Snickersnee: Anti-Semitism

Dangerous Myths About Radiation, Diet and Health

by Lorna Salzman

Most of what we read on the internet about health is dubious, speculative and based on anecdotal evidence, not clinical studies. Yet how does one persuade those who distrust government and traditional medicine to consult credible scientific and medical research bodies? A first step is to check out the sources given by an author; often an author will simply use his own studies as sources for his article. Rely on peer reviewed journals. Check the author's background, university and technical degrees and institutional affiliations to make sure these are not inventions of the author, which they often are.

Since the Fukushima nuclear accident, all kinds of foods and herbs are being promoted as protection against radiation, but these foods are completely useless with regard to whole-body radiation and ingestion of fission products like iodine. Gamma is whole body and once you have gotten the exposure, nothing can be done. Your cells have absorbed the gamma rays, period. If they hit the DNA, there could be adverse consequences. If they miss the DNA and go right through the cell, you are lucky. This is usually the case with medical Xrays. Repeated or prolong exposure increases the risk proportionately; there is no dose that doesn't produce some effects in the population, statistically. You just don't know who will be affected or when. There is evidence that DNA can repair itself (obviously our ancestral cells evolved with ultra violet rays and other kinds of radiation) but this probably depends on lots of other factors.

Beta emitters like cesium 137 and strontium 90 are dangerous due to their half life of about 30 years and their deposition on soil and crops that are consumed by animals and humans, especially strontium 90 in milk, which then goes to the bones and teeth. Cesium goes into muscles and organs.

Alpha emitters: plutonium. Alpha particles cannot penetrate intact skin or tissues. That's why you can hold solid plutonium in your hand (unless you have skin cuts). But if plutonium is in the form of fine particles and there is an explosion (as with meltdowns of nuclear fuel or spent fuel, nuclear weapons or bombs), the particles go into the atmosphere and can be inhaled into your lungs or gonads. And that's where they stay, forever, irradiating the tissue around them. This is probably happening now with the mixed oxide of uranium and plutonium fuel from one of the Japanese reactors. And when the particles fall on the ground they remain there and can be picked up in dust or soil which can then be disturbed and redistributed.

There is absolutely no clinical evidence showing that radioactive particles can be flushed from the body. There is a dangerous treatment called chelation, which involves injecting some serious chemicals into the body with the hope that they will bind with radioactive particles. Whether or how much this has succeeded I don't know; you need to consult the medical literature. In any case it is a desperate measure with its own risks.

If there truly were such a thing as detoxifying radioactivity, it would already be in use widely and regularly. The fact is that the only thing that can "de-toxify" radioactivity is TIME: the radioactive elements decay according to their half life. Iodine 131 has an 8 day half-life so it gives off intense radiation as soon as it is produced. That is why it is of immediate concern in an accident. For example, if a finite amount of iodine is emitted in an accident, and the emission stops within a day, then in 8 days, half of it will have decayed. In 8 more days, half of that remainder will decay. In 8 more days, half of that remainder will decay, and so forth.

Generally for nuclear waste storage and "isolation", they aim for ten to twenty half lives for any given element. This includes plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,400 years. So it has to be isolated from the biosphere for at least 240,000 years, or 480,000 years. There are lots of authoritative sources available on radiation doses and exposure. Take the time to do the research. Or consult Dr. John Gofman's book, Radiation and Health.

One other point on another topic. In this country the NRC and others have responded to concerns about reactors in regions subject to earthquakes or tsunamis. However, the real risk, which is common to all reactors, is a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). And there are many possible events besides earthquakes that could initiate a LOCA such as sabotage or terrorism, or even routine flooding and hurricanes which we are now experiencing.

And by the way, the NRC chair stated that existing operating reactors were designed to withstand earthquakes of a magnitude "usual" for the region in which they are located. But so were the Japanese reactors. Design-basis earthquakes are not the only kind possible; Japan just discovered this. The impact of the recent earthquake there subjected the reactors to stresses 1.5 times what the reactor was designed to cope with. It is of course only a question of money: how much do utilities want to spend for those extra safety features? As little as possible.

SNICKERSNEE

The Many Disguises of Anti-Semitism

by Lorna Salzman

An article of faith among critics of Israel is that such criticism in no way is anti-Semitic, that is, directed against Jews as opposed to Israelis. It is more than an article of faith, however. It can and does provide cover for anti-Semitism. While subtly appealing to the public appeal of freedom of speech and dissent, it simultaneously ignores the very real examples that undermine this claim. It is useful to recall what Natan Sharansky says are such signs: demonization, double standard and delegitimization. All of these abound in virtually all criticism of Israel.

The grotesque exaggeration of Israeli treatment of Palestinians as "apartheid" is classic demonization. Descriptions of Israel mistreatment of Palestinians that do not contain this word or do not make comparisons to Nazism are almost nonexistent. Israel has many misguided policies, including its stubborn expansion of settlements and development in Arab sections of Jerusalem, its concessions and privileges to the often violent ultra-orthodox Jews, and it may be making life harder for Gazans than Hamas itself is doing, but they are not slaughtering Palestinians in cold blood, unlike the situation in other countries in Africa and the middle east. They have a free press and freedom of speech and an admirable legal system whose like is nonexistent elsewhere the middle east.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians and their supporters in this country continue to use demonizing language, thus inflating the Israel-Palestine conflict to a size exceeding that of far worse conflicts and genocides elsewhere. Legitimate charges by human rights groups against Israel that are free from vilification are almost nonexistent. When the enemies of Israel "cry wolf" and use language of hyperbole and vituperation, it is hard to identify legitimate grievances or take them seriously.

