amnesty

 

The Harvard Crimson reports:

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said military action is not a legally sufficient answer to accusations of genocide at a Harvard Law School talk Wednesday afternoon.

An HLS alum, O’Brien said he came to the Law School to preview a forthcoming article in the Harvard Human Rights Journal about laws surrounding genocide and their application to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“There can be multiple intents. A military actor who has legitimate military goals can intend the genocide in order to accomplish those goals,” O’Brien said at the talk, hosted by the HHRJ. “It can be a means to a military end.”

Based on this reading of human rights law, O’Brien and Amnesty International published a report in December that argued Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

...According to O’Brien, Amnesty eventually established that Israel had “a disregard, and credibly, an intention to destroy the civilian population” in Gaza — a conclusion that allowed the organization to publish its findings.

I don't know if students were allowed to ask questions at the lecture. but here are the questions that should have been asked - that would have demolished O'Brien's entire talk.

1. Isn't it true that Amnesty's report used a definition of genocide that was not accepted by the majority of judges of the International Court of Justice? Your report called the ICJ opinion of what constitutes intent to be "overly cramped."  In fact, Ireland asked the ICJ to broaden its own definition of intent of genocide when it joined South Africa's case.  If you are using a non-standard definition, how can you declare Israel's actions to be genocide as lex lata, the law as it exists?

2. Isn't it true that Amnesty staffers internally and informally called the report the "genocide report" before it was even written, meaning that Amnesty intended to twist the facts - and ignore others - to reach a preconceived conclusion? This was stated in a letter by Jewish Amnesty staffers, including some senior employees. Are they lying? 

In fact, according to your Harvard speech as reported, you said that the determination of Israel's intent to perform genocide was "a conclusion that allowed the organization to publish its findings" - does that mean that you wouldn't have published the report if it hadn't concluded that Israel was guilty of genocide? Wasn't this a predetermined conclusion? 

3. The report in the Crimson says you hoped your talk would confirm the value of 'free expression' and 'reasonable debate' on difficult issues.  Amnesty Israel - who, curiously, were not involved in  researching or writing the report despite their obvious expertise in the region - wrote a very serious, reasoned and detailed response refuting the accusation of genocide. Instead of answering Amnesty Israel's points, Amnesty suspended the Israeli branch of the organization, saying that dissenting opinions threaten the "operational coherence" of the organization. How does that fit with your stated ideals of "free expression" and "reasonable debate"? Amnesty shut down the debate!

Moreover, Amnesty justified this suspension by invoking Article 34 of the Statute of Amnesty International. Yet Article 34 does not say it must protect the "operational coherence" of Amnesty, it says it must protect the "operation" of Amnesty - a completely different thing. Did Amnesty make up a new rule just to expel the meddlesome Israeli Jews?

As far as I can tell, the speech at Harvard does not even attempt to answer the many serious criticisms of the Amnesty report. O'Brien simply restates what the report says. 

That is not the debate that O'Brien claims to value. On the contrary, Amnesty has done everything it can to shut down any dissenting opinions within its power. It acts exactly like the dictators that it is supposed to be exposing.

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ai

 Last week, AP published a long article about how the IDF uses artificial intelligence. 

Like other articles, it fundamentally misunderstands how it is being used. 

The bias is clear in the first paragraphs:

U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. But the number of civilians killed has also soared, fueling fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people.

No, the number of innocent people killed are a direct result of Hamas embedding itself among the civlian population. If AI was responsible for more civilian deaths, then wouldn't we have seen far more civilians die in Lebanon, where Israel is using the same AI systems to assist targeting as they use in Gaza? Yet the ratio of civilians to terrorists killed in Lebanon was quite low, hundreds compared to thousands. 

Militaries have for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel’s recent wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the United States have been used in active warfare, despite concerns that they were not originally developed to help decide who lives and who dies.

The first sentence plus the "However," implies that Israel's AI systems are autonomous weapons. They aren't. They are software tools to go through enormous amounts of data to find valuable information. 

