, or of Russians giving a platform to one or both sides of an American domestic debate. Even if every single one of the allegations about Russian bots and disinformation are true (and they aren’t), where is the actual clear and present danger? No one can say.
No one, that is, except the Atlantic Council.
In an absolutely jaw-dropping article that you should definitely read in its entirety, Elizabeth Braw took it upon herself to finally answer the question of why Russian propaganda is so dangerous, using the following hypothetical scenario:
What if Russia suddenly announced that its Baltic Fleet had dispatched an armada towards Britain? Would most people greet the news with steely resolve in the knowledge that their governments would know what to do, or would constant Kremlin-influenced reports about the incompetence of British institutions make them conclude that any resistance was pointless?
I mean, wow. Wow! Just wow. Where to even begin with this?
Before I continue, I should note that Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, the shady NATO-aligned think tank with ties to powerful oligarchs whose name comes up when you look into many of the mainstream anti-Russia narratives, from the DNC hack to the discredited war propaganda firm Bellingcat to Russian trolls to the notorious PropOrNot blacklist publicized by the Washington Post. Her article, published by Defense One, is titled “We Need a NATO for Infowar”, and it argues that westerners need to be propagandized by an alliance of western governments for our own good.
Back to the aforementioned excerpt. Braw claims that if Russian propaganda isn’t shut down or counteracted, Russia could send a fleet of war ships to attack Britain, and the British people would… react unenthusiastically? Wouldn’t cheer loudly enough as the British Navy fought the Russians? Would have a defeatist emotional demeanor? What exactly is the argument here?
That’s seriously her only attempt to directly address the question of where the actual danger is. Even in the most cartoonishly dramatic hypothetical scenario this Atlantic Council member can possibly imagine, there’s still no tangible threat of any kind. Even if Russia was directly attacking the United Kingdom at home, and Russian propaganda had somehow magically dominated all British airwaves and been believed by the entire country, that still wouldn’t have any impact on the British military’s ability to fight a naval battle. There’s literally no extent to which you can inflate this “Russian propaganda” hysteria to turn it into a possible threat to actual people in real life.
It gets better. Check out this excerpt:
Such responses to disinformation are like swatting flies: time-consuming and ineffective. But not addressing disinformation is ineffective, too. “Western media still have this thing where they try to be completely balanced, so they’ll say, ‘the Russians say this, but on the other hand the Americans say this is not true,’ They end up giving a lie and the truth the same value,” noted Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia.
I just have so many questions. Like, how desperate does a writer have to be for an expert who can lend credibility to their argument that they have to reach all the way over to a former president of Estonia? And on what planet are these people living where Russian narratives are given the same weight as western narratives by western mainstream media? How can I get to this fantastical parallel dimension where western media “try to be completely balanced” and give equal coverage to all perspectives?
Braw argues that, because Russian propaganda is so dangerous (what with the threat of British people having insufficient emotional exuberance during a possible naval battle and all), what is required is a “NATO of infowar”, an alliance of western state media that is tasked with combatting Russian counter-narratives. Because, in the strange Dungeons & Dragons fantasy fairy world in which Braw penned her article, this isn’t already happening.
And of course, here in the real world, it is already happening. As I wrote recently, mainstream media outlets have been going out of their minds churning out attack editorials on anyone who questions the establishment narrative about what happened in Douma. A BBC reporter recently admonished a retired British naval officer for voicing skepticism of what we’re being told about Syria on the grounds that it might “muddy the waters” of the “information war” that is being fought against Russia. All day, every day, western mass media are pummeling the public with stories about how awful and scary Russians are and how everything they say is a lie.
This is because western mass media outlets are owned by western plutocrats, and those plutocrats have built their empires upon a status quo that they have a vested interest in preserving, often to the point where they will form alliances with defense and intelligence agencies to do so. They hire executives and editors who subscribe to a pro-establishment worldview, who in turn hire journalists who subscribe to a pro-establishment worldview, and in that way they ensure that all plutocrat-owned media outlets are advancing pro-plutocrat agendas.
The western empire is ruled by a loose transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies. That loose alliance is your real government, and that government has the largest state media network in the history of civilization. The mass media propaganda machine of the western empire makes RT look like your grandmother’s Facebook wall.
In that way, we are being propagandized constantly by the people who really rule us. All this panic about Russian propaganda doesn’t exist because our dear leaders have a problem with propaganda, it exists because they believe only they should be allowed to propagandize us.
And, unlike Russian propaganda, western establishment propaganda actually does pose a direct threat to us. By using mass media to manipulate the ways we think and vote, our true rulers can persuade us to consent to crushing austerity measures and political impotence while the oligarchs grow richer and medicine money is spent on bombs. When we should all be revolting against an oppressive Orwellian oligarchy, we are instead lulled to sleep by those same oligarchs and their hired talking heads lying to us about freedom and democracy.
Russian propaganda is not dangerous. Having access to other ways of looking at global geopolitics is not dangerous. What absolutely is dangerous is a vast empire concerning itself with the information and ideas that its citizenry have access to. Get your rapey, manipulative fingers out of our minds, please.
If our dear leaders are so worried about our losing faith in our institutions, they shouldn’t be concerning themselves with manipulating us into trusting them, they should be making those institutions more trustworthy.
Don’t manipulate better, be better. The fact that an influential think tank is now openly advocating the former over the latter should concern us all.
State Dept condemns journalist killings, except ones by Israeli soldiers
RT | May 4, 2018
Speaking on World Press Freedom Day, US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert preached freedom from oppression for all journalists – unless they are Palestinian and the oppressor is Israel.
