Tuesday, January 26, 2010

SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, or The "Islamization" of Science

I recently discussed this issue here, but Phyllis Chesler has a rather terrifying example of how science can be used to further either a political agenda or an ideology (or both):
Lancet Study Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel
Does Not Mention Honor Killings, Forced Veiling, Arranged Marriages, etc.

It’s official. Britain’s premier medical journal Lancet has been completely Palestinianized. It no longer bears any relationship to the first-rate scientific journal it once was. Perhaps Lancet is no longer a standard-bearer but has become a follower in the global movement in which standards have plunged, biases have soared, and Big Lies now pass for top-of-the-line academic, scientific work.

The post-colonial academy is itself thoroughly colonized by the false and dangerous ideas of Edward Said (please read my dear friend Ibn Warraq’s most excellent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism). However, I once believed that Said’s paranoid perspective had primarily infected and indoctrinated only the social sciences, humanities, and Middle East Studies. We now see his malign influence at work in a new article, just out today, by professors who work at the Department of Medicine at Harvard University; the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at Minnesota University’s School of Public Health; The Boston University School of Medicine; the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Their study is titled: “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study.” And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation”— and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are “directly” as opposed to “indirectly” exposed to political violence.

I believe that Arab and Muslim men, including Palestinian men, are indeed violent towards Arab and Muslim women. I also believe that war-related stress, including poverty, usually increases “intimate partner violence,” aka male domestic violence. But beyond that, how does one evaluate this study?

First, let’s follow the money. This study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority as well as by the Core Funding Group at the University of Minnesota.


It's clear from these two examples--The American Journal of Public Health (from the first link)and Lancet--that PC has dumped its smoldering rot intofrom the social sciences and seriously infected health sciences and scientists. How long will it be before it warps the minds of physicists and astronomers? How long before we are informed by some new "study" that the laws of physics are not to blame for planetary movement through the cosmos, but it is the ultra-evil Israelis (or those demonic White Male/Conservative/Republicans/businessmen--pick your poison) who have altered the time-space continuum and put the universe at risk?

Of course, that is already a favorite Hollywood theme...and soon the "Islamization" of science will be showing at a university or college near you!

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