summary of main issues in evolution

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/berlinski_on_darwin_on_trial053171.html

Majestic Ascent: Berlinski on Darwin on Trial

Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker in 1985. The appearance of design in nature, Dawkins argued, is an illusion. Complex biological structures may be entirely explained by random variations and natural selection. Why biology should be quite so vested in illusions, Dawkins did not say. The Blind Watchmaker captured the public's imagination, but in securing the public's allegiance, very little was left to chance. Those critics who believed that living systems appear designed because they are designed underwent preemptive attack in the New York Times. "Such are the thought habits of uncultivated intellects," wrote the biologist Michael Ghiselin, " -- children, savages and simpletons."

Comments such as these had the effect of raw meat dropped carelessly among carnivores. A scramble ensued to get the first bite. No one bothered to attack the preposterous Ghiselin. It was Richard Dawkins who had waggled his tempting rear end, and behind Dawkins, fesse à fesse, Charles Darwin. With the publication in 1991 of Darwin on Trial Phil Johnson did what carnivores so often do: He took a bite.

Johnson was at the time a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, a man whose training had given him what great lawyers so often have and that is a shrewd eye for the main chance. Darwin's theory, Johnson observed, is hardly in need of empirical support: It is its own best friend. "The prevailing assumption in evolutionary science," he wrote, "seems to be that speculative possibilities, without experimental confirmation, are all that is really necessary."

This is wrong only to the extent that speculative possibilities without experimental confirmation are often all that is really possible.

Every paleontologist writing since Darwin published his masterpiece in 1859, has known that the fossil record does not support Darwin's theory. The theory predicted a continuum of biological forms, so much so that from the right perspective, species would themselves be seen as taxonomic artifacts, like the classification of certain sizes in men's suiting as husky. Questions about the origin of species were resolved in the best possible way: There are no species and so there is no problem. Inasmuch as the historical record suggested a discrete progression of fixed biological forms, it was fatal to Darwin's project. All the more reason, Darwin argued, to discount the evidence in favor of the theory. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life, the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory."

This is, as Johnson noted, self-serving gibberish.

Few serious biologists are today willing to defend the position that Dawkins expressed in The Blind Watchmaker. The metaphor remains stunning and so the watchmaker remains blind, but he is now deaf and dumb as well. With a few more impediments, he may as well be dead. The publication in 1983 of Motoo Kimura's The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution consolidated ideas that Kimura had introduced in the late 1960s. On the molecular level, evolution is entirely stochastic, and if it proceeds at all, it proceeds by drift along a leaves-and-current model. Kimura's theories left the emergence of complex biological structures an enigma, but they played an important role in the local economy of belief. They allowed biologists to affirm that they welcomed responsible criticism. "A critique of neo-Darwinism," the Dutch biologist Gert Korthof boasted, "can be incorporated into neo-Darwinism if there is evidence and a good theory, which contributes to the progress of science."

By this standard, if the Archangel Gabriel were to accept personal responsibility for the Cambrian explosion, his views would be widely described as neo-Darwinian.

In Darwin on Trial, Johnson ascended majestically above the usual point of skepticism. It was the great case of Darwin et al v. the Western Religious Tradition that occupied his attention. The issue had been joined long before Johnson wrote. But the case had not been decided. It had not been decisively decided and like some terrifying cripple, it had continued to bang its crutches through all the lower courts of Hell and Dover, Pennsylvania.

A few nodding judges such as Stephen Jay Gould thought to settle the matter by splitting the difference between litigants. To science, Gould assigned everything of importance, and to religion, nothing. Such was his theory of non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, a term very much suggesting that Gould was endowing a new wing at the Museum of Modern Art. Serving two masters, Gould supposed that he would be served by them in turn. He was mistaken. In approaching Darwin's theory of evolution, theistic evolutionists acquired a posture of expectant veneration, imagining hopefully that their deference would allow them to lick the plates from various scientific tables. They were in short order assured that having settled for nothing, nothing is what they would get. From the likes of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, Gould got what he deserved.

And from Phillip Johnson too, but in a different way and with different ends in mind.

The scientific establishment had long believed that in res Darwin et al v. The Western Religious Tradition, Darwin would prevail. They expected to be assigned governance over the ideology of a democratic society. Their palms had collectively commenced to itch. Newspapers hymned Darwin's praise, and television documentaries -- breathless narrator, buggy jungle -- celebrated his achievement. Museum curators rushed to construct Darwinian dioramas in which human beings were shown ascending, step by step, from some ancient simian conclave, one suspiciously like the faculty lounge at Harvard. A very considerable apparatus or propaganda and persuasion was put at the disposal of the Darwinian community.

