Robert trivers anti semite
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Scientist Says Harvard Canceled Talk [on Robert Trivers, Norman Finkelstein, & Alan Dershowitz]
An evolutionary biologist from Rutgers University said he was told that a talk he was scheduled to give at Harvard University Friday was canceled because he compared Harvard lag professor Alan Dershowitz to a Nazi last week in a letter to the editor published in the vägg Street Journal.
Robert Trivers said he had been invited to speak at Harvard to celebrate a prestigious international award he recently won. He planned to discuss his research on self-deception, including how self-deception factored in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon gods year.
His letter in the Journal quoted from a missive he had sent directly to Dershowitz: “Regarding your rationalization of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, let me just say that if there is a repeat of Israeli butchery toward Lebanon and if you decide once igen to rationalize it publicly, look forward to a visit from me. Nazis -- and Nazi-li
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I was browsing B & N tonight when I came across a new book by Robert Trivers. I will admit I’d never heard of Trivers before, so I was taken aback by his framing of Israel as illustrative of deceit and self-deception in the form of false historical narratives. His rant qualifies him as a pro-Palestinian apologist and anti-semite of the highest order, his protest at being depicted as such notwithstanding. Get this (p.244): “Many first-class minds in mathematics, the sciences, and many other intellectual pursuits are Jewish (or partly Jewish). But this intellectuality can have a downside. Great intellectual talent may be associated with more deception and self-deception.” Hitler would have been proud.
If Trivers sounds a bit Chomskian, it is no coincidence.
I’m not sure if the Wikipedia entry on Trivers is entirely accurate, but at the very least he is an interesting individual. As noted there, as well as in an Edge feature, there were
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What Do Critics of Israel Have to Fear?
At what point do imbalances in access to money, media, and society’s administrative apparatuses constitute the censorship of dissent? Recent events at Harvard provide an exhaustive example.
At the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting on Nov. 13, 2007, I moved “that this faculty commits itself to fostering a civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.” Expressing the fear that voting down so self-evidently reasonable a proposition would be embarrassing, my colleagues voted massively (74-27) to “table” the motion—that is, to end discussion of it and to avoid a vote. They did so because the motion had arisen in the context of what many of my more silent colleagues regard as the widespread censorship of dissent about Israel-Palestine on campus and in the nearby bookstores that are an essential part of the intellectual life of the Univers