Category: Cancel Culture

Letter to sign opposing boycott of Israeli universities

June 11, 2024 • 9:15 am

My co-deplatformee Maarten Boudry has announced in Quillette that he’s written an open letter (with coauthor Prof. Mark Elchardus) against the growing worldwide call to boycott Israeli universities. Although it’s called a “faculty open letter”, you don’t have to be an academic to sign it, though the signatures will be vetted to keep out trolls. You can read about the letter at the first link (it presents an earlier version of the letter), and then click the second headline to actually sign the latest and most comprehensive letter if you agree with its sentiments.

From Maarten’s introduction in Quillette (I won’t reproduce the whole thing):

Universities across the world are facing pressure—from students but also from academic staff—to cut ties with Israeli institutions over the war in Gaza. In the US, a dozen universities have struck agreements with activists and partly conceded to their demands, including divestment from Israeli companies. In Europe, dozens of Spanish universities and five Norwegian universities have resolved to sever all ties with Israeli partners deemed “complicit” in the war in Gaza. Several Belgian universities have now suspended all collaborations with Israeli universities because of their collaborations with the IDF. Even without a formal boycott, pressure from anti-Israel protests and the BDS movement has already led to pervasive exclusion of Israeli scientists and students. In the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, over 60 academics have testified what this amounts to: cancelled invitations to lectures and committees, desk rejections of papers on political grounds, freezing of ongoing collaborations, disrupted guest lectures, and withdrawn co-authorships.

And then, since Maarten is a philosopher, he goes into the arguments for and against such a boycott.

On the “con” side he criticizes the Netanyahu government and its policy of settlement on the West Bank, but in the end, as you must have guessed, he concludes that a blanket boycott of Israeli universities is counterproductive, not just for Israel but for the liberal Western values that universities are supposed to represent.

In liberal democracies such as Israel, universities are indispensable parts of civil society, which facilitate the critical examination and questioning of government policies. Despite the country’s flaws, such criticism is still very much possible in Israel. Those who oppose the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners will find numerous allies among Israeli academics. Many of them took the lead in the protests against Netanyahu’s dangerous judicial reforms of 2023, which threatened Israel’s democratic character. Finally, Israeli universities enrol tens of thousands of Palestinian and Arab students, often supported by government programs. They too will be targeted by a blanket boycott of Israeli universities, which will in no way contribute to peace, but will instead further weaken the constructive and liberal forces in Israeli society.

Let me add that Bob Zimmer, the late President of the University of Chicago, was pressured to divest from Israel and also engage in an academic boycott against its country’s universities He responded in 2016 by issuing this statement:

The University of Chicago will not divest from companies for doing business in Israel and opposes academic boycotts aimed at specific nations, including Israel. The University is restating its policy to address questions regarding its institutional position.

The University does not take social or political stances on issues outside its core mission. Using investments or other means to advance a social or political position held by some segment of the University community would only diminish the University’s distinctive contribution – providing a home and environment for faculty and students to engage freely and openly on the widest range of issues. The Kalven Report outlines this approach and the values behind it, concluding that preserving the freedom of individual scholars to argue for or against any issue of political controversy requires “a heavy presumption against” collective political action by the University itself.

The University has been consistent in its opposition to proposed academic boycotts, issuing statements in 2007 and again in 2013. The University has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of knowledge. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world, and to form collaborations both inside and outside the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, the University continues to strongly oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, including recent actions to boycott Israeli institutions.

QED.  Now click below to go to the letter itself, and then, if you want to append your name, click again on the “sign the open letter” boxes at top right or bottom—or just click here.