IDF policy for years has been that life and death decisions must be made by humans, not autonomously by machines. AP's use of "autonomous" here is highly deceptive.

The main new point of the article is that Israel us using commercial AI products from Microsoft and OpenAI in some of its data analysis. 

“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

What does she mean by "directly"? Israel would not use commercial software for actual warfare, for the simple reason that commercial software is not designed for that - the requirements in warfare are far stricter.

As the article says later, Israel's use of Microsoft Azure is mostly for translation, transcription and searching huge amounts of data. That is not "direct" use in war. The quote is either a lie on her part of AP's not telling her what it knew itself.

But Khlaaf is not exactly an impartial scientist.. She called the war in Gaza a genocide - on October 13, 2023. 

As U.S. tech titans ascend to prominent roles under President Donald Trump, the AP’s findings raise questions about Silicon Valley’s role in the future of automated warfare.

Again, Israel is not engaging in automated warfare. AP knows this, so it only implies it - over and over again.

Finally, AP quotes the truth after 10 paragraphs of sly innuendo of Israel building war robots:

The Israeli military says its analysts use AI-enabled systems to help identify targets but independently examine them together with high-ranking officers to meet international law, weighing the military advantage against the collateral damage. A senior Israeli intelligence official authorized to speak to the AP said lawful military targets may include combatants fighting against Israel, wherever they are, and buildings used by militants. Officials insist that even when AI plays a role, there are always several layers of humans in the loop.

“These AI tools make the intelligence process more accurate and more effective,” said an Israeli military statement to the AP. “⁠They make more targets faster, but not at the expense of accuracy, and many times in this war they’ve been able to minimize civilian casualties.”

Another nugget of truth:

It’s extremely hard to identify when AI systems enable errors because they are used with so many other forms of intelligence, including human intelligence, sources said. But together they can lead to wrongful deaths.

Which means that the errors are nearly always human - mistakes in data being input, mistakes in interpreting it. 

The real question, that AP doesn't answer, is what percentage of human decisions are mistakes and what percentage of AI plus human oversight are mistakes? Looking at AI in a vacuum and not comparing it with the alternative is simply bad reporting. 

The article notes that AI can make mistakes in translations, and quotes an expert:

 “Should we be basing these decisions on things that the model could be making up?” said Joshua Kroll, an assistant professor of computer science.

 But after that incendiary accusation, AP adds almost skeptically:

The Israeli military said any phone conversation translated from Arabic or intelligence used in identifying a target has to be reviewed by an Arabic-speaking officer. 

(I often use automated translation tools for my writing, but if anything seems off, I will verify with either other tools or with a human expert. My writings are not life or death. Anyone assuming that an army would kill someone based on a single tenuous piece of information is not an honest person.)

The article lists potential mistakes that anonymous IDF officers admit to have seen in AI, like  mistranslations or mislabeling a spreadsheet. But these are errors that humans can do too - and worse - and in these cases, the human oversight found the errors. If IDF workers don't follow procedure and ensure that data is verified, that is a problem that must be solved, but it is no different from any other army grunt not following proper procedures.

AP also seems shocked that Israeli employees at Microsoft might be - shudder - patriotic:

Microsoft also operates a 46,000-square-meter corporate campus in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and another office in Gav-Yam in southern Israel, which has displayed a large Israeli flag.

Horrors! Israeli employees are Zionist!

Finally, the article quotes anti-Israel tech people to inject more fear in the reader:

Former Google software engineer Emaan Haseem was among those fired. Haseem said she worked on a team that helped test the reliability of a “sovereign cloud” — a secure system of servers kept so separate from the rest of Google’s global cloud infrastructure that even the company itself couldn’t access or track the data it stores. She later learned through media reports that Google was building a sovereign cloud for Israel.

“It seemed to be more and more obvious that we are literally just trying to design something where we won’t have to care about how our clients are using it, and if they’re using it unfairly or unethically,” Haseem said.

