RUTHFULLY YOURS

Twenty days before the caliphate was created, Anne Patterson said “we can do much” to “contain and roll back the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”
WASHINGTON — One of the point people at the helm of the State Department’s strategy against the Islamic State and coalition-building effort is the U.S. ambassador reviled in Egypt for cozying with the Muslim Brotherhood during the summer 2013 Tamarod protests.

Both President Obama and Anne Patterson were lambasted by protesters as propping up the Muslim Brotherhood and sanctioning the Islamists’ abuses against the Egyptian people. As the U.S. envoy in Cairo, Patterson discouraged the epic protests against Islamist rule and reportedly tried to dissuade Coptic Christians from taking part.

Egyptian protesters were not shy about expressing their feelings of betrayal, hoisting banners that accused Obama of supporting terrorism in backing the Morsi government and holding photos of Patterson smiling and laughing at a meeting with Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie. “We know what you did last summer,” read one banner, while another said, “Anne Patterson, leave Egypt now and go to hell!!!”

“Wake up America, Obama backs up a fascist regime in Egypt,” said one banner, while another placed an international “no” symbol over Obama’s face and read, “Obama, you can’t fool your people and the world any more. You finance & back terrorism.”

Al-Ahram newspaper ran a piece accusing Patterson of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to smuggle fighters in from Gaza to “spread chaos” in the country.

“Your article’s claim that I personally am involved in a conspiracy to divide and destabilise Egypt is absolutely absurd and dangerous,” she wrote in a letter slamming the article [1] as “outrageous, fictitious, and thoroughly unprofessional.”

When she left the ambassador post at the end of August, Egyptians partied [2] outside the U.S. Embassy in a “good riddance” celebration.

Patterson was promoted to assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the end of last year.

Limiting First Amendment rights for Christians undercuts rights for everyone else.

In my lifetime I have been fortunate to see private associations within civil society promote astonishing social and political advancements in civil rights for African-Americans, women and gays. The voices of a like-minded minority, when allowed to associate and present a unified message, can be powerful. Yet we cannot pick and choose which groups have rights. Thus the current controversy surrounding evangelical Christian organizations on college campuses is a test of our commitment to liberal and constitutional ideals.

Earlier this month the California State University System “de-recognized” 23 campus chapters of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). This decision stems from a December 2011 chancellor’s executive order stating that “No campus shall recognize any . . . student organization unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students.”

The new policy has insidious implications. Any student may attend IVCF meetings or participate in its activities regardless of belief. But because IVCF asks its leaders to affirm their adherence to evangelical Christian doctrine—a “belief” requirement—California state-university administrators have deemed the group discriminatory. IVCF chapters will no longer have use of certain campus facilities and benefits available to other groups. This policy guts the free association right that was enshrined in the First Amendment precisely to protect minority or unpopular views.

It is obvious why IVCF would want to restrict leadership to true believers. It would be anomalous for a conventional religious group of any kind to open its top leadership to, say, atheists who would want to change the group’s beliefs and activities. The pope has to be Catholic, after all.

Yet this concept of associational rights is apparently foreign to college administrators, especially regarding religious students who hold out-of-favor views about marriage and abortion rights. As contentious as these issues are—especially within the ideological rigidity of the college campus—it is the constitutional right of students to hold unpopular beliefs and collectively espouse them.

The battle over the status of evangelical and other orthodox religious groups was long resolved in favor of the rights of such students to organize and enjoy equal access to colleges’—especially public colleges’—facilities. But this changed in 2010 when a narrowly divided Supreme Court decided Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of President Barack Obama’s proposal to arm and train Syrian rebels to combat the Islamic State group (ISIS). Combined with a lot of talk about creating an international coalition to fight this group of barbarians who mean business — and a lack of willingness to put American boots on the ground — this is part of Obama’s touted “leading from behind” Middle East policy.

Like every other move Obama has made since taking office, this one will fail to achieve its stated objective, and in the process strengthen one set of anti-Western forces or another.

Furthermore, even if U.S. and European troops did enter Syria, they would be hard pressed to distinguish friend from foe. This confusion certainly presents a problem when striking from the air. That’s the bad news.

The worse news is that ISIS is not only gaining huge swaths of territory (at this point larger than Great Britain), but has billions of dollars at its disposal. In addition, it runs a disciplined network inside and out of its territory in Iraq and Syria. It also employs Western methods to spread its message in a sophisticated way.