Of course I asked Maarten what would become of the letter so that readers who sign it aren’t simply engaging in a performative gesture. Maarten said this:

What will become of it? Obviously we want to send a signal to universities across the world that plenty of academics firmly oppose any form of boycott, so that the cowards won’t follow the path of least resistance and cave into the loudest protestors (as my uni had done already). I like to think that our well-publicized letter in Dutch (in two newspapers) played some role in the public announcement by the Dutch rectors that they reject a boycott, two weeks later.
The more people sign, especially academics, the stronger the signal.
JAC: Note that the anti-boycott announcement in the Netherlands involved 15 Dutch universities, including the University of Amsterdam.  These comprise the totality of the Association of Universities of the Netherlands, so it’s a very strong signal of opposition to boycotts. But this is only one country, not the world, and, as Maarten notes in his Quillette piece, calls for academic boycotts of Israel are numerous and ubiquitous.

Taboo conclusions in human biology

June 10, 2024 • 10:00 am

Reader Suzi pointed me to a RealClear Science article about subjects that cause controversy in psychology—but also in biology and among people in general. Click the top headline to see their short summary of a longer paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a paper you can access by clicking the second title.

While you can click the title below to get to the article, you can also find the pdf here.

The purpose of this study was severalfold, and I’m not going to go into all the questions and conclusions. What I found most interesting was the authors’ list of ten taboo conclusions about psychology and society, the degree of confidence that psychologists had in these conclusions, the degree to which psychologists would self-censor their opinions on these topics (and the correlation with their agreement between censorship and belief), and, finally, the consensus on academic freedom—the assent of psychologists that people should be able to study whatever they wanted.

First, the authors asked 41 psychologists to give a list of what they saw as “controversial” conclusions. From this they distilled the ten most controversial ones, often using their own phrasing to state the conclusions clearly.

Then, the authors gave these conclusions to a bigger sample of psychologists: 470 who agreed to answer the questions (4,603 were asked).  Among other things, they were asked to state their degree of confidence in the answers and then their reluctance to share their views, whatever they were. They were also asked whether “scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.”

 

I’ve put below the list of ten c0ntroversial conclusions derived from the preliminary survey, along with the average degree of agreement for each conclusion among the scholars who gave answers (not all 470 answered every question). First, how the scholars were asked to agree/disagree and how they judged their degree of risk that would make them self-censor (this is all from the paper itself):

Participants were told they would be responding to 10 taboo conclusions in the social sciences that were nominated by their peers in earlier interviews. First, participants responded to three questions regarding each conclusion on 101-point sliding scales (ranging from 0 to 100): “How confident are you in the truth or falsity of this statement?” (responses ranged from 100% confident it is false to 100% confident it is true), x

Participants then reported how at risk they would feel of various consequences if they shared their views on these topics openly on a sliding scale ranging from no risk at all to very high risk. (All sliding scales used in our study had a range of 0–100.)

After each question, I’ve put in bold the average degree of confidence among the respondents about whether they consider the conclusion to be true.  Notice that the first question is about whether men were naturally selective to be sexually coercive, a conclusion I attacked strongly when younger (I’d have a more nuanced answer now, I think).  Note that two of the questions, #4, #7, are taken up by Luana and me in our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, and we have high confidence in them (I just asked Luana, and we agreed that we both have 100% confidence in those two conclusions).

So here are the top ten hot potatoes in human psychology along with the average degree of agreement.

1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” (53.47)

2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”  (45.26)

3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” (59.29)

4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” (66.10)

5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”(52.06)

6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” (46.93)

7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” (65.50)

8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” (29.10)

9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” (54.11)

10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.” (21.44)

Note that for most topics psychologists had split opinions, but not for racial differences in IQ being somewhat based on genetic differences (question 8) or diversity leading to worse performance (question 10). In both cases a big majority of people disagreed  The highest agreement, though, came for the questions that Luana and I discussed (sex being binary for the vast majority of people and men and women had different psychological traits because of evolution.  It is surprising that questions whose answers are dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement, which means that psychologists don’t know much about the binary nature of biological sex or about evolutionary psychology (note that question 7 doesn’t say that ALL psychological differences between men and women are evolved; it implies only that some of them are, which to me seems palpably true, e.g.,  differences in attentiveness to their offspring or the degree of choosiness in mating).

What I found almost as interesting to me is that there was, with one exception, a positive correlation between the degree of belief of individuals in these statements and their reluctance to share their views. Can you guess what the exception is?

