We’ve noted here the growing cave-in of hard science to post-modernism. One of the signs is talk of intersectionality among people supposedly committed to science. We knew it was bad news but we didn’t realize that it was enmeshed with fashionable anti-Semitism. Maybe we should have realized that.
From Alan Dershowitz at the Washington Examiner:
Students at the University of Illinois recently took to social media to express their distress after flyers were plastered around campus calling for the “end of Jewish privilege.” The flyer stated in bold letters that: “ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.” The posters had outlines of silhouettes with Stars of David printed out, and an arrow pointing to them with the accompanying caption “the 1%.” Although some of the posters identified Black Lives Matter as sponsors, it is not clear whether they were distributed by extreme right-wing groups using hard-left anti-Semitic tropes or by hard-left anti-Semites. In some respects, it does not really matter because many on the hard-right and hard-left share a disdain for Jews, their nation state and so called “Jewish privilege.”
…
This practice resembles the vile, anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1930s, when splashed across Der Spiegel was blaming Jews – and so called disproportionate Jewish wealth – for Germany’s losing WWI and the country’s subsequent economic downturn. Canards about Jews controlling world finances – first promulgated by the Tsarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – was anti-Semitic back then and it is anti-Semitic today, whether espoused by the extreme left or right. More.
Right. But one thing Dershowitz and everyone else can take home: Big Science today is cowardly and is simply letting the war on evidence and reality run the show, as long as boffins keep their jobs.
Regular news coverage to resume shortly.
See also: The war on freedom is rotting our intellectual life: Intersectionality
and
Nature: Stuck with a battle it dare not fight, even for the soul of science.