Nauert started her Thursday briefing by praising the State Department press pool and urging accountability for the “apparent assassination” of a BBC journalist in Afghanistan on Monday (one of the nine that were killed in that attack). She then profusely condemned the many violations of journalists’ rights across the world. Among the perpetrators, she listed Myanmar, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malta, Mexico and, of course, China and Russia. All of them were chastised as oppressive governments that repress, detain or outright murder unwanted journalists.
Once Nauert was done with her opening speech (which included congratulating one of the journalists present on her promotion and praising another’s dress choice), she moved on to other topics – but was pulled back on track by the first reporter to ask a question:
“Would you also condemn the recent deaths of journalists, Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip?”
Nauert answered that too many journalists die across the world, and the State Department can’t mention them all.
She said that the US, of course, is “always saddened by the loss of life,” but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Israel has been defending itself from Palestinian protesters across the border in Gaza for a month now. Within that time, the defensive action, which includes live gunfire, has claimed 45 lives – two of them journalists’ – and caused 6,000 injuries, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) says the Gazans were rioting, throwing improvised explosives and trying to break through the border fence.
When pressured further, Nauert claimed no detailed knowledge of any journalists killed or injured by the IDF, and ultimately told the pool reporters to go ask the Israeli government.
Israel convicts Palestinian poet of incitement
Press TV – May 4, 2018
An Israeli court has convicted a renowned Arab poet of using her poems to provoke violence against the Tel Aviv regime’s military forces.
Dareen Tatour, who has been under extended house arrest since January 2016, was charged on Thursday in connection with three posts that she made on social media during a wave of attacks on Israeli soldiers which began in 2015.
In the indictment, Israeli prosecutors said they made the decision based on one specific poem — “Resist My People, Resist” — which was posted on Facebook, and three other posts that Tatour made, calling on Palestinian people to rise up to protect the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem al-Quds.
The poem includes such lines as, “I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution,’ Never lower my flags, Until I evict them from my land.”
She also wrote in the poem, “Resist the settler’s robbery, And follow the caravan of martyrs.” This is a reference to Israel’s illegal settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian lands.
The indictment further claimed that the poem’s “content, its exposure and the circumstances of its publication created a real possibility that acts of violence or terrorism will be committed.”
Following her indictment, Israeli newspapers quoted Tatour as saying, “My trial ripped off the masks.”
“The court said I am convicted of terrorism. If that’s my terrorism, I give the world a terrorism of love,” she added.
The case has drawn international attention after Israel initially arrested Tatour in 2015 and then put the 36-year-old poet under house arrest.
Describing her arrest as a violation of freedom of expression for a poet, more than 150 literary figures, including authors Alice Walker and Naomi Klein, have so far called for her immediate release.
Member of Israeli Parliament, Ahmad Tibi, who is with the Joint (Arab) List at the Knesset, also condemned the court’s verdict, saying Tatour has received the conviction only because she was Arab.
“Dareen Tatour was found guilty solely because she is an Arab,” he tweeted. “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, rabbis, and right-wing politicians continue to incite freely solely because they are Jewish.”
Living in an Orwellian Dystopia
By Gilad Atzmon | May 3, 2018
It is puzzling to witness the speed and ferocity with which Britain is deteriorating into an Orwellian nightmare.
The Evening Standard reported yesterday that “a London council worker has been suspended after being caught claiming Zionists ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis.”
Apparently Stan Keable was removed from his duties as an environmental enforcement officer for Hammersmith & Fulham Council after saying, “The Nazis were anti-Semitic. The problem I’ve got is the Zionist government at the time collaborated with them. They accepted the ideas that Jews are not acceptable here.”
Keable made the comments, shared in a clip on Twitter, at a pro-Corbyn demonstration outside the Parliament. I guess that in Britain 2018 you can lose your job simply for expressing an opinion.
It seems that some British Jews are disturbed by parts of their history. They try to suppress any speech about the Haavara Agreement. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party for mentioning that collaboration between Hitler and Zionism. And disturbingly, in the Labour Party’s discussion of Livingstone’s case the party general secretary, Iain McNicol, “made it clear in a letter to the former mayor that the case against him was not about the historical facts, but whether his conduct was ‘grossly detrimental’ to the party…” *
The Transfer (Haavara) Agreement between the Nazi regime and the Palestine Zionist leadership is an accepted historical fact. In his superb book, Final Solution, the British Jewish Historian David Cesarani examines the agreement and he quotes German Zionist voices that approved of the Nazi regime and even welcomed the Nuremberg Racial Laws because they pushed for segregation. But evidentiary truth is not a defence in Britain 2018. I guess this disregard for truth is just another symptom of our removal from the Athenian ethos.
Conservative MP for Chelsea & Fulham, Greg Hands, said: “I am shocked someone expressing hateful opinions could have a job meeting vulnerable tenants. The council leader should launch an inquiry into whether there are others of his ilk in the council.”
I can’t see a drop of hatefulness in Keable’s comment. But I would like to advise the conservative MP and other ignorant Tories that while the Haavara Agreement was signed as an attempt to save German Jews, the Conservative Government here in Britain did little for German Jews and other Jewish refugees.
Mike Katz, of the Jewish Labour Movement, said: “To try to twist the history of the Nazis to fit an anti-Zionist narrative is offensive.” It may be offensive but the Haavara Agreement and the collaboration between Zionist organisations and Nazi officials from 1933 till the end of the war are part of Jewish history and political terrorism will not wipe out that history.
When contacted by the Standard, Mr Keable said: “I am sorry for any offence I may have caused. But the Nazi regime and the Zionist Federation of Germany collaborated, through the Haavara agreement, in the emigration of some 60,000 Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.” He said he did not insinuate that Jews collaborated with the Nazis.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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