Here are two graphs showing particularly strong correlations between degree of belief of a controversial statement and the degree of “self-censorship”; each point represents one individual. Surprisingly, the first one is the binary nature of biological sex. The more strongly you accept it, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself. That’s not true for Luana and me! It’s bloody obvious and we’ll shout it from the rooftops!

This one is more understandable as it’s the hottest of the hot potatoes: the claim that IQ differences between races are appreciable (at least 10% of the difference is based on genetic differences). The more you think that IQ differences between races are genetic, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself:

Did you guess that the one statement that people didn’t self-censor about was a statement in line with liberal ideology. Yes, it’s this one: “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”  The more confidence you have in that, that more likely you are to espouse it publicly, because it makes you seem less racist to be public about it.

All of the correlations, negative and positive, were statistically significant.

The authors note two differences in responses between males and females (that assumes a sex binary!), though of course these not be based on genetics or evolution (bolding is mine):

As seen in Table 3 and Figure S1 in the Supplemental Material, men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions: (a) For political bias in social science, there was a small but not significant effect in the same direction, and (b) women believed more strongly that academia discriminates against Black people. In some cases, differences were quite large. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence. Future research should explore whether male and female psychology professors present to their students different evidence and arguments regarding the veracity of taboo conclusions.

As has been noted by some, women are likely to be more empathic than men, and this may explain the result vis-à-vis racial differences.  Here’s another:

Female scholars were more left-leaning (M = 20.86, SD = 16.03) than male scholars (M = 27.90, SD = 18.70), t(401) = 3.93, p < .001, and younger, t(400) = 4.73, p < .001.

Since most academics are left leaning, I would expect this sex difference based on my hypothesis (which is not mine) that females are more empathic than men, and being more empathic makes you lean even more to the left (a hypothesis that is mine).

Finally, although self-censorship is rife in academia, I was glad to see that most scholars (but only by a bare majority) don’t think that people should be penalized for working on anything they want.

A slim majority of professors (52.3%) reported that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. By contrast,1.6% said scholars should not have this freedom, and 46.0% said it’s complicated.

Well, it is a bit complicated, for, as we said in our discussion in Amsterdam, there are some questions (though very few) that people should not be free to work on. But such work is banned anyway by research stipulations of granting agencies and academia, as this work involve harm to humans and other animals (i.e., the kind of experiments on inmates that Josef Mengele did in Auschwitz). Readers may want to think of some questions NOT involving harm to humans and other species that still should not be allowed.  Right off the bat I can’t think of any. There are plenty of experiments that I think are not worthy of doing on humans, but none that should be banned if they don’t cause mental or physical harm.

The belief in academic freedom does conflict with the ability of researchers to investigate some of the questions above, particularly those that have implications for social policy (i.e. is there bias against blacks or women in academia?).  It’s the “politically correct” thing to say that there is, but you really need to know how much bias there is versus other factors (culture, preference, etc) that can cause inequity before you start intervening to achieve equity. But I’ve discussed this before.

It would be a good thing if people didn’t have to self-censor, for that kind of censorship inhibits free discussion, the kind of discussion essential for a university to function and for people to examine their ideas and/or sharpen them.  But we’ll never get rid of self-censorship on questions like the ones above so long as academia is pervaded by ideology, which it must be since scientists are humans and don’t want others to think poorly of them.

Resurrected: Our conversation in Amsterdam

June 5, 2024 • 10:15 am

As I mentioned in the last post, after our discussion at the University of Amsterdam was canceled on grounds of Maarten Boudry’s and my sympathies for Israel, the sponsors who brought us to Amsterdam kindly had the discussion restaged in an empty room and professionally filmed.  I haven’t listened to the whole 80-minute discussion as I can’t stand to see and hear myself, but as I recall it went smoothly, even without an audience.

The filming and appended notes on the screen are due to videographer David Stam, who did a great and professional job, clarifying any references that aren’t spelled out.