The double standard used to judge Israel is unprecedented in modern times. Were Israel not a Jewish state, the world would probably ignore its conflict with the Palestinians. On the map of world conflict, it is a tiny blip. The really huge blips involving state-sponsored genocide, ethnic wars, assassinations and the rape, pillaging and axe murders of women and children that are still occurring in Africa and elsewhere (such as Haiti) get almost no attention. Except for Darfur where a coalition of Jews, blacks and Christians was formed to confront the murder by Muslims of animists and other minorities in the south of Sudan, the world has kept its eyes closed to the slaughter of at least three million people in Darfur alone, plus millions more in Congo, Rwanda and their neighbors. Bluntly: the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis (always in self defense ) probably numbers in the hundreds compared to the millions of victims in Africa at the hands of their own governments. Yet it is this conflict that monopolizes world attention.

The enthusiasm of the left for radical Islam and terrorists is unceasing and makes leftist accusations against Israeli suspect even when they may have substance. Impartial and independent judgments against Israeli treatment of Palestinians are almost impossible to find. It is puzzling to see American leftists aligning themselves with movements whose historic enmity towards the left is well documented, while ignoring the disdain of Gazans and Arabs for women's rights and civil liberties. Much of this arises from the long-standing hatred for the US, fueled by Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, and spearheaded by groups like ANSWER (an ally of north Korea), the Revolutionary Communist Party and Workers' World Party (sponsors of the "World Can't Wait" campaign), and Clark's National Action Center, to mention only a few.

A major contributor to global anti-Semitism was the frenzied gathering in Durban, South Africa in 2001, known as the World Social Forum, and in particular the separate NGO forum and statement produced by its eight thousand participants. Despite attempts at the main conference to address racism in a global context, somehow the topic at hand always ended up as Israel and "Zionism" (code word for Jews) and their purported racism and apartheid. Trans-Atlantic slavery was addressed but mysteriously the enslavement of black Africans by Muslims from the Arab world was not mentioned.. As a result, the final documents were not signed by many western countries or, to their credit, by the major human rights organizations, although some of their subsequent actions on Israel were deplorable, such as the Human Rights watch report on the Israel-Gaza war, which had no more credibility than the infamous, now-discredited Goldstone report.

Onto this list of the neo-fascist left are now added many "useful idiots": naive American peace groups wrapping themselves in Hamas scarves and identifiable by the use of the term "peace and justice" somewhere in their name. Beyond their anti-Americanism, though, they see an opportunity to vilify and demonize Israel, the Jewish state, and by implication all Jews. Many closet anti-Semites are now able, through these groups and movements, to hang their hat on these campaigns without being identified as anti-Semites.

Delegitimization involves the major falsification of history, of Israeli history and territory and the identity of those who call themselves Palestinians. No such ethnic group ever existed before today. Jews were there two thousand years ago and so were scattered Arab tribes with no cohesion or national identity. The creation of Palestine as a Jewish state has been turned on its head by those making unprovable claims about priority ownership of lands. While it may seem absurd to base territorial claims on three thousand-year history, the fact is that present day Palestinians, being of many origins, did not exist as an ethnic group or even a political one until the anti-Israel campaign started to heat up in recent times. More absurd is their demand for the "right of return" for all those who were forced out of Israeli territory during the various wars that began in 1967. At that time perhaps 700,000 Arabs left; today their descendants number over five million. There is no chance whatsoever that Israel or any of its neighbors would allow them back. Indeed, none of Israel's neighbors have offered to take them in.

The double standard can be easily verified by comparing the number of anti-Israel resolutions introduced into the UN and those introduced against the real criminals in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. The former outnumber the latter by a factor of ten. The UN and the media are still ranting over the Gazan war but you will hear no mention of the atrocities being committed right now in Congo nor of those that were committed in Rwanda when the cowardly UN refused to arm its "peacekeepers" to allow them to protect the people. Here is a comment on this for the UN General Assembly: released by Wikileaks:

Sunday, February 6, 2011

DEMARCHE DELIVERED: ANTI-ISRAEL RESOLUTIONS AT UNGA

Reference ID 08BRASILIA1538

Created 2008-11-28 16:04

Released 2011-02-06

Classification CONFIDENTIAL

Origin Embassy Brasilia

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RR RUEHRG

DE RUEHBR #1538 3331618

ZNY CCCCC ZZH

R 281618Z NOV 08

FM AMEMBASSY BRASILIA

TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 3001

INFO RUEHRG/AMCONSUL RECIFE 8759

RUEHRI/AMCONSUL RIO DE JANEIRO 6936

RUEHSO/AMCONSUL SAO PAULO 3132

RUCNDT/USMISSION USUN NEW YORK 0281

C O N F I D E N T I A L BRASILIA 001538

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR IO/UNP ANDREW MORRISON

E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/26/2018

TAGS: PREL UNGA IS PA LE SY BR

SUBJECT: DEMARCHE DELIVERED: ANTI-ISRAEL RESOLUTIONS AT

UNGA

REF: STATE 123081

Classified By: Political Counselor Stephen Liston for REASONS 1.4 B AND D.

