“Illinois chancellor who fired Salaita accused of serial self-plagiarism.”

I came across a couple of stories today that made me wonder how much we can learn from a scholar’s professional misconduct.

The first was a review by Kimberle Crenshaw of a book by Joan Biskupic about Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor. Crenshaw makes the interesting point that Sotomayor, like many political appointees of the past, was chosen in part because of her ethnic background, but that unlike various other past choices (for example, Antonin Scalia, the first Italian American on the court), “Sotomayor’s ethnicity is still viewed [by many] with skepticism.”

I was reminded of Laurence “ten-strike” Tribe’s statement that Sotomayor is “not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is,” a delightfully paradoxical sentence that one could imagine being said by Humpty Dumpty or some other Lewis Carroll character. More to the point, Tribe got caught plagiarizing a few years ago.

So here’s the question. Based on the letter where the above quote appears, Tribe seems to consider himself to be pretty smart (smarter than Sotomayor, that’s for sure). But, from my perspective, what kind of smart person plagiarizes? Not a very smart person, right?

But maybe I’m completely missing the point. If some of the world’s best athletes are doping, maybe some of the world’s best scholars are plagiarizing? It’s hard for me to wrap my head around this one. Also, in fairness to Tribe, he’s over 70 years old. Maybe he used to be smart when he was younger.

The second story came to me via an email from John Transue who pointed me to a post by Ali Abunimah, “Illinois chancellor who fired Salaita accused of serial self-plagiarism.” I had to follow some links to see what was going on here: apparently there was a professor who got fired after pressure on the university from a donor.

I hadn’t heard of Stephen Salaita (the prof who got fired) or Phyllis Wise (the University of Illinois administrator who apparently was in charge of the process), but apparently there’s some controversy about her publication record from her earlier career as a medical researcher.

It looks like a simple case of Arrow’s theorem, that any result can only be published at most five times. Wise seemed to have published the particular controversial paper only three different times, so she has two freebies to go.

As I discussed a couple years ago (click here and scroll down to “It’s 1995”), in some places Arrow’s theorem is such a strong expectation that you’re penalized if you don’t publish several versions of the same paper.

But, to get back to the main thread here: to what extent does Wise’s unscholarly behavior—and it is definitely unscholarly and uncool to copy your old papers without making clear the source, even if it’s not as bad as many other academic violations, it’s something you shouldn’t do, and it demonstrates an ethical lapse or a level of sloppiness so extreme as to cast questions on one’s scholarship—to what extend should this lead us to mistrust her other decisions, in this case in the role of university administrator?

In some sense this doesn’t matter at all: Wise could’ve been the most upstanding, rule-following scientist of all time and the supporters of Salaita would still be strongly disagreeing with her decision and the process used to make it (just as we can all give a hearty laugh at Laurence Tribe’s obnoxiousness, even if he’d never in his life put his name on someone else’s writing).

Or maybe it is relevant, in that Wise’s disregard for the rules in science might be matched by her disregard for the rules in administration. And Tribe’s diminished capacities as a scholar, as revealed by his plagiarism, might lead one to doubt his judgment of the intellectual capacities of his colleagues.

P.S. A vocal segment of our readership gets annoyed when I write about plagiarism. I continue to insist that my thoughts in this area have scholarly value (see here and here, for example, and that latter article even appeared in a peer-reviewed journal!), but I am influenced by the judgments of others, and so I do feel a little bad about these posts, so I’ve done youall a favor by posting this one late at night on a weekend when nobody will be reading. So there’s that.

36 thoughts on ““Illinois chancellor who fired Salaita accused of serial self-plagiarism.”

  1. To what extent should I mistrust a colleagues academic work / decisions because I know he has tons of speeding tickets? Or because I know he possesses an (apparently illegal) radar-detector in his car? Or because he used to drink on the sly before he was 21?