To reiterate, the subject of the discussion was a paper by myself and Luana Maroja published in the Skeptical Inquirer, “The ideological subversion of biology.” If you watch the video, you’ll see that the topic of the war and Israel wasn’t even raised.  We did range beyond the ambit of the paper, for we talked about biology, philosophy, and other topics, but you’ll see that we were deplatformed for something we didn’t even intend to mention.

Here are David’s notes on the video:.

Welcome to an eye-opening discussion on “The Ideological Subversion of Science” featuring evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, and embryologist Michael Richardson. In this thought-provoking video, our distinguished panel delves into the growing influence of ideology on scientific research and education. They explore how societal pressures and cultural trends can distort scientific integrity, the implications for scientific progress, and the importance of safeguarding objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Join us for a conversation that champions the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

Em. Prof. Dr. Jerry Coyne, Evolutionary Biology at University of Chicago
Dr. Maarten Boudry, Philosopher of Science at University of Ghent
Prof Dr. Michael Richardson, Evolutionary Developmental Zoology at University of Leiden

The moderator, who did an superb job of keeping the discussion going, is Gert Jan van ‘t Land.

My Quillette piece with Maarten Boudry: the story of our deplatforming in Amsterdam

June 5, 2024 • 9:30 am

As I recounted on May 14, philosopher Maarten Boudry from Ghent, developmental biologist Michael Richardson from Leiden and I were “deplatformed” by a student-run group, “BetaBreak”, at the University of Amsterdam. We were recruited to discuss a paper that I wrote with Luana Maroja, “The ideological subversion of biology,” in which we discussed several areas (sex, race, evolutionary psych0logy, etc.) in which “progressive” ideology had crept into biology, distorting the science.

A few days before our event, we got a note that BetaBreak was canceling our discussion because Maarten and I had “unacceptable” sympathies towards Israel in the Gaza War. This had nothing to do with our discussion, as you’ll see when I put the video in the next post. But it didn’t matter, if you’re more on the side of the Jews, you’re tainted—at least in Amsterdam. (Maarten had in fact been deplatformed a few days before that when he was scheduled to give a talk on climate change, which he eventually gave remotely.)

At any rate, BetaBreak then came up with a second explanation for our deplatforming, which was that the event “could get violent” and they couldn’t guarantee our safety. Well, that sounds bogus to me (a scientific descussion?), and of course none of us were worried about our safety.  The fact that the “safety” trope came only in a subsequent explanation of course makes us think it was confected, for, as the group explained in its first message to us: “Another fear is how [the deplaforming] would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC.” Oh, dearie me. They might have been blackballed! They canceled others so they wouldn’t get canceled themselves. . . And the advantage of raising the “safety” issue, of course, is that it can’t be refuted: if you cancel an event on those grounds, you’ll never know if your worries were justified.

The details of the deplatforming are in the first link above, but Maarten and I collaborated on a new article in Quillette, which you can see below (click the headline) for free, BUT READ IT WITHIN A DAY OR SO, AS IT’S GOING TO BE PAYWALLED. (I did find an archived link here.) But the point of our article was not to play the victim, for within a few days we staged the discussion without an audience, and it was recorded professionally and put on YouTube. (More people can hear it now!)

The point of our Quillette piece, as you see, is that deplatforming invited speakers is a disservice not just to the speakers, but, more important, to the audience. In the article I added an apposite quote from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” to show why, whether or not you disagree with speakers whose views offend you, you should still listen to them. I’ll put it here:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

That is, if you listen carefully to such a speaker, you might not only change your mind on some issues, but, even if you don’t, it gives you the chance to hear the best arguments of your opponents, and thus a chance to hone your ideas.  (Further, the person speaking is “outed” in that you finally can learn what they really believe.)

But I see I’m summarizing the piece for you. Please read it yourself (and before the weekend!) by clicking below. It’s not very long.

Also, if you’re a regular reader of Quillette, remember that it has no ads and is sponsored by reader support alone. You can subscribe by going here.