And, yet, no matter the extent to which Darwin's theory was said to be beyond both reappraisal and reproach, the conviction remained current that it was not so, and if so, not entirely so.

"Why not consider," Johnson asked, "the possibility that life is what it so evidently seems to be, the product of creative intelligence?"

The question is entirely reasonable. It is the question that every thoughtful person is inclined to ask.

So why not ask it?

No standard by which science is justified as an institution rules it out. The ones commonly employed -- naturalism, falsifiability, materialism, methodological naturalism -- are useless as standards because transparent as dodges.

The geneticist Richard Lewontin -- Harvard, oddly enough -- provided an answer to Johnson's question that is a masterpiece of primitive simplicity. It surely deserves to be quoted at length and quoted in full:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

There is much in these remarks that is analytically defective. The "commitment to materialism" that Lewontin defends is hardly clear enough to merit rebuttal. The history of physics suggests the maxim that anything goes if something works. It is as useful a maxim in mathematical physics as it is in international finance.

Nonetheless, Lewontin, as Johnson understood, had properly grasped the dynamics of the Great Case, its inner meaning. What remains when materialism (or anything else) is subtracted from Lewontin's prior commitment is the prior commitment itself; and like all such commitments, it is a commitment no matter what. Had they read the New York Review of Books, mullahs in Afghanistan would have understood Lewontin perfectly. They would have scrupled only at the side he had chosen.

Darwin's theories are correspondingly less important for what they explain, which is very little, and more important for what they deny, which is roughly the plain evidence of our senses. "Darwin," Richard Dawkins noted amiably, "had made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

But the Great Case, Johnson reminded his readers, has not yet been decided in the only court that counts, and that is the considered reflection of the human race. Efforts by one side to absent themselves from judgment are somewhat premature. Too much is at stake.

That much is at stake explains a good deal about the rhetoric of discussion in the United States, its vile tone. Biologists such as Jerry Coyne, Donald Prothero, Larry Moran or P.Z. Myers are of the opinion that if they cannot win the argument, they had better not lose it, and what better way not to lose an argument than to abuse one's antagonist? If necessary, the biological establishment has been quite willing to demand of the Federal Courts that they do what it has been unable to do in the court of public opinion. If the law is unwilling to act on their behalf, they are quite prepared to ignore it. Having been spooked by some tedious Darwinian toady, the California Science Center cancelled with blithe unconcern a contract to show a film about the Cambrian explosion. Spooked by some other Darwinian toady, the Department of Physics at the University of Kentucky denied the astronomer Martin Gaskell an appointment in astrophysics that he plainly was due.

The California Science Center paid up.

The University of Kentucky paid up.

As Philip Johnson might well have reminded them, the law is a knife that cuts two ways.

At the Discovery Institute we often offer an inter-faith Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Almighty for the likes of P.Z. Myers, Larry Moran, Barbara Forrest, Rob Pennock and Jeffrey Shallit.

For Donald Prothero, we are prepared to sacrifice a ram.

And now? Both critics and defenders of Darwin's theory have been humbled by the evidence. We are the beneficiaries of twenty years of brilliant and penetrating laboratory work in molecular biology and biochemistry. Living systems are more complex than ever before imagined. They are strange in their organization and nature. No theory is remotely adequate to the facts.

There is some evidence that once again, the diapason of opinion is being changed. The claims of intelligent design are too insistent and too plausible to be frivolously dismissed and the inadequacies of any Darwinian theory too obvious to be tolerated frivolously. Time has confirmed what critics like Phil Johnson have always suspected. Darwin's theory is far less a scientific theory than the default position for a view in which the universe and everything in it assembles itself from itself in a never-ending magical procession. The religious tradition and with it, a sense for the mystery, terror and grandeur of life, has always embodied insights that were never trivial.

The land is rising even as it sinks.

And this, too, is a message that Phil Johnson was pleased to convey.

no explanation of consciousness

See http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/post_33052491.html:

Darwinian Psychologist David Barash Admits the Seeming Insolubility of Science's "Hardest Problem"
Evolution News & Views November 1, 2011 12:03 PM | Permalink

Our local U. of Washington psychology professor and Darwin advocate David P. Barash comes from the "My Back Hurts Therefore It Wasn't Designed" school of evolutionary thought, as he wrote in an L.A. Times op-ed a few years back ("Does God Have Back Problems Too?"). It's a nice surprise, then, to find him confessing what he regards as the seeming impossibility of imagining a material explanation for the "hardest problem in science."