Take its latest video, released on Thursday. Called “Lend me Your Ears,” this clip shows British journalist John Cantlie (captured along with American reporter James Foley in Syria in November, 2012) making the case for ISIS and denouncing American-led military intervention in the Middle East.

Unlike the previous three pieces of YouTube “porn” produced by ISIS — the graphic beheadings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines by Jihadi John — this broadcast has a decidedly different flavor.

Here Cantlie is filmed in a professional studio. His captors are neither seen nor heard. And though he acknowledges that he is being held against his will, he claims that his words are his own.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he says, appearing like a newscaster, except for his attire, the same orange outfit worn by Foley, Sotloff and Haines. “You’re thinking, ‘He’s only doing this because he’s a prisoner. He’s got a gun at his head and he’s being forced to do this.’ Right? Well, it’s true. I am a prisoner, that I cannot deny. But seeing as I’ve been abandoned by my government and my fate now lies in the hands of the Islamic State, I have nothing to lose.”

Elizabeth Whelan didn’t invent the phrase “junk science,” but she dedicated her life to fighting its destructive effects. Since starting the American Council on Science and Health in 1978, Beth, who died at age 71 last week, worked tirelessly to help the public and policy makers understand the uses and abuse of scientific evidence.

We recall Beth visiting our offices shortly after she began ACSH to describe her plans. Our ears perked up when Beth said that one of the things she planned to take on was the Delaney Clause, a federal law that empowers the Food and Drug Administration to ban any chemical or additive that caused cancer in laboratory rats fed vast amounts of the substance.

The FDA’s outrageous interpretations of the Delaney Clause—most famously its attacks on the food sweetener saccharin—was one of our favorite fights. We might have guessed that this smart, focused and forceful woman would stay the course for some 35 years. Her formal training was in epidemiology, and she took the sensible view that if the federal government wanted to ban something, it ought to have credible evidence for doing so. In 2001 the FDA finally declared saccharin safe for consumption.

Essentially what Beth Whelan tried to do was distinguish between science and technology that helped society, such as genetically modified foods, and things that harmed society, such as smoking tobacco. In 1986 she published her most well-known book, “Toxic Terror: The Truth About the Cancer Scare.”

One of the first scientists Beth attracted to ACHS’s cause was Norman Borlaug, the geneticist who developed high-yield varieties of wheat that resisted disease. Beth’s purpose was to organize scientists to take a public position in defense of good science. By the time of her death, ACHS’s board of supporting scientists and experts numbered nearly 350.

Beth accepted corporate contributions to keep ACHS going, and her critics of course used this as a cudgel to suggest her views were tainted. Anyone who spent 10 minutes with Elizabeth Whelan knew there was one thing no one could buy: her integrity. She and the organization she founded have produced a legacy that will last.

She loathed The New York Times but would smile at this obituary. Beth was a remarkable, brilliant, witty and courageous woman who jousted tirelessly with junk science charlatans and spurious claims on nutrition. rsk

Elizabeth Whelan, Who Challenged Food Laws, Dies at 70
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Elizabeth Whelan, an epidemiologist who crusaded against what she called junk science by starting a national organization to question conventional wisdom on food, chemicals and the environment, died on Sept. 11 in Manahawkin, N.J. She was 70.

The cause was complications of sepsis, her husband, Stephen T. Whelan, said.

Dr. Whelan (pronounced WHEEL-an) believed that much research concerning complicated health questions lacked proper scientific underpinning, and in 1978 she started her organization, the American Council on Science and Health, to remedy this perceived deficiency.

One of the first scientists to join the initiative was Norman E. Borlaug, the biologist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to the vast increase in global grain yields known as the green revolution.

Dr. Whelan had earlier collaborated with Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, who founded the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, on the 1975 book “Panic in the Pantry: Food Facts, Fads and Fallacies,” which asserted that many federal food regulations were absurd.

The council’s main contention was that some chemicals and products were regulated without proof that they were harmful. Dr. Whelan thus often found herself on the side of industry, which partly financed her efforts, against consumer and environmental groups and regulatory agencies.

At first, the council refused corporate financing, though it accepted money from private foundations. But “in avoiding corporate donations, we were limiting A.C.S.H.’s fund-raising potential to no avail,” Dr. Whelan wrote in a commentary for the organization’s 25th anniversary in 2003.

