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http://www.hirhome.com/rozin1.htm
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BRIEF PREFATORY NOTE from Francisco Gil-White

In the Fall of 2002, I circulated to the Asch Center list the draft of my article documenting the Nazi origins of the PLO, and requested comments and criticisms.[1] The name "Mikhail," in the email from Paul Rozin that you will read below, refers to Mikhail Lubyansky (Kenyon College), who replied with a mouthful. In public, to the Asch Center list, he alleged that I was a liar, and that therefore my views on the Arab-Israeli conflict should not be believed. He claimed that I had supposedly boasted to him that I made up stuff in my academic work. When I challenged him to produce the email where I had supposedly said this, he did so, and thus proved to everybody that I had said nothing of the sort. Mikhail Lubyansky eventually gave me what he thought was a public apology, and conceded publicly that my piece on the Palestinian movement was factual.

The question that arose in my mind was: Why would this person, with whom I had no relationship, make this unprovoked and extreme attempt to slander me? Whatever the reason, this attack against me is what Paul Rozin calls "the uproar" and "the crisis" in the email you will read below. It is important to notice that he holds me responsible for it, and also that he sides with Mikhail Lubyansky, the man who slandered me.

Rozin accuses me of "stridency and intolerance." But all I did was share my documentation on the PLO with my Asch Center colleagues and ask for comments. The reply was a frankly bizarre and entirely unprovoked slander from someone at the Asch Center whom I barely know. The Asch Center director then upbraided me as if this had been my fault, explaining also that my effort to document some facts about the PLO were highly offensive. Who was strident and intolerant? The Asch Center was. Another example of "stridency and intolerance" at the Asch Center may be found in the reaction by the people at the Asch Center to my documentation on Kosovo.

Below is the text of Paul Rozin's email, followed by my analysis of its content.
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Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 12:30:42 -0500
From: Paul Rozin <rozin@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
To: Francisco Gil-White <fjgil@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu>,
"rozin@cattell.psych.upenn.edu" <rozin@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu>,
McCauley Clark <cMcCaule@CATTELL.psych.upenn.edu>
Subject: the uproar

Francisco.

I return to find that you have produced a crisis on the Asch list.
Numbers of balanced and informed colleagues think you are totally
one-sided, and most particularly, willing to accept evidence of
questionable reliability if on your side, but quite critical of opposing
evidence, including eyewitness observation. You have convinced almost
everyone at the Asch Center that when it comes to political issues, as
opposed to your academic work, you behave more like a politician than an academic scientist. This distresses me greatly. I am very sympathetic
with mikhail's position re you, and also Deepak's. You have a stridency
and intolerance that is unbearable to most people, though you cloak it
in the frame that you are the only scientist. Ian [Lustick] knows orders of magnitude more than you do about palestine, and thinks you are a biased observer. He says he has given you references, and offered to talk with you after you read them, but has not heard back. I, for one, would be happy to mediate a meeting between you and him, in which your claims about Palestinians and the Israel-Palestine peace process are carefully examined. I am astounded that you think you can be an expert on complex things outside of your field, and are indifferent to the observations of people on the scene. What would you say to someone who made a claim about the Mongols in Mongolia that your experience indicated was completely false. Would you be furstrated if the person who made the claim discounted your objection, because it was not scientific. Do you not understand that politicians frequently say different things to different audiences, and that citing one thing said does not make a case?

The result is that almost everyone is irritated by you, and wants to
hear no more. That is what you have done with your potentially most
sympathetic audience. God help you.

You have a level of confidence about complex social phenomena that I
have only seen in zealots of the political right and left. It doesn't
ring right for an academic.

Let's talk soon. I think you are on your way to committing academic
suicide.

Paul
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ANALYSIS OF THE ABOVE EMAIL, by Francisco Gil-White

According to Rozin, I will "accept evidence of questionable reliability" when it suits me. In fact, however, there was nothing special about my documentation of PLO origins. Nothing that I had written was new. I was merely stating something that those who purvey information to the masses always choose not to mention: that the PLO traces its roots to the German Nazi Final Solution, and that this matters to any interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So it is a bit silly to allege that I "accept evidence of questionable reliability" when I am reporting standard facts that, though perhaps not well known, still they are not part of any historical dispute.

Rozin further alleges that an army of supposedly respectable people -- "Numbers of balanced and informed colleagues" -- believe that I am a shoddy scholar, and presumably on the same absurd basis that I have accepted questionable sources for standard historical facts that nobody disputes. In fairness to me, though, Rozin mentions by name only one "balanced and informed colleague" who disagrees with me: Ian Lustick.

Now, social scientists disagree all the time -- there is nothing special in this. In fact, science requires and therefore fosters disagreement, so that a variety of points of view will be defended, and then whoever accounts best for the most reliable data (eventually) wins. Of course, if scientist A believes that scientist B made a mistake he may want to see the mistake corrected. The way to do this is for A to show B the evidence that disproves B's assertion, or else to publish an article that publicly demonstrates B's mistake. But Paul Rozin had a different process in mind -- one that has absolutely nothing to do with science. As you can see from the email above, Rozin wanted to mediate (his word) a meeting between Ian Lustick and myself: "I, for one, would be happy to mediate a meeting between you and him, in which your claims about Palestinians and the Israel-Palestine peace process are carefully examined."

The meaning of "mediate," according to Dictionary.com, is as follows:

"To resolve or settle (differences) by working with all the conflicting parties: mediate a labor-management dispute."

In other words Ian Lustick and I were not supposed to be disagreeing scientists who would present evidence in defense of our respective positions, but "conflicting parties" in a "dispute" whose differences had to be mediated. The implication in all this is that I had gone out of my way to offend Lustick, when in fact all I had done was circulate some facts I had gathered about the origins of the PLO and asked for comments. My article did not even mention Ian Lustick.

The dictionary's example of a dispute, a labor-management dispute, is especially useful here. You see, I was brought to UPENN psychology by the Asch Center, and Ian Lustick is an Asch Center director and, not coincidentally, its resident expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Also not coincidentally, he is a well-known public figure who for years has strongly endorsed creating a PLO state on the West Bank and Gaza. Paul Rozin, who was suggesting that I satisfy Lustick, is also a director at the Asch Center and moreover a tenured professor in the psychology department, to which he personally recruited me. The psychology department had deputized Rozin to be my official mentor, to guide me while the tenured psychology faculty determined whether or not to reappoint me to a second Assistant Professor contract. The wheels of the reappointment process had begun turning even as Paul Rozin sent me the email above.

So, academic management was telling the academic employee whose job was on the line: agree with us about the PLO or else you will be "committing academic suicide." Any non-tenured faculty member in my position would have perceived Rozin's email as an obvious threat to obey or get out. Naturally, this sort of thing erases academic freedom and therefore makes social science impossible. How can proper research about the Arab-Israeli conflict be conducted when those scholars who investigate and make known the Nazi origins of the PLO must sacrifice their jobs? And how can this fail to contribute to a distorted public understanding about what really goes on in Israel, and about which side the US Establishment really supports?

A final observation. Rozin says this about Lustick:

"He says he has given you references, and offered to talk with you after you read them, but has not heard back."

This is false. I had in fact politely requested that Ian Lustick read and comment on my documentation on the PLO. He then replied that I was not important enough, as a scholar, for him to read my work.[2] Lustick did eventually consent to give me a list of suggested readings that in his view would help educate me. I read the books he recommended, but they did not refute what I had documented. Mostly, they were irrelevant to the points my own article discussed.

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Footnotes
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