¶1. (C) On Tuesday, November 25, poloff delivered reftel demarche to Secretario Ricardo Rizzo from the United Nations Division of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations. Rizzo sincerely thanked poloff for the detailed information breaking down the number of anti-Israeli resolutions compared to other countries and added that, although he was aware that there was a disproportionate level of anti-Israeli discourse at the U.N., he never realized its extent until looking at the figures. Furthermore, he noted that he was unaware of the continuing existence of the three U.N. bodies charged with protecting Palestinian rights or monitoring Israeli practices and candidly admitted that it showed a "lack of maturity" in the international system that would have to be overcome in order to achieve progress towards peace in the region. He noted, however, that he could only take the points presented under advisement for the moment and that he would have to consult with the regional desks involved with the issue in order to provide a reaction to the demarche points. Post will monitor and report any further reaction.

Between 1948 and 1991, the UN Security Council passed 175 resolutions regarding the middle east. Of these 97 were anti-Israel; 4 were anti-Arab states.

The UN General Assembly passed 322 resolutions against Israel and none against Arab states.Why is Israel the main target of anger and righteousness rather than the tyrannical regimes in Africa? Or Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Burma or Libya? Because Israel is comprised of Jews. The singular attention to Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians, depicted in leftist propaganda ad nauseum, is never counterbalanced by attention to Hamas atrocities against those considered Israeli sympathizers or collaborators, the sharia oppression of women, the absence of a secular civil legal system and a free press. Hamas recently arrested peaceful Palestinian demonstrators calling for a unified governance of Gaza and the West Bank and journalists who covered the demonstration. The arrests got little attention in the American press.

Simultaneously, the unprovoked firing of missiles by Hamas against Israeli civilians and settlements, the use of Palestinians as human shields, and the deliberate use of homes, hospitals, schools and public buildings for Hamas weapons storage, go unacknowledged even by human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, as well as the infamous and now disgraced Goldstone report (parts of which have now been retracted by Goldstone). Such a wildly unbalanced response could only be fueled by those with a longstanding animus and bias. But there are other unmistakeable signs: the attack on "Zionism" by NYC councilman Charles Barron, beneficiary of a trip to Gaza and Hamas whom he praised; the banning by South African bishop Desmond Tutu of attorney Alan Dershowitz from speaking at any South African university and three similar bans imposed in Norway; Spanish polls showing 60% of its citizens distrust Jews even though most of them have never met one (20% of Spaniards have Jewish ancestors who converted to Catholicism to save themselves in the middle ages; these can be distinguished because they changed their name and took their profession or city as their name -----including the name Zapatero, the name of Spain's president, a vehement critic of Israel, which means shoemaker). Those who shout "Zionism is racism" mean Jews. No other answer is possible, logical or indicated.

Snickersnee: Dangers Myths

Dangerous Myths About Radiation, Diet and Health

by Lorna Salzman

Most of what we read on the internet about health is dubious, speculative and based on anecdotal evidence, not clinical studies. Yet how does one persuade those who distrust government and traditional medicine to consult credible scientific and medical research bodies? A first step is to check out the sources given by an author; often an author will simply use his own studies as sources for his article. Rely on peer reviewed journals. Check the author's background, university and technical degrees and institutional affiliations to make sure these are not inventions of the author, which they often are.

Since the Fukushima nuclear accident, all kinds of foods and herbs are being promoted as protection against radiation, but these foods are completely useless with regard to whole-body radiation and ingestion of fission products like iodine. Gamma is whole body and once you have gotten the exposure, nothing can be done. Your cells have absorbed the gamma rays, period. If they hit the DNA, there could be adverse consequences. If they miss the DNA and go right through the cell, you are lucky. This is usually the case with medical Xrays. Repeated or prolong exposure increases the risk proportionately; there is no dose that doesn't produce some effects in the population, statistically. You just don't know who will be affected or when. There is evidence that DNA can repair itself (obviously our ancestral cells evolved with ultra violet rays and other kinds of radiation) but this probably depends on lots of other factors.

Beta emitters like cesium 137 and strontium 90 are dangerous due to their half life of about 30 years and their deposition on soil and crops that are consumed by animals and humans, especially strontium 90 in milk, which then goes to the bones and teeth. Cesium goes into muscles and organs.

Alpha emitters: plutonium. Alpha particles cannot penetrate intact skin or tissues. That's why you can hold solid plutonium in your hand (unless you have skin cuts). But if plutonium is in the form of fine particles and there is an explosion (as with meltdowns of nuclear fuel or spent fuel, nuclear weapons or bombs), the particles go into the atmosphere and can be inhaled into your lungs or gonads. And that's where they stay, forever, irradiating the tissue around them. This is probably happening now with the mixed oxide of uranium and plutonium fuel from one of the Japanese reactors. And when the particles fall on the ground they remain there and can be picked up in dust or soil which can then be disturbed and redistributed.

There is absolutely no clinical evidence showing that radioactive particles can be flushed from the body. There is a dangerous treatment called chelation, which involves injecting some serious chemicals into the body with the hope that they will bind with radioactive particles. Whether or how much this has succeeded I don't know; you need to consult the medical literature. In any case it is a desperate measure with its own risks.