In the spring of 1918, the influenza that would become pandemic was first detected. It was initially known as “three-day-fever.” Its effects were such that it caused few deaths. Nobody paid it much heed. That fall, however, it reappeared in a more deadly form, and began to rapidly spread. Because of the War and the subsequent troop demobilization in late 1918 and 1919, a concentration of soldiers in camps, and in troop ships and trains returning to their homes abetted the disease’s migration around the world. By the end of 1919, somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people were dead of influenza, more than had been killed in four years of fighting. It has been estimated that over 20% of the U.S. population (106 million in 1920) had contracted the flu, with 675,000 dying. While those numbers suggest the death rate was only 3.5%, the 675,000 dead were almost six times the number of Americans killed in the War.

The outbreak of the Ebola virus was first seen in Guinea in December 2013. It has since spread to at least four other West African countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, and recently Ebola been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The three hardest hit countries are among the smallest. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have a combined population of 22 million, But Nigeria has a population of 173 million and 68 million people live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Significantly, the latter two countries are not contiguous to the others.

A data sheet from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta provides some key facts:

* Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans.

* EVD outbreaks have a case fatality rate of up to 90%.

* The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.

* Fruit bats are considered to be the natural host of the Ebola virus.

* Severely ill patients require intensive supportive care. No licensed specific treatment or vaccine is available for use in people or animals.

Depending on the programs you watch on television – or the media avenue of your choice, it is hard not to have seen the commercials produced by the National Rifle Association (NRA). They are well crafted and thought provoking. In fact, if they didn’t include the final branding of the NRA in their closes, even the liberal Democrats amongst us would be hard pressed to find anything to object about in their messages. Without a doubt, the NRA knows how to communicate to the average American. So, why hasn’t the Republican National Committee (RNC) learned from the NRA’s effort?

One of the most paralyzing deficiencies of the Republican brand is the fact – the fact – that they couldn’t brand their way out a wet paper bag. Never mind their other short-comings – the combating of the Progressives’ individual targeting of voters with another old, crusty get-out-the-vote effort, or insisting on attacking a core constituency of the GOP in the TEA Party, or failing to reach out effectively to the Libertarians – messaging has, and most likely always will be, the GOP’s Achilles heel. When compared to the Progressive messaging apparatus, or the Democrat spin machine, the RNC comes in a distant fourth, behind the Progressives and Democrats, and trailing the public awareness campaign for the retirement home for blind squirrels. I won’t even get into how they fair against the Islamic State.

But the NRA has struck a chord. They have crafted thirteen segments, each addressing an issue that has become problematic in a nation that is supposed to sanctify opportunity, individualism, justice and liberty. In each, they state facts and make an argument, something inside-the-beltway 30-something “strategists” obviously ignored during “spin class” when they navigated their ways through “establishment Republican school.”

When the American Studies Association and the professional organizations of other ethnic studies associations moved recently to boycottIsraeli academic organizations for various political reasons, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization of academics studying and teaching about the Middle East from its ancient empires to the present day, was silent–never mind that such a boycott would go to the heart of a field in which academic discourse and debate about the Middle East is crucial.

But now that various politicians—Maryland State Senator Joan Carter Conway, Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver, and Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinski in the U.S. House of Representatives—have introduced a bill to prevent public money from funding academic participation in organizations participating in the boycott, MESA is crying foul.

Here are letters that MESA President Nathan Brown sent to the politicians mentioned above. In each case, he wrote, “It is clear to us that whatever one’s opinion of the campaign to boycott Israeli academic institutions, the principles of academic freedom protect the right of faculty and students to speak and act for, as well as against, such boycotts.”

What arrogance. Public money dedicated to education isn’t meant to be a slush fund for professors’ pet political causes. The American Studies Association is supposed to be about American studies. If it evolves from its academic purpose to focus more on academic grandstanding than on exchange of knowledge, then professors should not be able to use taxpayer funds for a trip to Los Angeles. Likewise, if the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association isn’t going to focus on Native American and indigenous studies, then why should any professor operating out of the public dole attend its annual shindig in Austin? They can pay out of pocket if it’s that important to them, just as I pay out of pocket with my own money when I make a charitable contribution or should I wish to make a political donation. The same holds true for the Association of Asian American Studies, which will hold its next conference in San Francisco.

If Nathan Brown and MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom are serious about academic freedom and scholarly discourse, then perhaps they might consider that they should not be in the business of political boycotts to begin with, regardless of target.