I’ll give the first paragraph and then the last two:

Like being struck by lightning, getting deplatformed—first invited to speak and then disinvited for your political views—is something you assume happens only to other people. But, unlike a lightning strike, it’s not a rare occurrence. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s “campus deplatforming database” of US universities lists 626 successful deplatforming attempts since 1998. This year alone, there have already been 110 attempts to cancel talks, most involving speakers sympathetic to Israel. Neither of us, however, had ever personally experienced this kind of cancellation before.

And the ending:

The problem with this approach [deplatforming or canceling people] is that plenty of unsavoury people have produced wonderful work in music, art, literature, and science, and that work should be judged on its own merits. In any case, who is to judge which beliefs and behaviours should render you untouchable? As Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows, “approved” opinions have a way of changing, and it’s impossible to predict which widely held opinions of today will be considered grounds for damnation tomorrow. Who could have predicted the current “orthodox” view on the war in Gaza several decades ago, when most Western progressives were staunchly pro-Israel? A hundred years ago, vegetarians were seen as cranks. A century hence, will killing and eating animals for food be seen as beyond the pale?

It’s been 155 years since Mill published his famous essay and, sadly, we have still not taken its lessons to heart. If BetaBreak had allowed our discussion to proceed, the students would not only have been able to engage in a lively discussion, but might also have learned something or—heaven forbid—even changed their minds about the relationship between science and ideology.

Press release about our cancellation

May 14, 2024 • 9:45 am

Below is the press release (in two languages) describing the cancellation of our discussion by a group at the University of Amsterdam. That cancellation (or “deplatforming”) is described in my previous post.

This press release was sent out by the people who came together to organize my visit to the Netherlands involving two scheduled events. This visit was a private initiative, not the initiative of an organization.

The original is in Dutch, but there’s also an English translation, and since most readers here are anglophones, I put the latter version first.

In English:

Meeting at UvA with American professor emeritus Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry cancelled due to Palestine position

Earlier I had invited you to the meeting of betabreak, the discussion platform of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science (FNWI) of the University of Amsterdam about a recent article by Dr. Coyne in the journal Skeptical Enquirer (https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/). The meeting was to take place this Friday in the FNWI-UvA building Science Park 904. Participating in the discussion would be, in addition to Jerry Coyne: Maarten Boudry (Flemish philosopher and skeptic) and Michael Richardson (Professor of Evolutionary developmental zoology at Leiden University).

The meeting’s organizer, Betabreak (https://www.betabreak.org/committee), called off the meeting because of Coyne and Boudry’s Palestine position. Betabreak indicated that many members of committee of Betabreak were uncomfortable giving Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry a stage given their position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Betabreak’s committee also expressed concern about the impression a debate with Coyne and Boudry would make on Betabreak’s organization. Betabreak’s committee concluded that the debate with Boudry and Coyne could not take place given the current political climate.

Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry will discuss the article in the Skeptical Enquirer at another location on Friday without an audience. A video recording of this conversation will be made available via the Internet. The discussion participants are dismayed that the decision of betabreak of the FNWI of the UvA (https://www.betabreak.org/) to cancel a scientific discussion because of the political-societal views of the discussion participants leads to the fact that the discussion will take place in a private residence.

You are welcome to attend the conversation between Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry. Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry are available for questions about the situation.

More information about Jerry Coyne and Maarten Boudry can also be found on their website/weblog:

– Jerry Coyne: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/

– Maarten Boudry: https://maartenboudry.be/category/blog

In Dutch:

Bijeenkomst op UvA met Amerikaanse emeritus hoogleraar Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry afgezegd vanwege Palestina standpunt 

Eerder had ik u uitgenodigd voor de bijeenkomst van betabreak, het discussieplatform van de Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica (FNWI) van de Universiteit van Amsterdam over een recente artikel van dr. Coyne in het tijdschrift Skeptical Enquirer (https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/). De bijeenkomst zou aanstaande vrijdag plaatsvinden in het FNWI-UvA gebouw Science Park 904. Aan het gesprek zouden deelnemen naast Jerry Coyne: Maarten Boudry (Vlaams filosoof en skepticus) en Michael Richardson (Professor of Evolutionary developmental zoology aan de Universiteit van Leiden).