If there truly were such a thing as detoxifying radioactivity, it would already be in use widely and regularly. The fact is that the only thing that can "de-toxify" radioactivity is TIME: the radioactive elements decay according to their half life. Iodine 131 has an 8 day half life so it gives off intense radiation as soon as it is produced. That is why it is of immediate concern in an accident. For example, if a finite amount of iodine is emitted in an accident, and the emission stops within a day, then in 8 days, half of it will have decayed. In 8 more days, half of that remainder will decay. In 8 more days, half of that remainder will decay, and so forth. Generally for nuclear waste storage and "isolation", they aim for ten to twenty half lives for any given element. This includes plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,400 years. So it has to be isolated from the biosphere for at least 240,000 years, or 480,000 years. There are lots of authoritative sources available on radiation doses and exposure. Take the time to do the research. Or consult Dr. John Gofman's book, Radiation and Health.

One other point on another topic. In this country the NRC and others have responded to concerns about reactors in regions subject to earthquakes or tsunamis. However, the real risk, which is common to all reactors, is a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). And there are many possible events besides earthquakes that could initiate a LOCA such as sabotage or terrorism, or even routine flooding and hurricanes which we are now experiencing.

And by the way, the NRC chair stated that existing operating reactors were designed to withstand earthquakes of a magnitude "usual" for the region in which they are located. But so were the Japanese reactors. Design-basis earthquakes are not the only kind possible; Japan just discovered this. The impact of the recent earthquake there subjected the reactors to stresses 1.5 times what the reactor was designed to cope with. It is of course only a question of money: how much do utilities want to spend for those extra safety features? As little as possible.

Snickersnee: Muslim Pseudo-Science

Is Muslim PseudoScience Taught at GWU?

by Lorna Salzman

Prof. Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University was chosen a year or two ago to lead a Muslim delegation to the Pope. This was a bit of unusual irony: the Catholic Church has accepted the fact of evolution but Nasr and the Muslims do not.

As an environmentalist and writer on ecology and evolution, I received an email regarding Islam and science, and was prompted to do further research. I was appalled at the abysmally distorted views on science and evolution of Prof. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who teaches at GWU. I wonder if this is what his students are being taught, and what GWU science teachers would think of this.

Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies. Last year I went to the web and printed out an article published in the journal Islam & Science, Winter 2006, as transcribed from an interview with him recorded in Canada in 2006. The Turkish scientist Edis (see Salon URL at end) does not fully convey the laughable distortions and ignorance revealed by Nasr in his article, most of which is devoted to (purportedly) refuting Darwin and evolution. Some of Nasr's statements follow here:

"I reject the ordinary understanding of the Darwinian theory of evolution even on scientific grounds...The theory of evolution is the peg of the tent of modernism. And if it were to fall down, the whole tent would fall on the top of the head of modernism.And therefore it is kept as an ideology and not as a scientific theory that has been proven".

The scientists' use of the word theory is not the same as the layman's. The layman thinks the word is synonymous with idea or conjecture or hypothesis; for scientists, a theory is a demonstrably workable formula which is used as the basis for research. Darwinian theory is considered a fact in science, while the means by which evolution proceeds, natural selection, is an hypothesis, even though it has been actually demonstrated). Nasr's statement reveals more about his ideology than about Darwin, an ideology that rejects materialism and scientific inquiry in their totality.

"God is both Life and the Giver of Life, and that for me is...true without being unscientific. God is also the source of all existence, whether alive or not alive...no other power in the universe can bestow life except the Source of Life".

"If we migrate to Zimbabwe, our skin grows darker; if we go to Sweden, it would grow a bit lighter".

Nasr here reveals himself as an adherent to the wholly discredited Lamarckian theory, which tainted Soviet science for so many years under Stalin, namely that acquired traits are passed on to our descendants. It is truly awesome to see remnants of Lamarck popping up today.

"How could something greater come out of something lesser?...how could the greatest works of literature, like Dante or Shakespeare, come out of a bowl of soup of molecules? "

The same way, one might conclude, that Nasr's statements come out of the "stone soup" of his brain's molecules. The same way that single digit numbers, if multiplied, result in "something greater". The same way that a single seed, if planted, can produce a whole crop of apples. The same way that a single fertilized human egg can grow into a many-celled human being.

"..the scientific worldview separates what it studies of the world of nature from all that is Divine and then considers this truncated reality to be the only reality...for the theologian or the man of religion or the philosopher of religion, there is no way that biology can destroy his view of Divine causality...No theologian can deny that God said, let there be light and there was light, that He created birds, the whole phyla (sic) of birds....creative power belongs to God alone and not to matter as the Qur'an also makes clear".

First, a small quibble that reveals his scientific ignorance in another way: birds are not a phylum; they are a class called Aves, which is under the phylum Chordates. Second, just what IS "divine", how can a mere mortal perceive it, and if he claims he has, why should we believe him? And to my knowledge, no one is alive today who actually heard god say "let there be light....". This statement reminds us of the first reactions to Darwin from "natural theologians" of his day who scrambled to reconcile science and religion, and the creationists of today. It smacks of both arrogance and desperation, a desperation that sweats profusely as the sciences reveal more and more the nature of life and the cosmos and clings for its life to antiquated irrational belief systems. Not even the Catholic Church was able to sustain its stubborn theological resistance to evolution for so long.