Which is? "How the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth, what philosophers call 'the hard problem of consciousness.'" Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Barash concedes that to say the problem is "hard" considerably understates the problem. He writes as "an utter and absolute, dyed-in-the-wool, scientifically oriented, hard-headed, empirically insistent, atheistically committed materialist, altogether certain that matter and energy rule the world, not mystical abracadabra." Yet:

It's a hard one indeed, so hard that despite an immense amount of research attention devoted to neurobiology, and despite great advances in our knowledge, I don't believe we are significantly closer to bridging the gap between that which is physical, anatomical and electro-neurochemical, and what is subjectively experienced by all of us ... or at least by me. (I dunno about you!)
...

To be sure, there are lots of other hard problems, such as the perennial one of reconciling quantum theory with relativity, whether life exists on other planets, how action can occur at a distance (gravity, the attraction of opposite charges), how cells differentiate, and so forth. But in these and other cases, I can at least envisage possible solutions, even though none of mine actually work.

But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can't even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don't even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run. Let's say that a particular cerebral nucleus was found, existing only in conscious creatures. Would that solve it? Or maybe a specific molecule, synthesized only in the heat of subjective mental functioning, increasing in quantity in proportion as sensations are increasingly vivid, disappearing with unconsciousness, and present in diminished quantity from human to hippo to herring to hemlock tree. Or maybe a kind of reverberating electrical circuit. I'd be utterly fascinated by any of these findings, or any of an immense number of easily imagined alternatives. But satisfied? Not one bit.

Barash can get away with saying this, but we congratulate him for doing so all the same. Our friend James Le Fanu said it already, however, with his characteristic elegance in his wonderful book Why Us? ENV's David Klinghoffer summarized in our review:
[P]hysical explanations of how [the brain] gives rise to the mind consistently explode upon takeoff. The brain is no computer, where every operation can be traced to physically describable events: "Neither the findings of the PET scanner nor Professor [Eric] Kandel's scientific explanations can begin to account for the power of memory to retain...visual images over decades and retrieve them at will, any more than they can account for remembering the words of a familiar hymn or recalling a telephone number."
That's just for starters. The brain-computer analogy utterly fails to clarify how "just a few thousand genes might instruct the arrangement of those billions of neurons with their 'hardwired' faculties of language and mathematics."

And a good thing that is, too. Because if the mind really did reside entirely in the brain, if the mind were genuinely reducible to the brain, that would mean the end of free will -- a computer ultimately can do only what it's programmed to do (in this case, programmed by a mindless nature) -- and that in turn would spell the end of moral responsibility.

Of course Barash says he's confident that a solution will be found, and that would have to be so, since he's also said that science compels us to reject a belief in free will: "There can be no such thing as free will for the committed scientist."
We've long thought that the issue of whether men and women are free and thus morally responsible is the real nub of all the issues that divide materialists from theists.

the death of Steve Jobs

Written by my brother:

Steve Jobs -- Rest In Peace, But Let's Not Overdo It

Amid the spasm of media hype about Steve Jobs -- I've heard people say he was our Edison, our Disney and as important as JFK, that he shaped our lives, changed our lives, improved our lives. I want to offer a dissenting voice.

Now I have nothing against Jobs, who certainly was brilliant and highly creative, combining incredible business sense with a unique intuitive grasp of how people relate to gadgets. And I have nothing against computers, of which I've owned several and in front of which I spend far too much time; or against, for that matter, gadgets. I'm on my 5th mp3 player, which is packed to the gills with my favorite music.

But it is a sign of the incredible spiritual poverty of our time that gadgets like an iPhone or an iPod can be thought of as things which fundamentally change our lives, for they do not. They make for some conveniences and some pleasures, certainly, but conveniences and pleasures are not really the center of our lives; or if they are, that tells us something deeply sad in and of itself.

For example: now that I can carry a hundred and fifty hours of music on a device slightly bigger than a fat credit card, do I understand the music any better? Do I appreciate it more than when I had to take an old LP out of cardboard sleeve, put it on the turntable, and place the needle on the grooves? Having all that glorious sound at my disposal, in three seconds to be able to choose from thousands of tracks of classical, Jazz, new age, pop, or folk -- does it make me love it more? Or just trivialize the experience so that I take it all for granted?