MESA (MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION) SEEMS TO FALL UNDER THE RADAR OF SERIOUS INVESTIGATION. IN ORDER TO TEACH MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES PROFESSORS MUST BELONG TO MESA WHICH TOWS THE HARSHLY ANTI-ISRAEL LINE OF EDWARD SAID/RASHID KHALID AND IS FUNDED BY ARAB NATIONS…..RSK

Yesterday ten organizations, including the Middle East Forum, announced an effort to educate Congressional leaders and policy makers on the need to reform federally-funded Title VI Middle East studies centers, which have for years produced biased, anti-American and anti-Israel material.

Predictably, Amy W. Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), responded not by countering the signatories’ charges, but by attacking their character and motives.

Newhall claimed “MESA resolutely opposes all forms of hate speech and discrimination, including anti-Semitism.” In fact, “It supports prompt and forceful action in response to anti-Semitic incidents on college and university campuses.”

Were this true, MESA would have condemned flagrantly anti-Semitic statements by Joseph Massad and Hamid Dabashi of Columbia, Ali Mazrui of SUNY Binghamton, As’ad AbuKhalil of Cal State Stanislaus, and countless others. Yet it consistently defends such speech rather than condemning it.

She next offered this bit of sophistry:

MESA is concerned that some of the reports issued by partisan political groups based outside academia may actually weaken efforts to combat anti-Semitism by portraying all criticism of Israeli policies as a form of anti-Semitism or as “anti-Israel.”

A touching sentiment disproved by MESA’s silence in the face of genuine anti-Semitism, as noted above. Plus, the participating organizations never suggest that criticism of Israeli policies is anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.

Newhall proffers the intellectually lazy claim that:

Their real goal seems to be to shut down open discussion of issues of public concern by demonizing academic and other critics of Israel, Zionism, and U.S. policy in the Middle East, in many cases by tarring them with the brush of anti-Semitism.

Joel Zinberg is associate clinical professor of surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City

A medical journal’s one-sided view on the conflict between Israel and Palestine

It has become commonplace for academics and entertainers, especially in Europe, to prove their humanitarian bona fides by condemning Israel, often in the most outrageous, defamatory ways possible. Now, proponents of these tactics have infiltrated the world of objective scientific journals.

The Lancet is a widely read weekly British medical journal. This summer, it published a rambling, one-sided denunciation of “Israeli aggression” in Gaza. Under the headline “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” 24 medical doctors, researchers, and professors accused Israel of conducting a “massacre” and of “clearly directing fire to target whole families.” The letter ignited a firestorm. Some lauded the journal and supported the political sentiments of its authors. Others attacked The Lancet for publishing an inaccurate diatribe. They wondered why a well-known medical journal would publish a political statement that seemed to have no scientific or medical connection.

The Lancet doubled down in an editorial entitled “Gaza: an urgent call to protect civilian life and health.” The editors acknowledged that publishing the letter “has led to a debate about the appropriateness of a medical journal giving space to opinions about an issue that lies at the intersection between health and politics.” The Lancet justified the publication of the open letter because “The role of the doctor is to protect, serve, and speak up for life. That, too, is the role of a medical journal. . . . Our responsibility is to promote an open and diverse discussion about the effects of this war on civilian health.”

In fact, The Lancet has a history of publishing one-sided criticisms of Israel. A March 2013 editorial was titled “Israeli doctors accused of collusion in torture.” A 2006 Lancet article by reporter Sharmila Devi repeated the unverified claims of a Palestinian hospital administrator who accused Israel of using “chemical and phosphorous weapons.” Devi also wrote that Israel “controls all land borders” around Gaza, which must come as news to Egypt. Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote a vitriolic letter to The Guardian newspaper on August 24, 2010, labeling Israel an occupier, denying any anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian schools, and accusing Israel of “indiscriminate bombing of residential communities.”

But the journal reached a new low with its recent open letter and follow-up editorial, which abandoned all pretense of objectivity and scientific inquiry. The Lancet is a peer-reviewed journal that checks its publications for accuracy. Yet the editors allowed the open-letter authors to claim in the disclosure section that they have “no competing interests” when they are well-known, long-term critics of Israel and members of pro-Palestinian organizations. They published the letter despite its baseless claims that Israel deliberately targets civilians and its assertion that Israel blockaded building materials “so that schools, homes, and institutions cannot be properly rebuilt.” In reality, Israel once allowed building materials to be imported into Gaza, but clamped down once it became clear that Hamas was using these materials to build terror tunnels and ammunition bunkers. Israel places its ground troops at risk rather than resort to indiscriminate bombing so as to limit civilian casualties.