The entire point of sovereign clouds is for regulatory and security reasons. Some data is not allowed to cross national lines for various reasons, including higher security. It is not something Google created for Israel - it is meant to safeguard the data. Haseem is saying that cloud companies should be responsible for how their services are used and act as Big Brother to ensure that it fits their own standards. 

If that was true, they would have no customers. 

Altogether, this is a hugely biased article of the sort we've seen often in major media. There are no direct lies, but it was written deliberately to imply that something really evil is happening when there is none. 

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palstudies

 My Monday post joking about me applying for the job of "Palestinian Studies" instructor at Hunter College may have been tongue in cheek, but the description of the job itself points to a very uncomfortable fact: The entire field of Palestine Studies should really be called Anti-Zionism, and its obsession with Israel makes it a truly antisemitic field.

Let's review the fields that Hunter wants the candidates to be familiar with:

We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender and sexuality.

Notice what is missing. Nothing about Palestinian politics, or culture, or history. Nothing about how Palestinian women or children or gays live outside the prism of "occupation."  Nothing about how Palestinians treat animals or the environment. Nothing about how Palestinian Arabs live outside the territories, and the challenges they face as second-class residents in the Arab world for generations. 

Most glaringly, nothing about Palestinian terror or "resistance," which is a fundamental part of Palestinian psyche. Most Palestinians support murdering Jews, in poll after poll taken after specific terror attacks. Palestinians consider salaries for terrorists to be the most important budget item for their government. They name schools and sports contests after murderers. 

If Palestine Studies was a legitimate, objective field, why is it so centered on slandering Israel?  All of the listed issues, without exception, are mainly about attacking Israel, not studying Arab Palestine. (I have sometimes seen papers on topics like Palestinian women's health or other issues that don't revolve around blaming Israel, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.) 

This job description shows that there is no room in Palestine Studies for debate on its core tenets. The field postulates that Israel is guilty of apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism. One cannot advance in the field of Palestine Studies without accepting those lies as axioms. 

And yes, they are lies. But even if you do not accept that they are lies, you must admit that there are some excellent arguments on the other side of those issues. Within the bubble of Palestine Studies, however, these are settled issues. Any other opinion is not only unthinkable; anyone in the field who dares contradict the orthodoxy would be canceled and lose their jobs. Palestine Studies is as objective as a Yemeni Studies program where the only valid point of view is that of the Houthis.

Palestine Studies exists as merely an excuse for putting a scholarly facade on old fashioned Israel bashing. It is not an organic yearning to study Arab Palestine but purely a reaction to, and forum for attacking, Israel.

If you think that I am overly generalizing from Hunter College's job description, let's look at how the field is described in the website of Istiqlal University in Jericho. The "Educational Objectives and Outcomes" include:

Finding a Palestinian elite capable of engaging in a sharp, serious, scientific, academic, and cognitive engagement with Israel’s political, intellectual, religious, and historical system and its narratives that target the Palestinian cause.

Strengthening the Palestinian presence in the Arab collective memory, which Israel has begun to target through cultural normalization, and filling this void only through a solid and academic Palestinian presence.

The truth is not a goal. Countering Zionist narratives is. 

 And what kind of job can one expect to get after achieving a masters degree in Palestine Studies? Among others, according to the site, is working on boycott campaigns against Israel!

Or look at how the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS University of London chooses to illustrate its program - with a picture of a defensive barrier Israel constructed to limit Palestinian terror attacks against Jews but framing it as prison walls. 

Their description of their fields of study is, again, Israel-centered (and also inaccurate.)

The question of Palestine and the lack of resolution to the so-called conflict with Israel has implicated various countries across the Middle East and North Africa and further afield. Palestinian refugees remain the largest body of refugees in the world, Palestine is the theatre of the longest ongoing illegal occupation recognised as such in international law, Palestinian holders of Israeli citizenship have been permanently engaged in fighting for their rights, and a wide range of social and political movements locally and globally claim to represent the Palestinian voice.