"People in the Islamic world who are evolutionists are not important and influential religious thinkers...their influence is limited, confined especially to the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent where the British taught evolution in all the schools. Four fifths of Muslim evolutionists come from Indian and Pakistan. The Arabs and the Persians were protected to a large extent from this prevalent error by the language barrier.." What he doesn't comment on is the primitive intellectual and educational condition of Arabs today, or, to the contrary, of the Persians (Iranians), who, despite the language barrier, did become a nation with an advanced culture and science orientation. The division in the middle east was and stlll is between the Arabs and the non-Arabs. It's easy to see why when you read someone like Nasr, but he is hardly alone today. Al Jazeera broadcasts are full of the most fanciful fairy tales about medicine, science and health, equalling the health herbalist charlatans in this country but much funnier.

Do I detect some racism and chauvinism here....towards the two countries that have, structurally if not perfectly, secular governments...one of which is arguably the most educationally and scientifically advanced in Asia, namely India, thanks to the British....and which possesses a secular democracy where all religions are equal? Of course evolutionists have no interest whatsoever in being "influential religious thinkers", and one would fervently hope that religious thinkers would refrain from re-interpretations of science and evolution.

"95% of our neurocells (sic) are similar to those of monkeys....Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel have almost identical DNA, but they are two very different people..."

The echoes of racism and eugenics raises their heads, which is scarcely surprising given the close relationship Arabs had with Hitler and Nazism and which persists today. Nasr is again revealing his ignorance by conflating brain cells with DNA. Humans share 98.5% of their DNA with apes. DNA is contained within brain cells. He doesn't seem to understand this. I suspect he thinks DNA resides outside cells. In a strange contradiction he also appears to be disciple of B.F. Skinner in dismissing anything but genes and heredity as influences on human behavior. He apparently thinks that Arabs and Jews evolved differently. Someone should break the news to him gently.

"..human beings have a more complicated life form than the monkey, but possess also some of those characteristics we see in the monkey but this does not mean that we have evolved from the monkey".

Of course no scientist ever claimed we evolved from monkeys. Humans share a common ancestor with apes. This guy probably never read a 20th century biology text in his life but feels qualified to shoot off his mouth. I hope he refrained from this in the presence of the Pope, who might have corrected him.

"...The Qu-ran says specifically, that God is the creator of all things...if God has knowledge of the ant, the ant must have a kind of archetypal reality in the 'mind' of God, in the Divine Intellect." (Shades of Plato). Some people think humans have a "God gene ". Is this a way of saying that ants have one too ? It is a humbling thought.

"We train a lot of Muslims to become scientists, and many become very good Western scientists, some being among top scientists but they are not Islamic thinkers. They have had no education in Islamic thought. We have few people in the Islamic world who can understand such deep theological and philosophical ideas and are, at the same time, good biologists and physicists, and that is a tragedy". Not surprising though.

"These days we have the theory of S. Jay Gould, of volcanic eruptions of species.....We should remain faithful to authentic Islamic thought..which does not surrender to the prevalent materialistic and reductionist worldview that is a truncated worldview....we should not follow the path of providing logically absurd answers which also keep the Hand of God out of His creation".

Gould proposed no such theory. He and Niles Eldredge proposed a theory called "punctuated equilibrium", (colloquially called "punk-eek") which has been seriously misunderstood and sometimes considered anti-Darwinian, which it is not.

"Paleontology does not support the theory of evolution as usually taught, and that is why some famous biologists such as R. Sheldrake and S. Jay Gould have proposed other ways for the explaining the phenomena of the multiplicity of life forms on earth, departing from classical Darwinism but still calling it evolution although what they propose is based on a different understanding of this term".

This is about the most ridiculous pack of lies. Sheldrake, a former botanist, is a scientific ignoramus regarding evolution who tried to promote a supernatural fantasy about how evolution occurred; no one has ever paid him any attention, since he used such terms as "fields of resonance", which Nasr quotes. At no time did Gould ever dispute Darwinian evolution; his writings are world-famous as a result of his numerous articles and books explaining Darwinian evolution, and he was as it happens also a geologist. His hypotheses on "punctuated equilibrium", evolutionary processes and rate of evolutionary change were disputed by other biologists such as Richard Dawkins - such disputes are the way science functions and progresses - but they never questioned evolution itself.

"How can we have a critique of modern science in general, specifically modern biology, and..how can we..bring together scientists and religious thinkers and produce a generation of Muslim thinkers who understand science and Islam..? That will not happen unless what is called science today is mastered and then integrated into the Islamic worldview". What means is integrating the Islamic world view into science, though he has expressed it poorly. It means absorbing what is congruent with Islam and discarding the rest.

As anyone can see, this is indistinguishable from creationism. Just substitute Christianity for Islam. It is interesting that Nasr's focus is on the biological sciences rather than the physical sciences and cosmology, the sciences that differ from the biological sciences by explicitly seeking information about the material (as opposed to the miraculous) origins of the universe and of life itself.

"We are conscious before we leave this world and shall be conscious after we leave this world. ..Muslim thinkers must..provide an authentic Islamic interpretation of the data of these sciences without accepting the ideological basis of the interpretation of these data, this ideology being itself founded upon a specific philosophy that is not acceptable to genuine Islamic thought". How does one deal with this kind of statement that purports to "know" that we will be conscious after death? Of course, since it cannot be falsified, Nasr is free to make this claim without fear of contradiction.

