Monday, October 13, 2008

The evil fruit: An encyclopedia of intellectual fraud

Just as there can be no legitimacy conferred upon an event that inspires people to read "Mein Kampf" and adulate Hitler's projects, there can be no legitimacy for an “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism” to include an entry of "Zionism" among its other entries. Adding insult to injury, the author of this entry is none other than one Noel Ignatiev, a well-known consort of a proven antisemite, and an antisemite in his own right.

Ben Cohen, on Z-word, explains, here.

"... this is not about the vanity of anti-Zionists desperate to achieve dissident status with false claims of being muzzled. It is about an apparently reputable publisher promoting a concoction of myths, distortions and outright lies about Zionism as reliable scholarship, written by someone who doesn’t even think Israel should be there in the first place. And in a world where antisemitism continues to percolate (see here and here for very recent examples), there is much more than standards of scholarship at stake."

The insistence by the publishers to go ahead with the project is indefensible. An encyclopedia is about verifiable knowledge, debatable firm ideas grounded in facts, academic honesty, none of which applies in this case. So why the insistence?

2 Comments:

At 4:47 AM EDT, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

The evil fruitcake comes to mind rather. How can you do this without a juicy ad hominem - it simply escapes me...

 
At 9:04 AM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

I can do a nice ad hom when Jimmy Carter is around. Or some pompous, shallow antisemite-by-proxy comes along.

But these types, they are just not worth the energy.

 

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