De organisatie van de bijeenkomst, Betabreak (https://www.betabreak.org/committee), heeft de bijeenkomst afgeblazen vanwege het Palestina standpunt van Coyne en Boudry. Betabreak gaf aan dat veel leden van committee van Betabreak zich er niet prettig bij voelden om Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry een podium te geven gezien hun standpunt over het Palestijns-Israëlische conflict. Het committee van Betabreak gaf aan ook bezorgd te zijn over de indruk die een debat met Coyne en Boudry zou maken over de organisatie van Betabreak. Het committee van Betabreak komt tot de conclusie dat het debat met Boudry en Coyne niet kan doorgaan gezien het huidige politieke klimaat.

Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry zullen op een andere locatie op vrijdag zonder publiek met elkaar in discussie gaan over het artikel in de Skeptical Enquirer. Van dit gesprek zal een video-opname worden gemaakt die via internet beschikbaar zal worden gemaakt. De gespreksdeelnemers zijn ontsteld dat het besluit van betabreak van de FNWI van de UvA (https://www.betabreak.org/) om een wetenschappelijke discussie af te blazen vanwege de politiek-maatschappelijke opvattingen van de gespreksdeelnemers er toe leidt het gesprek in een privé woonhuis zal plaatsvinden.

U bent van harte welkom om aanwezig te zijn bij het gesprek tussen Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry. U kunt Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry dan ook vragen stellen over de situatie.

Meer informatie over Jerry Coyne en Maarten Boudry kunt u ook vinden op hun website / weblog:

I’ve been deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam for having the wrong stance on the Palestine/Israel conflict

May 14, 2024 • 8:15 am

I have been Dorian Abbot-ized: that is, a presentation in which I was going to participate with two other faculty, scheduled for this Friday at the University of Amsterdam, has been cancelled by the organizers because of my political views on the war between Israel in Hamas.

And, like Dorian’s case at MIT, our scheduled discussion had nothing to do with either Israel or Palestine. That is, we were deplatformed not for what we were supposed to talk about, but for views Maarten Boudry and I had independently expressed elsewhere—views that were apparently offensive to the organization that cancelled our discussion.

Our discussion was supposed to center on a paper I wrote with Luana Maroja for The Skeptical Inquirer, ‘The ideological subversion of biology“, which dealt with the distortion of six areas of evolutionary biology by well-meaning people whose ideology did not comport with biological reality.  It had nothing to do with war in the Middle East.

The organization that deplatformed me and two other professors was Betabreak, a science discussion group at University of Amsterdam. You can reach its website by clicking the banner below.

Everything was fine until we were informed yesterday on WhatsApp that the discussion was cancelled. The organizers didn’t contact me directly, but sent the cancellation to one of my hosts, so I’ve redacted his/her name in the indented message below, which is otherwise exactly as my host received it. “Dr. Boudry” is Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher with whom I collaborated on a paper about religious belief several years ago.

Here is the official cancellation:

Hi NAME REDACTED,

I’m sorry to inform you that unfortunately we will have to cancel the event on Friday. I’m sorry it’s so last minute, but in light of the information from Dr. Boudry, many of the members in the committee did not feel comfortable giving Dr. Coyne and Dr. Boudry a platform given their stances on the Palestine/Israel conflict. Another fear is how it would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC. We understand the irony of this considering this is the very issue that Dr. Coyne wrote his article about, however the group decided we can’t host this event given the current political climate. Again, I’m very sorry that we have put so much time and effort into organizing this for nothing, I’m disappointed as well.
If you look at the Coyne/Maroja article (link is above), you’ll see it’s all about science, so “the very issue” of our article is not the war in the Middle East, but about the danger of distorting science by infusing it with politics.

 

A bit of background: Betabreak had voted to invite me and the other participants previously, but then backed out when they discovered Maarten and my “stances on the Palestine Israel conflict.” (Presumably this is because we are both sympathetic to Israel.) At that point they apparently decided that such a stance was sufficiently unpalatable to disallow us from discussing science in their forum. Betabreak also noted that it was is worried about how they’d look if they hosted the event and whether they’d get “blackballed” at their university.