  2. As someone said to me once, people are not any one thing. You can’t expect them to live every aspect of their lives following a strict moral code. If that were so, we would not have this all-too-frequent phenomenon, even more than plagiarism: a lot of top-flight (needless to say, male) professors dump their ageing and increasingly wrinkly wives in favor of shacking up with a grad student (although of course the shacking up doesn’t make them top-flight; I know a lot of truly mediocre profs who did that too ;). Every achievement of a person (good or bad) has to be seen as something that happened at that moment in time.

  3. Also, now that I think about it, lots and lots of people self-plagiarize. It’s so easy to find them that I can give examples from the off the top of my head by just thinking about it for a few seconds, no internet search required. Let me give you an example from your own field: statistics. A stats professor, Yudi Pawitan, wrote a great book, In all Likelihood:

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199671222/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1944687722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0198507658&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1YKJBRAEFV28TEK6PQEK

    He wrote another book with someone else: Lee, Nelder and Pawitan, Generalized Linear Models with Random Effects: Unified Analysis via H-Likelihood.

    These two books contain *identical* passages, without any indication that the passages are repeated verbatim. One could say that if one bought these two books, one paid twice for the same information (of course, the two books are not identical; they just contain identical passages).

    I think that a lot of people do this. Should they? Of course not. I don’t really care about calling them out; I’m just saying it happens all over the place. People run out of things to say, so they just say them again and again instead of just keeping quiet.

    Having said that, I still like Yudi Pawitan’s book.

    • On the face of it, this is unfair on Pawitan (who I don’t know).

      I don’t think this counts as even mildly dubious. We are not given evidence on the extent of the repetition, but in general the case for the defence is easy: The same stuff needs the same explanation. If you as an author worked out a careful explanation once, I’d _expect_ you to use it again unless you can improve on it or it needs rewriting for a different readership.

      You might as well indict people who use the same presentation slide in different courses, or in different lectures in the same course, or give similar talks in different places. That’s most people who teach or research, I guess. Or complain about the small amount of material in a new edition of a book. (Come to think of it, that’s often a fair complaint, but for other reasons!)

      “Self-plagiarism” is, as often pointed out, something of a oxymoron, but there is quite a range from obnoxious repetition of work with intent to deceive and inflate your own reputation to just repeating stuff when it’s natural to do so.

    • In all Likelihood was a very introductory level book perhaps with some original material in it, but the purpose was to introduce folks to using likelihood functions rather than just MLEs and SEs (and I think it did a very good job of that).

      The “Unified Analysis via H-Likelihood” on the other hand is something many thought was overly adventurous (hence the H for hopeless).

      On a more serious note, Meng has written a paper on H likelihood giving other words that H might stand for.

      But re-cycling of intro material in more adventurous work, to me seems fine.
      (Have not read Lee, Nelder and Pawitan, Generalized Linear Models with Random Effects: Unified Analysis via H-Likelihood.)

      • Keith: We seem to agree on the major point. But I’m intrigued by your passing comment. If you regard “In all likelihood” as “very introductory” what is your terminology for the typical first course text in statistics assuming no previous probability or calculus?

        • Hmm, an introductory text in statistics that requires no previous probability or calculus.

          In the preface Pawitan states “mathematical content of the book is kept relatively low, … To make these accessible I am relying (most of the time) on a nontechnical approach”

          So I perhaps should have put it as a very introductory level book on “the whole spectrum of likelihood ideas” that requires calculus and some previous course work in probability and statistics.

  4. Rahul, Shravan:

    Yes, it’s a tough call, which is why in my post above I expressed strong uncertainty as to how much we should take rule-breaking in one area as a cause for mistrust in another area. Given the difficulty of compiling any reliable statistics on these different sorts of rule-breaking, it seems that we have little choice but to rely on our own judgment, which of course is colored by the details of each case.