Like creationists, he expresses certainty about things that cannot be tested much less proven (consciousness after death). Is this the kind of propaganda that Nasr's students at George Washington University are being force-fed? If anyone wonders why most of the Muslim world is so backward intellectually and scientifically, Nasr's opinions will provide the reason. The resemblance to Christian creationism and fundamentalist thought is striking.

What is also striking is something I discuss in my book Politics as if Evolution Mattered (on my web site, www.lornasalzman.com), namely that creationism and fundamentalism find evolution indefensible not only because it banishes the need for a god or creator, but because it provides the basis for materialism, which in turn leads to the inescapable conclusion that the notion of a god is simply a function of the human mind which is the product of the brain which evolved along with the rest of our body.

SNICKERSNEE

The Myth of Broad-based Movements
by Lorna Salzman

The April 9th spring chorus in Union Square was not melodious songbirds but a bunch of squawking crows jostling for attention and hoping to devour the entrails of Israel and the real issues be damned. What could be the point of this rally and all those that preceded it and those that will follow? "Anti-war" is the cry of the resistance but this hides a multitude of disparate causes and identity groups, each with a tiny constituency and little political currency.

Presumably all the disadvantaged and wretched of the American earth - minorities, immigrants, jobless, women, the poor, workers - will come together in a Millennium Development Goal in which all of them will be winners in an as-yet uncharacterized game with no rules and no goals. How you play the game is their motto. Those who still grip these fantasies have little to contribute to real-world problems beyond a shared resentment of just about everything American and Israeli, and even there the object of their resentment is rarely clear nor are the objectives necessarily congruent. There is just the usual laundry list compiled to please each identity group, comprised mostly of mismatched socks.

As just one example: there is a backlash against higher energy prices by the poor and their advocates, whereas the knowledgeable environmentalists know full well that they should and must go up, as part of a sane energy policy that must include stringent efficiency standards, full cost pricing for energy and goods and an end to federal subsidies and tax breaks for all sectors of the economy, not just fossil fuels.

Unions and workers, like corporations, don't want higher energy prices because they raise the cost of goods and reduce consumer spending, thus impacting on economic growth, the basis for consumer society and capitalism. The issue of growth is the single largest stumbling block to developing a "broad based" movement for change, but it is stubbornly resisted by nearly everyone, especially those promoting "green" economies and technologies. These now include the leading climate change group 350.org/1Sky, which has effectively abandoned citizen action so as to curry favor with big business for whom the "no-growth" paradigm is anathema.

Thus, the chance that social justice activists will find agreement with environmentalists is remote, and this does not even consider the side-lining of environmental emergencies by smaller side issues like Israel and the Palestinians. Despite the long history of failed coalitions, hope springs eternal even as rigorous thinking is dismissed as the province of "elites". Environmentalism gets the short end of the stick as always, as their representative is allotted his three minutes at the podium to shout "No nukes".

There is no such thing as "natural allies", there never was, and there never will be. The movement and the future will be defined only by the movement that grasps ecological reality, sticks to a firm set of principles, articulates how these subsume all the other social and economic issues, rejects corporate cant, eschews false solutions and dilatory actions, and designs a substitute economy that starts with relocalization and other ecological precepts and rebuilds society on top of these. In brief, the only movement capable of doing this is anenvironmental movement modelled on the one that was born in the 1970s.

A recapitulation of its accomplishments is long overdue, not least because the only thing most people see today are the privileged establishment groups in Washington who long ago abandoned their grassroots constituents in favor of status and access to decision-makers and congress. These groups regard their work as a profession, not a cause, and are the mirror image of corporations. Where was there a group that was able to stop the Wall St. and bank bail-outs or force withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan or achieve decent universal health care or loosen the corporate grip on congress? Where was there a group or movement to stop Congress and Obama from decimating urgent social, health, education and transportation initiatives? And will there be one ready to eject Obama and his congressional lackies in 2012?

The peace movement has never prevented wars. Unions and workers have lost out to corporations. Liberals have rejected the kind of radical reform needed as witness their antagonism to Ralph Nader . And the Democratic Party retains its death grip on liberals only because of its more progressive stance on things like racial discriminationm abortion and women's and gay rights.

But the environmental movement has strong accomplishments to its credit, in legislation, regulatory reform, habitat protection, worker safety, public health. It led to the creation of local and state environmental agencies, local laws and enforcement of federal standards. It busted a gut in organizing, educating,, lobbying, pressuring, demonstrating, resisting, against huge odds. And for the most part it succeeded and left us their legacy. For the short period of the 1970s decade it accomplished monumental things, while enduring attacks from the left and social justice activists who even today cannot see that environmentalism is a social justice movement par excellence and that it poses the greatest threat to capitalism extant ---a realization that corporations and government came to long ago. And it did this without a leftist in its ranks, except for the anti-nuclear activists.

No other movement except civil rights has come close to this record of achievement, yet today the left and the greens are abandoning it, claiming that the deck is stacked against it (it always was). It is thus indefensible that climate activists like 350.org declare the game lost and are moving to an undefined arena with no declared allies, no goals, and no chance of success. They do not understand that a movement is not built by preaching only to the disenfranchised and the disadvantaged. While the "permanent government" may still call the shots, it still needs the legitimization from important sectors of society, not just business. It needs the media, the political pundits, the intellectual elites, the academics, economists, attorneys, etc.