Note that Betabreak is a “science discussion platform,” and that’s what we were going to do: discuss evolutionary biology and the way it’s misconstrued by the public.

But enough—one of the main purposes of this post is to solicit reader reaction to what happened.  I thus ask readers to give their honest reaction to the deplatforming above. Be aware that some comments might be picked up and quoted by the press in the Netherlands, so I ask you to be civil and rational (no profanity!)

Thanks!

Oh, here is the poster put out by Betabreak advertising the now-cancelled event.

Israeli writer pulls out of scheduled talks before she gets canceled for having “wrong views”

March 14, 2024 • 11:00 am

Dina Rubina is a prominent Russian Israeli Jew who writes in Russian. Wikipedia gives this precis:

Rubina is one of the most prominent Russian-language Israeli writers. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. Her major themes are Jewish and Israeli history, migration, nomadism, neo-indigeneity, messianism, metaphysics, theatre, autobiography and the interplay between the Israeli and Russian Jewish cultures and languages.

This letter from Rubina comes from a site I don’t know, Truth of the Middle East (click on screenshot). It shows how Rubina staved off cancelation (for being Jewish) by canceling her appearance first. Click to read:

First, the intro:

Not long ago the Pushkin House in London together with the University of London invited the famous Israeli writer Dina Rubina to hold a meeting.
The topic was to be literary – a discussion of the writer’s books.
 Some time ago, Dina received a letter from the moderator of the meeting:

Then the email came that smells strongly like an impending cancelation:

“Good afternoon, Dina
The Pushkin House advertised our upcoming discussion on social media and immediately received critical messages regarding your position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They would like to understand your position on this issue before reacting in any way.
Could you formulate your position and send it to me as soon as possible?”
Natalia! “

That letter is an arrant insult. Rubina was going to discuss her books, and her political stand on the war has no bearing on that. Even if it did, she had already been invited.  But the Pushkin House and the University of London are spineless, and surely wanted some groveling letter from Rubina that smacked of “both side-ism.” But that’s stupid given that she is an Israeli, a fact that, again, has no bearing on her book talk.

But Rubina has spine, and I put her response below. Instead of being canceled, she canceled her own talk and rebuked Pushkin House. I put her whole letter below because you should read it, because it’s “open”, and because she says exactly what needed to be said in response to Natlia’s insulting communication.

AN OPEN LETTER

from Dina Rubina

Dear Natalia!

    You have written beautifully about my novels; I am very sorry for the time you have wasted. But it seems we’ll have to cancel our meeting. The University of Warsaw and the University of Torun have just cancelled lectures by the remarkable Israeli Russian-speaking writer Yakov Shechter on the life of Jews in Galicia in the 17th and 19th centuries – “to avoid aggravating the situation”. I suspected that this would also happen to me, because now the academic environment is the main nursery of the most disgusting and rabid anti-Semitism, hiding behind the so-called “criticism of Israel”. I was expecting something like this, and even sat down three times to write you a letter on the subject… but I decided to wait, and so I have waited.

That’s what I want to say to all those who expect from me a quick and obsequious account of my position on my beloved country, which now (and always) lives in a circle of ardent enemies who seek its destruction; on my country, which is now waging a just patriotic war against a violent, ruthless, deceitful and sophisticated enemy:

The last time in my life I apologised in the headmaster’s office, in the ninth grade. Since then, I have done what I think is right, listening only to my conscience and expressing only my understanding of the world order and human laws of justice.

And so on.

I’m really sorry, Natalia, for your efforts and the hope that you could “cook something with me” – something that everyone will like.