    To me, plagiarism seem different from your examples of the speeding tickets, the radar detector, and the wife-dumping in that (a) in Wise’s case, her copying without attribution seems to indicate, a willingness to bury evidence, which is one of the particular issues that arose in the Salaita affair; and (b) in Tribe’s case, his copying without attribution seems to indicate a bit of laziness, which seems relevant to considering his judgment of what it means to be “smart” as a qualification for being a Supreme Court judge.

    Again, the issue seems to me to be worth raising but I do not pretend to have any unambiguous answers.

  5. “…what kind of smart person plagiarizes? Not a very smart person, right?”

    Wrong, I say. An *ethical* person doesn’t plagiarize but it’s got very little to do with “smartness” per se. At least how I see the term “smart” being commonly used.

    But yes, it’s not very smart to get caught for it. OTOH, if you plagiarized extensively, and created a bestseller & made millions off your fame, it’s probably “smart”. Just not ethical.

    • Rahul:

      Interesting point. I was thinking about the sort of “smart” that translates into good science and good scholarship: plagiarists typically seem to me to be people who are too lazy or too stupid to figure things out themselves.

      But I suppose there are other sorts of “smart” that are relevant to being a good law professor or a good judge. One could even argue (though I doubt Tribe would make this claim himself) that a bit of experience covering up rulebreaking would be a positive qualification for being a judge, in that it it’s good for a judge to have insight into others who hide their wrongdoing.

      • Even in an academic context does good textbook scholarship correlate with academic “success”?

        Again, “smart” & ethical may not be aligned virtues even within academia. Maybe not outright plagiarism, but scooping other groups work, political maneuvering, mutual back scratching seem not exactly uncommon in high profile academics.

        Plagiarising (or fishing) may still be “smart”, just so long as you execute it well enough to not get caught for it. (What percent of plagiarizers get caught anyways? )

        Ergo, ethics is the dimension most relevant. Not smartness.

        • Rahul:

          I said “good science and good scholarship,” not academic “success,” which indeed can derive from all sorts of non-academic behaviors such as plagiarism, faking data, trolling, brown-nosing, etc etc etc. The sort of “smart” that helps with good science and good scholarship is not the same, perhaps, as the sort of “smart” that makes one an effective brown-noser or politician etc. And Tribe’s comments regarding Sotomayor largely involve his assessment of her political skills.

          So, basically, I’m agreeing with you.

    • > But, from my perspective, what kind of smart person plagiarizes? Not a very smart person, right?

      When it comes to ‘smart’ people who plagiarize, I’ll speculate that it’s driven time constraints/productivity goals. It’s not that they couldn’t have come up with original text, it’s that they didn’t have time to do so given all the other things they’d committed to doing. (I’ll speculate that Tribe and Kearns-Goodwin fall in this category.) Not that there’s any positive spin to put on that but – if it is in fact an accurate characterization – I don’t see it as following from any malevolent intent. (If someone knowingly copies someone else’s work figuring that a) they’ll gain some benefit from doing so and b) they won’t get caught then I’d call that malevolent intent.)

      • Chris:

        As Basbøll would say, intent has nothing to do with it. I still don’t see plagiarism as the act of a person who is “smart” in an academic or sciencey way. Could you imagine Richard Feynman copying someone else’s words and labeling them as his own? No: he had too much to say, himself, to want to copy from others. Similarly, can you imagine George Orwell deciding to fill up one of her novels with someone else’s words? Hardly. If he was going to quote somebody, he’d just do it.

        For Tribe, Goodwin, Ayres, Wegman, etc.: Sure, they were over-committed, they didn’t have time to do all the work themselves, maybe they felt they’d rather be spending time playing with their grandchildren rather than putting in the work to understand what they were writing, whatever. OF course Tribe could’ve just notified his publisher that he was too busy to write the book, and canceled the book contract, but that would’ve been embarrassing. . . . He did have time, though, to write Barack Obama a letter saying that Sonia Sotomayor isn’t so smart.

