Western Academics Show Their Complicity With Hamas

Peer-reviewed publishing is a problem

One of the reasons, among many others, that I did not complete the PhD program that I enrolled in pre-COVID was because I found academic writing — both reading and producing it — horrendous. I labored over lengthy papers padded with others’ research only to realize that they had a readership of exactly one person: the professor evaluating it. I vividly remember handing in a research proposal about first-generation college students. The main issue that the professor had with it was my repeated use of the term “minorities” instead of “historically minoritized due to systemic oppression.” I withdrew from the program a month later.

If God forbid the professor teaching the class authored the text on the schedule for that day, one had no choice but to pretend that we were privileged to consume the rare pearl of brilliance that they produced. Academics, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, specialize in esoteric subjects that no one in the real world gives a damn about. Deep down, they all know it.

The public has wisened up somewhat to the general idiocy of peer-reviewed journals. In one infamous example a few years back, a group of scholars submitted a variety of fake papers to modern social justice journals. They covered pedagogically impressive subjects like why heterosexual men like to visit Hooters, and the existence of dog parks as proof of toxic masculine rape culture. Several of the journals accepted and published these articles (the dog park one won an excellence award).

Those authors submitted fake papers as part of a hoax. What I’m about to reveal below is real.

Unfortunately, academic writing does reflect current intellectual trends among the elite. The lunacy lies with the editors running the journals, who are other academics promoting the same thinking. The work inspired by the Israel-Hamas War is no exception. The following examples show how western academics have framed the Israel-Hamas War over the past year, starting with the events of October 7th.

Three weeks after the massacres happened, I ran across a ‘Why Hamas is Not ISIS’ article by a professor of ‘Islamist movements’ at NYU-Abu Dhabi. Here is an excerpt from this genius:

A key difference [between Hamas and ISIS] is their relative religious extremism. Hamas is religiously conservative, but it does not ruthlessly harass or kill non-Muslims in Gaza simply because of their faith or religious comportment. It tolerates women who don’t wear the hijab, people who sport tattoos, and teenagers who listen to American music. Christians and churches also coexist with Muslims in the Hamas-run enclave. None of this would have been possible under ISIS, a far more religiously extremist organization that tortured and mutilated people to compel their adherence to an ultra-radical version of Islam.

One might ask why a professor at an American university located in a dictatorship that currently funnels millions into western institutions felt the need to defend Hamas by producing sophistry. Hamas and ISIS are the same organization, a fact that clearly offends this (female) academic’s sense of social justice. What this “progressive” academic seems to find super significant is that Hamas generously does not kill non-Muslims (does that include Jews?) for their beliefs, although she omits that they’re happy to throw gays off of rooftops. That makes Hamas highly reasonable, and therefore it’s Israel’s fault that they didn’t negotiate with them not to rape, butcher, murder, and kidnap civilians in the same month that this article ran (that’s literally the author’s conclusion, I’m not making that up).

I hoped that after a few months, more academics would start realizing the truth about the situation. Maybe they would understand, for example, that the ‘Gaza Health Ministry’ is simply an arm of Hamas, and that they probably should not buy into their fake data. Boy, was I wrong. The following is some “research” on the subject 2 months into the war:

This article, in what is supposed to be one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, suggests that the high death rate among UNWRA workers supports the civilian casualty numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry. This argument only works if all UNWRA workers were actually civilians. Unfortunately for these researchers, many UNWRA workers not only had Hamas affiliations, but also had direct roles in the October 7th massacres. This rather large blind spot makes this entire article not only inaccurate, but complicit with Hamas. Oops.

In fairness, it’s possible that these researchers did not know about UNWRA’s ties with Hamas at the time they published the above article. But since that rather significant piece of information became known, The Lancet has not issued any corrections or retractions.

It gets better. Only two months after the above article ran, one of its physician authors partnered with Gaza-based UN officials to produce the following as a follow-up in the same journal:

I did a search for how many times this article mentions the term ‘Hamas.’ Results above.

In this bizarre version of reality that these authors have invented, UNWRA is just an organization of noble do-gooders being prevented from providing healthcare. In other words, they choose to portray UNWRA as a victim of this war as opposed to one of the direct causes of it. This portrayal of UNWRA is intellectually dishonest, although I guess it’s plausible if one chooses to pretend that all international organizations have pure intentions and that Hamas does not actually exist.

Now we get to The Lancet’s most recent blunder, the most absurd article yet on this conflict that has made the journal beloved among the viewership of Al Jazeera. It’s the article that estimates the death toll in Gaza to be more than 4x the number agreed upon by both Israel and Hamas:

Both Israel and Hamas estimate the current death toll in Gaza to be ~40,000, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. So 40,000 within a densely populated area of over 2 million people, after 11 months of war. It’s a number that the UN, which has zero interest in making Israel look good and that this journal has cited as a trustworthy authority, has agreed on. In short, this “analysis” from The Lancet is based on the highly scientific process of pulling numbers out of one’s ass.

Peer-reviewed publishing is a farce. It’s been like that for a long time, across most disciplines. The academic community’s superficial analyses of the Israel-Hamas War are simply the most current continuation of the bullshit production. We are on an intellectual race to the bottom. And as we have learned in the past year, some of our most elite institutions have revealed themselves as nothing more than modern incubators of this stupidity.