The corollary is that if there is an influential (not necessarily large) dissenting group, a hole can be punched in the best laid plans. The anti-nuclear power movement is an example and a near-example was the opposition to cap and trade (aided though by Republicans for their own reasons). The anti-coal groups in Appalachia may with luck and perseverance step to the front of a new movement. As for the left, it looks for excuses for its irrelevance and ineptness at educating and organizing the general public (which it looks at with scorn anyway); it is now inventing rationalizations for abandoning the political process on the most urgent issue humanity has ever faced, and for abandoning all pretenses at citizenship. In this sense it plays into the hands of its adversaries by building a Tower of Babel that lacks form and ideological cement. Michael Berube is not far off the mark in postulating that the left actually welcomes defeat. So far they haven't proven him wrong.

Snickersnee: Burqa Ban

Burqa Ban is Legitimate and Necessary

by Lorna Salzman

Kenan Malik, in his Pandaemonium blog, has attacked the burqa ban which just went into effect in France. Like others who have tried to portray this ban as an intrusion into private life or an authoritarian and coercive measure, Malik ignores the "ground truth" of Muslim attitudes and behavior in their adopted societies.

First, one must recognize that the Muslim leadership preaches uncompromising resistance to secular civil law and to any kind of assimilation. In this respect, Muslim immigrant communities are self-isolating, practicing a voluntary and insistent separatism that liberals naively think is being forced on them by the government. When Muslim nurses in UK hospitals refuse to touch nonMuslim bodies, you know that more than religion is at work here; it is a sense of not just separatism but superiority that is unwilling to bend under any circumstances to accommodate the demands of nonMuslim society.

While no one can predict how the next generation of Muslims or the one after it will conform to Islamic mandates and sharia law (one fervently hopes they will break free and become willing constructive members of society), the present generation of Muslims, dominated by men, is determined to maintain its iron grip on the lives of its women primarily but of all Muslims by implication. This defiance is now being supported by naive liberals who have given Muslims the excuses they need to justify wrapping their women in shrouds. They are thus able to claim religious discrimination from nonMuslims by using the burqa ban alone as proof of their victimization.

Were there no other problems with Islam today, they might have a glimmer of justification. But Muslim terrorism on the ground has a bad habit of jolting us back into reality, through its vile anti-Semitic tracts, its honor killings, its forced child marriages, its suppression of freedom of speech and dissent, and in general a resistance to every aspect of post-Enlightenment secular democracy and to the western democracies' notions of equality and dignity for all. Let's be blunt: when an indigenous Amazonian tribe visits this country, wearing head feathers, paint and loincloths, we don't tremble in fear. We respect their traditions (and by the way, the head-hunting tribes in South America and Borneo gave up head hunting a long time ago, in contrast to Muslims' abusive treatment of their women).

There are compelling practical and security reasons for banning burqas and voluminous women's clothing just as there are good reasons for enhanced airport security and luggage inspection. The middle east has seen terrorists donning women's garb after throwing a bomb and escaping. They can conceal weapons as well as identities. To ignore this in today's climate would be foolish. It is all very well to defend a person's right to wear what they please but this right is not defensible today. One can be a staunch libertarian on individual rights but these rights end at the door of public safety and collective good, which must come first in any democratic society, especially one under constant threat of terrorist acts by radicalized Muslims. The use of these powers must of course be legitimate, not arbitrary, but given the clear risk of terrorism and the need for society to identify individuals at all times, the power to ban certain clothing is quite defensible.

And as Malik himself pointed out, today the burqa is either a political statement or it is forced on women by their husbands and fathers, as is the rest of their behavior. Allowing burqas therefore is a form of legitimizing patriarchy and misogyny and the mistreatment of women, not a religious statement. Talking about ideals in the abstract is no longer tenable. Also, were there no OTHER problems with radical Islam - were women fully equal, enfranchised and free beings and were there no honor killings or forced marriages, then wearing the burqa would have no political connotations nor would there be these security concerns. But this is a pipe dream. The reality of radical Islam is quite different and to ignore the context of the burqa is to ignore what is in front of our face and MUST be confronted and rolled back: the domination of Muslim men and their determination to impose their religious tenets not only on Muslim women but the whole Muslim world. This is what the burqa represents, not free choice or religion.

Snickersnee

350.org/1Sky:The Thinking Person's Nightmare

by Lorna Salzman

Two items appeared on my screen a few days ago. The first announced the merger of 350.org and 1 Sky, two mass movement organizations claiming to be dedicated to stopping climate change. The first was founded by writer Bill McKibben. The second was long an affiliate of the first so an official merger is no surprise, nor is their Rockefeller funding. Nor is it a surprise that this merger won't make any significant difference to resolution of the climate change issue. 350.org already unveiled its philosophical alliance with big business, overtly admitting what it had already done: abandoned grassroots resistance in order to curry favor with corporate money and power. Rest in peace, 350.org; we never believed in you anyway.