        • Not sure about plagiarism, but if Feynman ever decided to cook up data (he wouldn’t I know!) I bet we’d never ever find it. :)

        • > I still don’t see plagiarism as the act of a person who is “smart” in an academic or sciencey way.

          Agreed. And I didn’t mean to imply that time constraints/productivity goals are an excuse. Absolutely Tribe should have notified his publisher that he was too busy to write the book and canceled the contract. It probably would have been a little embarrassing for him at the moment but, other than he and the publisher, who’d give it a second thought even a week after the fact? It would have cost him a few buck but, ethically, that should be a super easy decision to make. (I don’t imagine that Tribe would have been hurting for income without the book contract.)

          Here’s a hypothesis: Plagiarism is motivated by one or more of the following – malevolence, arrogance, laziness, incompetence. An effective overall strategy for reducing plagiarism will require different strategies for dealing with each of those root causes.

        • Many cases of plagiarism involve work claimed to be original, that is not.

          This might get covered under “malevolence, arrogance, laziness, incompetence”, but another form, I think sometimes found in student work:
          some of a text looks like a review of literature, supposedly to show the author knows the literature and knows what’s important … but is plagiarized, because the author does not know the topic. Copying/editing a Wikipedia page and using a selection of its references is a good example.
          This might be called: simulating false expertise.

          The Wegman Report was almost certainly one of these:
          a) The authors wanted to write authoritatively on a bunch of topics for which they had little or no experience.
          b) Big chunks were plagiarized, sometimes introducing real howlers of errors.
          c) Sometimes wording was changed slightly, and almost always skewed towards the conclusions they wanted. That was easier to see once one had done detailed side-by-side comparisons with the antecedent texts.
          In the most extreme case, the WR plagiarized a book by one of the authors whose work they were criticizing, then inverted key conclusions they didn’t like, as per Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report. That goes beyond expertise simulation into malevolence, which I think is relatively rare.

        • You keep bringing up Tribe’s letter to Obama as an example of poor judgement on the merits. But more probably than not, it was a letter motivated by his strong preference for another candidate (most probably, Kagan). It was sort of negative campaigning. Now, in a different context, it was not smart to write that vile letter and 1) miss you goal and 2) let it escape into the wild. But as you say yourself, it’s a different kind of smart.

        • D.O.:

          I know nothing about the intellectual abilities of judges Sotomayor or Kagan. I’m just saying that the story of Tribe’s plagiarism lowers my estimation of his intellectual abilities, making me dubious about his qualifications to make such judgments of others.

  6. Since I have the flu, I am reading this on a weekend.

    My first real exposure to plagiarism – other than 5th grade when (I admit) I copied articles from an encyclopedia to fill out a report on Kentucky (and felt bad about it, as witnessed by my continuing memory of it) – was when a guy in college was praised to the heavens as a new literary force and it turned out his book was stolen. I use the words intentionally: his novel was in large sections a reprint of an obscure one by someone else (in another language). The extent defines that to me as stealing. These cases stick in the craw in the same way that book about the CIA director was ruined when it came out he was having an affair with the author – both were married to others. Both are breaches of the entire process of creation of a work. And it rankles because these people use the fraud, are propelled by the fraud to undeserving fame.

    Plagiarism is a spectrum offense. It is sometimes lack of attribution in a footnote or the use of a phrase that, frankly, is better than anything the author can muster. It is sometimes the lifting of whole sections. I have more sympathy for the former than the latter. Why make your work worse because you need to pick different words just to pick different words? Not noting the source can become a mistake rather than an intentional desire to take credit for those words as yours.

    The reason I note “spectrum” is the allegations and their sources become important when the accusation is used to advance an agenda other than keeping the record straight. The Phyllis Wise allegation is an example: the purpose seems to be to tar an opponent of the political goal of BDS to dissuade future actions against them (and to rile up supporters, of course). Something similar might be said about the Montana Senate candidate who admitted plagiarism in getting his master’s (which has now been revoked). In other words, the use of the accusation as a political weapon, which naturally means blurring the spectrum as necessary so the guy you’re attacking is as guilty for the lack of a footnote as if he stole the work outright. (As a side note, the Wise thing is an interesting continuation of the thread: BDS wants to suppress academics from Israel and complain when they are suppressed and then act to suppress acts of suppression.)

