Speaking of Political Purposes…

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” [Yossarian] observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

I’ve been thinking about this story for the last couple of days, and finally decided that, repulsive as it is, I just couldn’t pass on the sheer weirdness of it. It’s a story about the kind of thinking only an academic could love:

A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers’ committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose. [Emphasis added.]

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.”

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers’ eyes.

It could be, of course, that the IDF is too civilized to countenance rape of any kind, much less organized military rape,  which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. And it is also undoubtedly the case that if the IDF was engaged in such a heinous practice, academics such as these would have been howling about war crimes for all they are worth. So, either the  IDF organizes rape and gets accused of war crimes, or Israeli soldiers don’t rape and get accused of de-humanizing Palestinian women. Either way, the military gets branded as pigs. But the head of the academic committee that awarded the prize to this piece of dreck had this to say when contacted by an Israeli TV station:

“I do not have the entire text in front of me,” Gurevitch said, when contacted by Arutz-7, “and I don’t think we can jump to conclusions based on partial sentences, but I can say the following: This was a very serious paper that asked two important questions: Is the relative lack of IDF rapes a noteworthy phenomenon, and if so, why is it that there are so few IDF rapes when in similar situations around the world, rape is much more common?”

Arutz-7: “Can’t it just be that Israeli soldiers come from a culture that very much condemns rape?  And why not mention the much-touted ‘purity of arms,’ i.e., the high moral conduct, of the Israeli Army?”

Gurevitch said that observers do not have the right to demand a particular explanation to a given phenomenon.  He said that the researcher had done a serious job, based on interviews with 25 soldiers and other accounts, and that the right-wing should not jump to the conclusion that this was simply another “secular, left-wing” generality. [Emphasis added.]

So observers can’t ask for explanations, but academics can provide the most dishonest, biased, scurrilous ones they can conjure up. Somewhere, Joseph Heller is wondering, “why didn’t I think of that?”

The World of Designer Babies

Many people have worried about what genetic engineering is going to do to child-bearing. Is it going to be possible to choose your children’s physical traits (height, eye color, etc.)? Is it going to be possible to design out undesirable traits (anything from Down’s Syndrome to cleft palate)? Is it going to be possible to design out traits that some considerable undesirable but others consider normal (homosexuality)? News from Britain via the Times of London offers yet another variation on this theme: what about people who want to design in disabilities:

DEAF parents should be allowed to screen their embryos so they can pick a deaf child over one that has all its senses intact, according to the chief executive of the Royal National Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People (RNID).

Jackie Ballard, a former Liberal Democrat MP, says that although the vast majority of deaf parents would want a child who has normal hearing, a small minority of couples would prefer to create a child who is effectively disabled, to fit in better with the family lifestyle.

Ballard’s stance is likely to be welcomed by other deaf organisations, including the British Deaf Association (BDA), which is campaigning to amend government legislation to allow the creation of babies with disabilities.

A clause in the Human Tissue and Embryos Bill, which is passing through the House of Lords, would make it illegal for parents undergoing embryo screening to choose an embryo with an abnormality if healthy embryos exist.

Weird, isn’t it? The government wants to prevent people from deliberately saddling their children with disabilities, and others insist on the right to do so. Medical professionals aren’t thrilled with the latter’s efforts:

Doctors are opposed to creating deaf babies. Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, medical director of the Bridge Centre, a clinic in London that screens embyros, said: “This would be an abuse of medical technology. Deafness is not the normal state, it is a disability. To deliberately create a deaf embryo would be contrary to the ethos of our society.”

But deafness is now, to some, not just a physical disability but a “cultural” trait, and they want to be able to pass along their “culture” to their children:

Ballard, who previously ran into controversy as director-general of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) where she pushed through extensive job cuts, said in an interview with The Sunday Times: “Most parents would choose to have a hearing embryo, but for those few parents who do not, we think they should be allowed to exercise that choice and we would support them in that decision.

“There are a number of deaf forums where there are discussions about this. There are a small minority of activists who say that there is a cultural identity in being born deaf and that we should not destroy that cultural identity by preventing children from being born deaf.”

Ballard added: “We would like to retain, as far as possible, parental choice, but it has to be in conjunction with a clinician so that people know exactly what they are choosing.”

Ah, choice: the ultimate trump card of our age. I wonder how the Labor-dominated Parliament is going to stand up against that argument.

Francis Murphy, chairman of the BDA, said: “If choice of embryos for implantation is to be given to citizens in general, and if hearing and other people are allowed to choose embryos that will be ‘like them’, sharing the same characteristics, language and culture, then we believe that deaf people should have the same right.”

How deaf people view themselves and their community is up to them. They should leave future children alone, however. Children aren’t a commodity to be manufactured, and these folks have no more right to decide that their children will be deliberately bereft of hearing than they have a right to decide they will be born blind or without legs or with one kidney or with hemophilia.