The best known purveyor of Palestine Studies is the Institute for Palestine Studies. They held their third annual Palestine Forum in Doha last month. The forum featured over  hundred presentations over three days. Virtually every paper features or centers an anti-Israel component; even a lecture on Palestinian graffiti is based around the artwork drawn on the separation barrier. 

If the field has nothing to say about Palestinians without referring to Israel, that is a strong indication that Palestine Studies, and indeed Palestinian nationalism as a whole, is a reaction and counter to Zionism that has little to do with "Palestine."  In Palestine Studies, Palestinians themselves become bit players in a grand anti-Israel narrative. They are defined purely in relation to Israel.

If Israel didn't exist, neither would Palestine Studies. 

Let's compare with Israel Studies. There are lots of people in Israel Studies programs who are anti-Zionist, who are passionate critics of Israel, even professors who would accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide. Being an anti-Zionist does not automatically disqualify someone from the field of Israel Studies. 

Do you think there is a single Zionist instructor in Palestine Studies? The very idea is laughable. 

All of this makes Palestine Studies a dogma, not an academic field. It is as scholarly as a Flat Earth society that debates whether the Earth is shaped like a circle or a square. 

Since Palestine Studies is wholly congruent with anti-Zionism, that makes it effectively antisemitic. As Professor Andrew Pessin comprehensively demonstrates and as Jews worldwide can feel in their bones, anti-Zionism is largely a form of antisemitism. They are both characterized by the irrationality and obsessive hate of their believers. My book gives example after example of how anti-Zionism is modern antisemitism. 

There is one major difference between how antisemitism infiltrated German universities in the 1930s and how modern antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism has invaded Western academia. That difference is not complimentary towards today's academic antisemites.

The Nazis fired all professors who were Jewish or who didn't accept the racial purity beliefs of the Third Reich. They imposed antisemitism into all academic fields from the top down. 

Today, no government is forcing the antisemitism/anti-Zionism that is rife in academia now. It is the  academics themselves who are embracing a fundamentally hateful, anti-intellectual philosophy and imposing a set of beliefs that are utterly at odds with both the truth and with free inquiry. Palestine Studies may have been designed to make anti-Zionism (and therefore antisemitism) acceptable, but its false ideas have infected the rest of the social sciences and is moving into every conceivable academic field. It is almost comical to see how students and academics try to find new, novel crimes to accuse Israel of. 

The German professors had no choice but to embrace antisemitic philosophy. Today's Western academics are too often the trendsetters for modern antisemitism. 

Any objective review of Palestine Studies leads one to that conclusion. 

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hunter

 Here is part of an advertised faculty position at Hunter College:

 As part of a Palestine Studies cluster hire, Hunter College is honored to announce its search for an open rank tenure-line professor in one of the social sciences who would join one or more of the departments of Anthropology, History, Sociology, Political Science, or Women’s and Gender Studies. This position is one of two positions in Palestine studies. The other search, in the humanities, can be found here (ADD).

We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender and sexuality. We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. We seek candidates interested in public-facing work and who exhibit a commitment to being part of the life of the college, a diverse and exciting undergraduate minority serving institution.

I think I am the perfect candidate. I have written extensively on the topic for over twenty years; I've authored books, articles and given lectures and podcasts on these topics. My ideas have been taught at Ivy League universities and quoted in numerous scholarly works. 

Since they are seeking diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, they might find my ideas on their specific topics mentioned a bit revolutionary, but certainly well founded and with lots of factual support:

- Palestinian nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon, about a century old, created purely as a reaction and counter to modern Zionism. This remains the case today as Palestinian leaders have shown far less interest in creating a state than in destroying the Jewish state.