    In terms of record-keeping, I’m always surprised by the number of well known scientific labels that are inaccurate, that refer to a later popularizer or someone better connected or sometimes outright thief rather than the originator. Plagiarism can become a theft of lasting reputation and heaven knows history is full of arguments about who stole from whom. I’m of two minds about this and sometimes wonder if the only reason we care about the names we stick on certain things is because of arguments about priority. I used to think it was important as a way to get into the mind of x or y but I no longer believe we can get there.

    In some areas, like music and food and fashion, plagiarism is the norm. A hot riff or hot style is immediately copied – and in this era, a hot riff is actually recorded and used, meaning stolen (and people actually argue they have a right to do this without paying). All those menus across America are mostly dishes created by others. I mention this because copying others is clearly a significant human trait and is essential to social behavior. That plagiarism pours over into areas where it needs to be restricted is expected.

      • Obscuring seems to imply malicious intent. It would still be plagiarism if I just straightforward didn’t quote any sources.

        That’s something that seems perfectly acceptable in sectors like music or food like @jonathan was saying.

        In general, even in academics, if you stole an idea and were diligent enough to work hard to use your own words it wouldn’t be called plagiarism (I think). Ultimately there’d be no practical way to tell it apart from an independent, serendipitous discovery.

        In a way, we condone the copying of ideas but come hard on the copying of words.

        • Rahul:

          You write that we “come hard on the copying of words.” Let me repeat that the problem with plagiarism is not the copying, its the lack of acknowledgment of the source. The lack of acknowledgement can be on purpose or by accident, and even if on purpose does not have to be “malicious” (perhaps, for example, Doris Kearns Goodwin just didn’t want her readers to be distracted with a long acknowledgments section) but in any case degrades the value of the document for the reader, for reasons discussed in my paper with Basbøll.

          I agree with your other point, that it is good to acknowledge the source of the ideas in a paper as well as the source of the words. As you note, the difficulty here is that it’s hard to detect. Plagiarism of words is obvious (sorry, Wegman, but I find the evidence more convincing than your denials!), while unattributed copying of ideas is in general difficult to identify from the outside, given that good (or, for that matter, bad) ideas can come from many sources.

        • Well, if you think going easy on annoying citation soup a wee bit might prevent reader distraction, leading to a better reader experience, or more effective transfer of ideas, that in itself is a big plus in my book.

          Especially self plagiarism. That looks pretty close to a victim-less crime.

        • Rahul:

          I think that not giving clear citations leads to a worse reader experience, but perhaps Goodwin thinks differently. Ultimately I can just give my impressions here; I have no statistical data.

          I agree that self-plagiarism is generally not as bad as plagiarism of others but it can still lead to difficulty in tracking down the source. In the cases of Wise and Frey, my impression was that people were bothered by the self-plagiarism because it was polluting the scholarly literature, wasting the time of reviewers, and contributing to a general moral hazard in which researchers are motivated by playing the credit-grabbing game rather than doing the actual work (Frey is an extreme example here). Again, the problem is not the copying but in the lack of attribution.

        • Well, there are other things that can lead to a difficulty in tracking down a source e.g. a sloppy incorrect citation, personal communication, or reference to stuff under publication, or even statements like “It is known that…[no cite]”.

          But we don’t penalize these practices half as harshly as we do self-plagiarism, do we?

          People waste reviewer time in all kinds of other ways far more often than self-plagiarized paragraphs. The day we start convening internal investigation committees because someone wasted reviewer time by submitting a half-baked or obviously flawed paper, I’ll be convinced that we take reviewer time seriously.