Therefore, I ask you personally to send my reply to all those who are interested:

On Saturday 7 October, the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the ruthless, well-trained, carefully prepared and perfectly equipped with Iranian weapons Hamas terrorist regime ruling the Gaza enclave (which Israel left some 20 years ago) attacked dozens of peaceful kibbutzim and simultaneously pelted the territory of my country with tens of thousands of rockets. Atrocities that even the Bible cannot describe, atrocities and horrors that make the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah pale in comparison (captured, by the way, by the frontal and chest cameras of the murderers themselves and boastfully sent by them in real time to the Internet), can shock any normal person. For several hours, thousands of gleeful, blood-drunk animals raped women, children and men, shot their victims in the crotch and in the head, cut off women’s breasts and played football with them, cut babies out of the bellies of pregnant women and immediately beheaded them, tied up small children and burned them. There were so many charred and completely burnt bodies that for many weeks the pathologists could not cope with the enormous burden of identifying individuals.

   My friend, who worked in a New York hospital waiting room for 20 years and then spent another 15 years in Israel identifying remains, was one of the first to arrive in the burned and blood-soaked kibbutzim with a group of rescuers and medics… She still can’t sleep. A medic used to cutting up bodies – she fainted from what she saw and then vomited all the way back to the car. What these people have seen is beyond words.

    Together with the Hamas fighters, the “civilian population” rushed into the holes in the fence, joined the pogroms on an unprecedented scale, robbed, killed and dragged whatever they could get their hands on into Gaza. Among these “peaceful Palestinians” were 450 members of the UN’s UNRWA scum. Everyone was there, and judging by the stormy total joy of the population (also captured in these inconvenient times by hundreds of mobile cameras) – there were a lot of people – Hamas supports and approves, at least before the real fighting starts, of almost the entire population of Gaza… The main problem: our residents were dragged into the beast’s lair, more than two hundred of them, including women, children, the elderly and non-essential foreign workers. About a hundred of them are now rotting and dying in the Hamas dungeons. Needless to say, these harassed victims are of little concern to the “academic community”.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am not writing this to make anyone sympathise with the tragedy of my people.

For all these years, when the world community has literally poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this piece of land (the Gaza Strip) – and the annual budget of the UNRWA organisation alone is a BILLION dollars! – All these years, Hamas has used this money to build an empire of the most complex underground tunnel system, to stockpile weapons, to teach primary school children how to dismantle and reassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to print textbooks in which the hatred of Israel defies description, in which even the maths problems go like this: “There were ten Jews, Shahid killed four, how many are left?” – with every word calling for the murder of Jews.

And now that Israel, shocked at last by the monstrous crime of these bastards, is waging a war to destroy the Hamas terrorists, who have prepared this war so carefully, planting thousands of shells in all the hospitals, schools, kindergartens… – here the academic world of the whole world has risen up, worried about the “genocide of the Palestinian people”, based, of course, on data provided by… who? That’s right, by the same Hamas, by the same UNRWA… The academic community, which was not concerned about the massacres in Syria, the massacre in Somalia, the mockery of the Uighurs or the millions of Kurds persecuted for decades by the Turkish regime – this very concerned public, wearing “Arafat” around their necks, the trademark of the murderers, rallies under the banners “Free Palestine from the river to the sea! – which means the total destruction of Israel (yes, many of these “academics”, as surveys show, have no idea where this river is, what it is called, where some borders are…). – Now this very public asks me to “take a clear position on this issue”.

Are you serious?! Are you serious?!!

You see, I’m a writer by profession. All my life, for more than fifty years, I have been folding words. My novels have been translated into 40 languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Chinese, Esperanto… and many others.

Now, with great pleasure, without using too many expressions, I sincerely and with all the strength of my soul send all the brainless “intellectuals” interested in my position go to ass. In fact, very soon you will all be there without me”.

Dina Rubina

********************

It’s their loss.

Notice that she says there were 450 UNRWA members at the October 7 massacre. I knew that there were 13 who had been fired, but this higher figure may well be accurate, though I can’t confirm it yet. There are 13,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza, so if it was 450, that would be 3.5% of the entire staff, all present at the butchery.

And I wonder how many Palestinian writers or Arab writers would be asked to “clarify” their position before they gave a book talk.