- The concept of settler-colonialism does not apply to Jews in Israel, who have had a deep psychological and spiritual connection to the land of Israel for millennia. Part of this connection is no doubt due to their being attacked as outsiders no matter how long they lived in their host countries. The irony of Jews now being considered white Europeans after centuries of European antisemitism and marginalization, including racial antisemitism, is just one of the topics that deserve more coverage in academia. 

- Genocide requires intent. There is no intent by the State of Israel to destroy the Palestinian people, and every single attempt to fabricate such intent by ignoring counterevidence or taking quotes out of context is pure antisemitism, specifically the disgusting need by so many to accuse Jews of being as bad or worse than the Nazis. 

- There are real issues with human rights of Palestinians. They must be balanced with the human rights of Israeli citizens. As with every nation on Earth, the rights of citizens are prioritized over the rights of those who are dedicated to destroying their nation. 

- There is no apartheid in Israel against its Arab citizens by any definition of apartheid, and the concept of apartheid does not apply to non-citizens, by definition.

- Palestinians by and large migrated from their homes in 1948 without being forced out. Most simply fled a war zone. The only reason they have not been integrated into the lands they moved to like all other refugees is because of deep Arab antisemitism and shame at having lost a war to the despised, weak Jews.  It would be a wonderful academic exercise to compare, say, Egyptian or Jordanian attitudes towards refugees from Syria, Iraq and Sudan with those who are considered Palestinian. For some reason, I haven't found any such study.

- Blaming Israel for climate change is absurd on the face of it to anyone who has the ability to look at a world map and try to find the several pixels that represent Israel. 

After I wrote this I decided to actually count the pixels in the first world map I searched for. Out of the 739,000 pixels in that map, no more than 25 are Israel, maybe 2 are Gaza. The word "Israel" takes up about five times the area of Israel itself.

Most of the professors in the fields mentioned are innumerate, so I already have a huge advantage over most social sciences academics. 

- Gaza's infrastructure has indeed been devastated. This is entirely due to Hamas using all of Gaza's infrastructure for military purposes, which makes them valid military targets according to international law.

- I have done serious analysis of accusations of health issues against Israel in The Lancet. They have all been shown to be baseless. I am willing to bet that my knowledge of no more than arithmetic and how to use spreadsheets goes way beyond any other candidate Hunter is considering. 

- I have no idea what race has to do with the Israel-Arab conflict. I would suggest that to try to shoehorn Israeli Jews as "white" and Arabs as "people of color" into other constructs is itself racist and antisemitic.

- I have no idea what gender has to do with the conflict. I would suggest that any claim that Israel specifically attacks Palestinian women is antisemitic.

- There is plenty to speak about on sexuality in the region - Palestinian laws specifically against women and gays, for example. I am as qualified as any to discuss it. It is hardly my area of expertise but since it is a topic that is all but ignored by mainstream academia I am pretty much as much of an expert as anyone else being considered for the position. Of course, if the only discussion of sexuality is meant to be twisted against the most liberal state in the region, then I would again suggest that the discussion is inherently antisemitic. 

I think Hunter will find my qualifications to be superior to every other candidate, except that I do not have a PhD. I cannot imagine getting one would be difficult given the poor quality of the papers I have read in these fields over the past decade. In general, I would claim that my extensive knowledge gathered in other fields like the sciences, data analysis, international law, Judaism and history, as can be seen in my 40,000 plus articles in this website, would bring a novel and invigorating perspective in a field that badly needs alternative points of view. 

To make things interesting, I would be happy to challenge any of Hunter's existing Palestine Studies professors to choose any one of my longer articles on their own area of expertise and critique it, and then give me a chance to defend it, online. Most of my articles are written in less than an hour, so finding mistakes in my own research should be simple. All my facts are referenced with hyperlinks.  I have no specific academic expertise in any of the fields they mention and I would still be happy to defend my writings against the best they have to offer.   Let independent scholars judge whose arguments are best. 

But if the position is meant to only be given to anti-Zionists, then perhaps that should be made more clear in the job description. At least that would be honest.

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