        • In this case the issue is really that there were co-authors of the other work. As the retraction says, it made it appear as though these were new results not that it was a report of previously published work. Overall, sometimes you do have to have something like the same table in several publications (for example of descriptive statistics of the same sample or even an appendix showing the question texts for survey data) and it seems as though the emerging standard is that now you have to always cite that first publication. Maybe this is partly a transition between print and electronic. Now, you can just point a link to your data with those kinds of things at that location.

      • Of course the problem is the obscuring of the source. If you’re lifting a few lines, the obscuring is not a big deal. If you’re lifting a whole section, it is a much bigger deal. I have no idea how we could function without lifting what others have done for our own use. One could argue nearly everything we learn is lifted from someone, somewhere else.

        I accept that sources get lost. And I accept that constantly acknowledging sources makes you sound like – well, like one of those radio show hosts who constantly repeats who tweeted what first as though any listener cares that freaking tweet is acknowledged as prior art. Imagine your day filled with footnotes, like some ridiculous Google Glass experience in which everything you said – or heard – was accompanied by citation.

        In an academic setting, we need to be stricter but not absolutist in part because nearly every line of nearly every paper could be footnoted with some citation. In my head is the “gotcha” game I mentioned when plagiarism is used as a political weapon, but I think that generalizes.

        Sorry if this is abruptly written, but I feel like crap.

  7. Interestingly the references in Pubpeer regarding Chancellor Wise were all written well after Salaita was refused a job at Illinois/Urbana. My father was on the faculty in Urbana. The Board of Trustees was not going to approve of Salaita’s employment. In a strange twist, Board Chairman Christopher Kennedy was not quite a five year old when his father and Presidential Candidate Robert was assassinated by a Palestinian for his support of Israel.

    Salaita is a founder of the academic boycott of Israel and Robert Warrior who heads the department Salaita was hired into is a signer of that movement.

    Zionists: transforming “antisemitism” from something horrible into something honorable since 1948. #Gaza #FreePalestine
    — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

    By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.
    — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 18, 2014

    Ever wonder what it would look like if the KKK had F-16s and access to a surplus population of entrapped minorities? See #Israel and #Gaza.
    — Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

    Although he was hired into an Indian Studies dept, unlike other faculty members, he has almost no academic works on Indians. He does write extensively about Israel Gaza/Hamas but fails to mention that Hamas has tried people for being homosexual and then beheading them, or other homosexuals accused of being collaborators (with Israel) and then killed and that about 300 Palestinian homosexuals have sought refuge in Israel. Nor does he mention that in Gaza there are honor killings of women who “dishonor” their family and that the killers are given light sentences, if any and that there is polygamy in Gaza under Hamas.

    Nor does Salaita mention that as Colonel Kemp, who was head of all British forces in Afghanistan said, that his army and other armies study Israel’s IDF specifically because Israel has kept the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties so low at about 1:1 even though Hamas uses civilians as human shields. He further notes that the Brits and US try very hard to minimize civilian casualties, but not as well as the IDF (typical conflicts Iraq, Afghanistan have civilian/combatant loss of about 3:1).

    Nor does Salaita ever mention that the Palestinians turned down their state in 1948 when they followed The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who spied for the Nazis during WW II, who organized SS troops from Bosnians for Hitler, and who spent the War in Berlin as a guest of Hitlers.

    Nor does Salaita ever mention that President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak offered Arafat a peace agreement in 2000 which Saudi Prince Bandar (no friend of Israel) stated, “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy, it will be a crime.”

    Nor does Salaita mention that both Egypt and Saudi Arabia wanted Israel to defeat Hamas in Gaza during the summer conflict.

    Ultimately, the conflict where civilians were killed could have been and should have been avoided. The problem was that after Hamas had its civil war with the PA in Gaza and threw the PA out, Egypt closed its crossing with Gaza but that underground tunnels were constructed where missiles, concrete for tunnel building and other war material were smuggled. President Sisi of Egypt in the past year started to close the tunnels, but they of course should have been closed years ago. Those that truly care about the livelihood of the civilians of Gaza will seek to demilitarize Gaza.

