No to politicization at UCSF. No to BDS

To err is human. We know that. When a journalist errs, a report is retracted, altered. When a doctor errs however, the results can be devastating.

Lets hope Nadia Gaber, a second year medical student at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School (UCSF) is a better doctor than she is a journalist.  Nadia's op-ed in the Synapse, the UCSF student journal urging the school to divest from Israel  was rife with inaccuracies and out-dated information.

 Fortunately, the Synapse has printed a rebuttal to Nadia's misguided tome, written by Dr. Arnold S. Seid, a graduate from UCSF Medical School  currently practices surgery in Santa Monica, California. its called "No to politicization at UCSF"

   As a graduate of UCSF Medical School (1971), permit me to comment on Nadia Gaber’s op-ed (January 9) calling for boycotts and divestment from the state of Israel. The article was troubling for three reasons.

  First, Ms. Gaber uses counterfactual and illogical arguments.  She charges that Israel is responsible for the Palestinians’ “dismal” health care system. This accusation is fraudulent.  The Palestinian National Authority has been self-governing for almost 20 years, and Palestinian health care is managed by the PA’s Ministry of Health. Any deficiencies are the result of mismanagement, and given that Palestinians receive the highest amount of per capita foreign aid in the world, to their poor allocation of resources.

  If Hamas, the Palestinian government in Gaza, spent this largesse on medical care rather than on rockets, and if the PA did not divert 6 percent of its annual budget to pay convicted Palestinian terrorists and the families of suicide bombers, their health care system would be better.

 Furthermore, Gaber perversely justifies Hamas’ thousands of rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by claiming Palestinians have “no other options.”  Certainly one option is that Hamas could choose to make peace, and renounce its charter and frequently stated goal to engage in jihad to murder Jews, “obliterate” Israel and replace it with an Islamist theocracy.

  Second, Gaber’s use of data is below professional standards.  She claims that Palestinians’ health care is “dismal,” but admits that her data may be 10 years old. Given recent data, either her statistics are wrong or there have been dramatic improvements in health indices, which contradict her thesis.

  She wrote that Palestinian infant mortality is 29 per 1,000 people, while 2011 data indicates it is 15.2 per 1,000 (CIA World Factbook), that maternal mortality is 70 per 1,000 when in 2011 it was 28 per 100,000 (World Health Organization), and that there are only nine physicians per 10,000 Palestinians, while 2011 data indicates that the number is 20.8 per 10,000 (World Health Organization), and that the number of PA Ministry of Health physicians almost doubled between 2005 and 2010, rising from 2,363 to 4,093. Gaber’s statistics are old and incorrect, in one case by orders of magnitude.

 Moreover, Gaber complains that Israel has far better health care than Palestinians. The comparison is meaningless. Israel is an advanced industrial nation on the forefront of medical research and innovation. The PA should instead be compared with neighboring countries at similar levels of development.  In fact, the PA’s health indices resemble or surpass those of other countries in the region.

Read all of Dr. Seid's response to the UCSF Synapse here.

Cyberbullying: The new trademark of the BDS crowd.

Does the "B" in BDS stand for Bullying?

Dr. Jess Ghannam is one of our local chameleons. As a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, Dr. Ghannam is clearly one of the one 1 %. Yet, he's been spotted frequently removing his tie and suit- jacket on his way to participate in demonstrations, often donning a jaunty Che style beret in an attempt to fit in with the crowd. Dr. Ghannam will trot out his academic and medical credentials when its convenient- he is a member of a California Scholars for Academic Freedom (a group that is obsessed solely with allowing academics the freedom to demonize Israel at taxpayers expense), but he's equally at home playing anarchist at International ANSWER or Al Awda meetings.

Dr. Ghannam just sent out a mass email via the extremist Al Alwda email list, encouraging the cyberbullying of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are scheduled to play in Tel Aviv, Israel later this year, complete with pre-packaged tweets to RT and RT ad nauseam .

Cyberbullying is being used with increasing frequency against any artist that dares to schedule a tour in the only democracy in the Middle east.

From an article by Jerome Reilly in the Independent-Ireland

"Justice Minister Alan Shatter has launched a blistering attack on the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Group (IPSG), accusing them of "cyberbullying" the folk group Dervish who were forced to pull out of a planned concert in Israel.
The band cancelled the tour planned for June, citing an "avalanche of negativity" and "venom" directed towards them on social media websites.
Shatter, who is Jewish, said, "It is a great pity that the bullying tactics of the IPSG worked."
He added that the IPSG's appeal to human rights "ignores the constitutional rights of Irish citizens and those who live in this state to get on with their lives, to travel and to perform around the world free from bullying, intimidation and discrimination."
"It is particularly extraordinary that the orchestrated campaign targeted at Dervish occurred at a time when thousands have lost their lives in Syria and the IPSG have remained silent about the crimes against humanity."

The website BDS gone bad has done an expose of anarchist and cyberbully Tali Shapiro. Tali apparently writes personal letters to bands calling herself a "long time fan". The site asks "Why is it then she’s not even the fan band’s fan on Facebook untill it’s time to call for divestment? A quick browse through her profile shows that she almost only likes Bands and artists who announced a concert in Israel,soon after the announcement, in order to fill their public pages with calls for boycott." At least 37 out of 50 Artists that Tali Shapiro "likes" are ones that announced concerts in Israel!

Tali Shapiro in anarchist mode


So there we have it. A system of alerts and pre-packaged tweets are sent out to anti-Israel activists around the world. With the mindless group-think of the Borg they blog and tweet and spam the web, hoping to bully an artist into submission. It gives the illusion of a mass- movement where one does not actually exist. Whenever a group like the Dervishes capitulates to the bullies, it increases the BDS'ers own delusions of their power and their importance.

And thats why we need to fight back.