While 1Sky has taken some official positions on what needs to be done, 350.org never did. My open letter to McKibben in the May 3rd issue of The Nation last year laid out what I and other rather more militant activists decried: the refusal of the organization to articulate specific policies, taxes, incentives, and legislation to bring about their objective of reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations back down to 350 parts per million (they are now about 390 and growing). Of course one does not get corporate or foundation grants by espousing

climate change solutions that rock the boat, hence the unfocused generalizations and political side-stepping characteristic of 350.org from the beginning.

For a short period McKibben and I exchanged emails, until he cut me off, with him defending the raising of public consciousness as the primary goal and dismissing the notion of political action and lobbying as essentially useless. Though McKibben is far from being a leftist, this position - throwing weight behind mass organizing, demonstrations and direct action - has long been an article of faith on the left. This is what suppressed the birth of an American Green Party for seventeen years and can be found routinely in leftist journals. It is the very old "movement vs. party" argument that the US Green Party underwent in the 1980s and which persists today on the left. Who comprises this movement and who makes policies are unanswered questions as are the definition of democracy, legitimacy and internal accountability. These fundamentals are very likely to be stumbling blocks to the mass movement envisioned by 350.org, if it ever can get off its duff and actually propose policies for the public to support. Meanwhile, they are on extended sabbatical from the fight.

Which brings me to the second related point: the accession of leftist journalist Naomi Klein to the board of 1 Sky. Her announcement of this explictly rejects appeals to "the elites", that is, in Congress, in favor of mass organizing. So the leftist article of faith has now been officially incorporated into the pro-business doctrine of the new entity comprised of 350.org and 1 Sky. Some of her pronouncements are little more than rhetoric: attacking "stalling tactics like action plans that get serious only in 2020"...the losing strategy of "lobbying elites behind closed doors", followed by a determination to "build the kind of mass movement that politicians cannot afford to ignore". Unfortunately it is their electoral constituency that they cannot afford to ignore, but Klein and 350.org are pretending otherwise. A million-person march on Washington to demand a reduction down to 350.org translates into exactly nada unless those million people confront their elected officials in ways they cannot ignore. This is not now in the cards at 350.org's table, and even less so with corporate partners holding the aces.

Left unsaid here is a back story about the whole Democratic Party and its supposed liberal wing who supported ineffective and ill-advised energy legislation and the large, wealthy Washington-based groups who have pushed the grassroots groups out of the nest, monopolize foundation grants, and transfix the mass media into thinking they speak for the whole movement, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, who long ago abandoned their base constituency in order to curry favor with the elites Klein refers to. The other back story has been that the smaller and poorer groups have been crowded out but put up little resistance anyway. This became clear in the battle over cap and trade, where the Democrats seduced or bludgeoned many liberals into thinking this supremely capitalist tool had anything to do with reducing CO2 emissions. The opponents of cap and trade dithered too long and too late, as did McKibben himself, in exposing the real function and intent of cap and trade, which was to allow indefinite burning of coal so as to hamper energy efficiency, slow up a transition to renewables and make profits for brokers in the process.

How has it come about that the very thing that has allowed socially reactionary groups in this country to achieve notoriety has been adopted by groups purporting to oppose everything these retrogressive movements stand for? How has it become not only acceptable but praiseworthy to celebrate citizen apathy and civil disengagement from the political process? How has leftist cynicism been able to implant itself on middle of the road progressive movements, to the point where they can shamelessly boast about the inutility of involvement in politics and the reform of civil society institutions? And how can someone like Klein deplore the "deeply anti-democratic influence " of major polluters, while in effect telling the rest of us that we should abandon all avenues offering democratic participation and influence in favor of street theater and rallies?

There's nothing like rejection of something you never tried.

Were these attitudes prevalent in the 1970s, it is likely that no environmental movement would have arisen. If one truly believes that governmental corruption is all-powerful to the point where one throws up one's hands, only two stark choices remain: a stoic resignation to the forces of evil; or bomb throwing. Thus, 350.org/1Sky has literally gone on indefinite moral and intellectual vacation, where it will meet and commiserate with those on the left who can now say: See, we told you so; there is nothing else to do but rant and take to the streets. Thus, they are effectively shutting out the vast majority of people who long for strong principled leadership to push for political and electoral change.

The greens and left in this country have abandoned the climate change issue, not only for the above reasons but also because they have some peculiar and unsubstantiated notions about building coalitions of disparate interest groups to address comprehensive economic and political change. In this venture they will also meet head-on with other brick walls. But that's another story for another time.

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This just in:
Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben have just come out swinging and punching, calling for an invigorated mass movement of "bodies, passion, creativity".....but to do what? They still won't say.

What does this reluctance to announce an agenda mean? Does it mean they have none? Does it mean they are still figuring it out? Does it mean that they think that people shouting "stop global warming" is all we need? Or does it mean, as some of us think, that they are afraid to take strong positions commensurate with the threat out of fear of alienating their funders and the elites and the mass media?

Are they afraid to stand in front of us and say that we have to drastically and speedily reduce energy consumption across the board by raising prices through carbon taxes and an end to subsidies? Are they afraid to lead the mass movement they claim they have activated because they realize that reduced energy use on the scale required will profoundly affect the economy, changing the scale and purpose of production, jobs and consumption? In other words, are they afraid to look the capitalist growth society in the face, to say what they know full well must be done, and to do what is needed? Give us a clue, folks.