    A scholar in a discipline should not withhold critical facts as those stated above and that Salaita has withheld. Does that make him a credible professor when you can’t count on him to give the entire facts?

    • Can I say that it’s also inappropriate – IMHO – to spend time denigrating Salaita. I disagree BDS and find their claims of “McCarthyism” ironically absurd, though within those academic circles the jargon is so stilted and specific they distinguish cases in ways that make no sense outside their circles. But there was a university decision made and the university decision seems clearly based on personal tweets expressed during the latest war, not on the content of his academic work. And I note the decision was almost surely made only because Salaita had been signed to a contract but had not actually started work, meaning they cut him before he played, which is substantially easier for an institution.

      • “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” – Elie Wiesel

        The university was accused of bowing to donor pressure when the reality is that Salaita’s tweets were out of bounds and do not represent what we want to see from a professor at a major university. My point was to present *facts* about the lack of scholarship on Salaita’s part (his inability to tell the complete truth). I don’t blame Salaita nearly as much as the faculty at his previous university that gave him tenure despite the poor scholarship and the search committee at the UIUC Indian Studies Dept. which, as I said previously, is headed by Robert Warrior who signed the academic boycott petition that Salaita founded.

        As someone who grew up in a community of professors (at UIUC) I can say that professors are supposed to present information so that students can think on their own, not to filter it and leave out critical information. Salaita filters out critical information.

        A discussion of the problem between Israel and the Palestinians must discuss in detail the antisemitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who as stated earlier was allied with the Nazis. It is beyond dispute that he wanted the Nazis to implement “the final solution” in what is today Israel. In fact, the Nazis wanted to send 4000 Belgium children to the British Mandate in what is today Israel and The Grand Mufti personally intervened with Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to have them sent to the concentration camps instead (O’Jerusalem by Collins & Lapierre). After WW II, the French captured him. Both the UK and Yugoslavia wanted to try him for war crimes but the French released him to curry favor with the Arabs.

        Instead of having their own state in 1948, the Palestinians and Arab nations decided to follow The Grand Mufti to destroy the new state of Israel and they lost. Today their descendants elected Hamas over the Palestinian Authority (PA). Hamas has as part of its charter to destroy Israel. It as previously mentioned also beheads homosexuals or falsely tries them as collaborators with Israel and executes them, allows for “honor killings” of women who choose to marry someone they love instead of someone their father wants them to marry, and encourages polygamy.

        It is also known that Hamas hides weapons in Mosques and other buildings where there are civilians as well as having command and control in apartment buildings. It is known that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and that Israel goes to great lengths to avoid hurting civilians.

        “The [The Lancet] letter also said that Israeli “attacks aim to terrorize, wound the soul and the body of the people, and make their life impossible in the future, as well as also demolishing their homes and prohibiting the means to rebuild.” *** But doctors at Rambam hospital who had served in the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza war told [Lancet Editor] Horton that Israel took extreme precautions to prevent civilian casualties and that they and other soldiers had put themselves as personal risk to this end.”***
        http://www.timesofisrael.com/lancet-editor-sees-positive-side-of-israel-in-visit/

        Finally, an professor that writes chiefly about Israel and Gaza and not Native American Indians should be employed in a Middle East Studies Dept and not a Native American Indian Studies Dept.

        We should all follow Elie Wiesel’s words and speak out against the injustice of Salaita distorting the truth.

  8. Just a quick thought on the doping analogy: To me (I have no data to support this), the difference between doping and plagiarism is that doping may be done under the motivation of extending ones capabilities further than previously able (so more of augmenting gains possible under non-doping methods), while plagiarism doesn’t have that augmentation aspect. Well, unless you think scholars use the time saved by plagiarism to push themselves faster and further in their work, which I suppose is plausible.

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