More important, far more important: now that I have a cell phone and can "reach out and touch" anyone of my contacts with a quick call or quicker text, do I care about any of them more deeply? Am I any better at keeping in touch with people I haven't talked to for awhile, or healing wounds from the past, or dealing with differences that arise within my family? Am I more honest about what I feel? More compassionate about other people's suffering? Any less likely to show off when I get an article published or gossip about some third party who both my phone pal and I dislike?

If you have a cell phone (which, unlike mine, is a stripped down model which pretty much just makes and receives phone calls) which takes videos, plays games, reads bar codes, provide instant maps to anywhere, and can use the half million or so apps available, are you a better person than you were before you got it? Any more able to handle questions of life and death, to face aging or illness, pain or disappointment? Is a world of terrorism and imperialism, environmental blight and staggering debt, hunger and poverty and sexual violence less frightening?

I heard all about "there's an app for that." Is there one for wisdom?

The answer, it seems to me, to just about every one of these questions is a resounding 'No.' And in just that sense our lives have been barely touched by anything Jobs did. They are the same as they have always been. Perhaps, in fact, they are a little worse: we are more distracted, less able to focus on what is important because we are too busy filling our mp3 players, surfing the web from our smart phones, or doing god knows what on our iPads. Having so much, we have too much. Having so much to do, we do too little that matters.

Is life 'easier' with all these 'conveniences'? In many ways, again, the answer is "not really." Because I have email and wireless connection, I can work anywhere, anytime. Gee, that's... really... great. Except now "time off" is virtually impossible. Because I can talk on the phone anywhere, people can be pissed off if I don't answer their calls. Because I have so much music available on my satellite radio (slogan: everything, all the time) I can switch stations until I find something I like instead of actually listening to something new and developing my taste. The machines replace our memories, our capacity to amuse ourselves if there are no batteries around and our face to face engagements with other humans.

Some convenience.

The essential tasks of life -- how to be kind, good, and wise; how to control one's mind and order one's emotions and desires; how to connect to other people and other species with compassion -- no machine will take away the essential difficulty of such things. In a time when we are constantly offered things to "make life easier" it might do us good to remember, as Kierkegaard was fond of saying, that sometime what's needed is a little more difficulty.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs, and thanks a lot for the toys. And now let's get back to the essential task of being better human beings.

defense of Israel

A friend sent this critique of the student boycott of Israel and Edinburgh University - well worth reading.


A Scottish professor responds to campus boycott. The Edinburgh Student's Association made a motion to boycott all things Israeli since they claim Israel is under an apartheid regime. Dr. Denis Maceoin (a non-Jew) is an expert in Middle Eastern affairs. Here is his letter to those students.

Dr. Denis MacEoin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, addresses The Committee of the Edinburgh University Student Association.



Received by e-mail from the author, Dr. Denis MacEoin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly,


TO: The Committee Edinburgh University Student Association.

May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain's great Middle East experts in their day.



I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field. I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote.



I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.



Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I'm not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I'm speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a "Nazi" state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for.



It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.



Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education.



The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country's 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha'is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population).



In Iran, the Bahai's (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren't your members boycotting Iran? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews - something no blacks were able to do in South Africa.



Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.



In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid….*

It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief.



….*


University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak.



I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it's clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens.



Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world's freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, ….*, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahai's.... Need I go on?



The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument.



They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930's (which, sadly, there was not), don't you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it?



Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense. I have given you some of the evidence. It's up to you to find out more.



Yours sincerely,



Denis MacEoin

*[The article has been slightly shortened for reader of this blog. If you wish to see the original, here is the link: http://israelseen.com/2011/07/27/denis-maceoin-open-letter-to-the-edinburgh-university-student-association-on-boycotting-israel/]


--

consistent prejudice

I suppose it is not news, but a reminder might still be in place:

Opinion

ZOA Details Obama's Hostility to Israel

From Morton Klein, ZOA Nat. Pres.

Is President Obama hostile to Jews and Israel? Let˙s look at the evidence.

Last week, the Obama Administration issued talking points for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where it referred to those struck by terrorism˛whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London. Conspicuously absent was the name of Tel Aviv,
Jerusalem or Sderot, which have been hit by terrorists, not once, but numerous times.

As a single instance, this omission might be unremarkable. In fact, however, omitting mention of Israel fits a pattern. When running for President,
then-Senator Obama referred in his July 2008 Berlin speech to the need to˛dismantle the [terrorist] networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York.
Again, no Israel.

It seems hard to believe that these omissions could be anything other than intentional. After all, Israel has been a primary target of terrorists
throughout the past decade. Almost 2,000 Israelis have been murdered by terrorists in this period and over 10,000 maimed or disfigured. In per
capita terms, far more Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than Americans were murdered in 9/11.

Obama also omits Israel in other contexts. Thus, when Haiti was struck by a calamitous earthquake in January 2010, Israel˙s relief efforts were exceptional, only matched by those of the United States, and were singled out for praise by former President Clinton. However, in praising these
relief efforts, Obama omitted any mention of Israel, saying only that help continues to flow in, not just from the United States but from Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others.

While Obama has more or less consistently failed to hold accountable or penalize the PA for incitement to violence against Israel, he has been
emphatic and repetitive attacking Jewish housing projects in eastern Jerusalem as an obstacle to peace. His Administration has used the terms condemn,
an insult and an affront when expressing disagreement with Israel on this issue, terms never used about other allies.

That Obama blames Israel, not the Palestinians, for the absence of peace is obvious. In a January 2010 interview, despite Israel˙s acceptance
in-principle of a Palestinian state, readiness to negotiate and instituting an unprecedented 10-month Jewish construction freeze in Judea and Samaria,
Obama said Israel had made no bold gestures.

In a March 2011 meeting with Jewish leaders (attended by Mort Klein), Obama contended that Israel’s [Palestinian] partner is sincere in wanting a peaceful settlement, while asking his Jewish interlocutors to speak to your Israeli friends and relatives and search your souls to determine how badly do you really want peace, and Israelis think this peace process is overrated.

Note also the contrast between his holiday messages to Jews and to Muslims. In his Rosh Hashanah message last year, Obama only once referred to Jews, not once to Judaism, promoted a Palestinian state, and never mentioned the extraordinary contributions of Jews to the U.S.

In contrast, in his August 2010 Ramadan Message, Obama referred to Muslims six times and to Islam twice, stated that American Muslims have made
extraordinary contributions to our country, and praised Islam˙s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings a faith known for great diversity and racial equality

Here, Obama, made no reference to what Muslims must do to achieve peace with Israel.

There are many other indicators of Obama evincing discomfort around Jewish matters. When, in May 2010, Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act, he did not mention that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was beheaded by Islamist terrorists because he was a Jew and that he was forced to state in the video recorded of his gruesome murder that he was an American Jew.

Instead, Obama merely referred to Pearl˙s loss.

And let˙s not forget Obama˙s June 2009 Cairo speech, in which he compared the circumstances of Palestinians under Israeli rule to Jews under the Nazis and blacks under Apartheid.

Nor his September 2009 UN speech, in which Obama couple[d] unwavering commitment to Israel with Israel respecting the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.

These incidents, some important, some less so, have assumed a troubling pattern. They suggest that President Obama has a distaste or even hostility towards Jews and Israel.

But should we be surprised? He spent twenty years absorbing the anti-Israel sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama has called a great man, his friend and Mentor.

anti-left on truth, facts etc.

Very worthwhile anti-left explanation


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/05/bill_whittle_on_far-lefts_view_of_truth.html

The need for Torah objecitvity

A friend sent me the following quote. I have learned the same lesson personally through discovering my own prejudices due to my training in philosophy.

R' Shimon Schwab
Selected Essays pg 151 [emphasis added]

“Finally, there is one important reason that the sincere Torah im derech eretz scholar should actively support the “Torah Only” school. It is possible that the occupation with secular philosophy has imperceptibly tainted the indigenous purity of genuine Torah thinking. Perhaps the invasion of foreign ideas has beclouded the genuine and original Jewish predispositions and attitudes. Subconsciously, our inner directions may have changed ever so slightly. In those circumstances, who would discover the change? It is the “Torah Only” scholar who would be quick to notice a deviation from the genuine pattern. And his reaction would be to call immediate attention to the slightest foreign intrusion.
All those who need a reliable compass for the windy passage through unchartered seas of Jewish Weltanschnauung should therefore welcome the “Torah Only” school as a sounding board and testing ground for creative Jewish thinking today.”