ideological criminal

To: Miriam Harris-Botzum (mharrisb@phi.devry.edu)

Miriam Harris-Botzum,

As an academic and teacher, I’m sure that you teach your students to adhere principles of academic honesty. In fact, I would expect that you enforce your school’s academic integrity policy found in the DeVry University handbook for your campus in Philadelphia, which states:

In speaking or writing, plagiarism is the intentional or unintentional act of representing someone else’s work as one’s own. In addition, plagiarism is defined as using the essential style and manner of expression of a source as if it were one’s own.

And goes on to say that plagiarism includes:

Paraphrasing of others’ work which contains specific information or ideas and which is not properly acknowledged.

With this in mind, I’d like to take issue with your article in today’s edition of The Morning Call newspaper. I noticed several instances of style, manner of expression, and ideas that were not properly acknowledged by you.

For example, you evoke images of disease and cancer when you say, “Israel is engaged in a deadly struggle against a virulent form of radical Islam.” You go on to develop in detail an analogy between the way in which Israel could respond to the “deadly scourge” of Hamas and Hezbollah and a cancer patient’s “many ways to treat deadly infections or cancers.” But what you fail to mention is that precisely this analogy was articulated by Dan Gillerman, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, just a few weeks ago on July 21 in his statement before the Security Council:

We have been aware, for years, of this deadly, cancerous growth, insidiously invading this beautiful, potentially prosperous country, and we have warned about the danger repeatedly.

The similarity doesn’t stop there. After exhausting less medically invasive measures to dealing with the “cancer” you go on to suggest:

When non-invasive procedures fail, more direct intervention is needed. If the tumor or infection is fairly isolated, a surgeon can cut it out. […] Ultimately, if an infection is too aggressive, it may be necessary to amputate an entire limb, because the diseased cells are too thoroughly intertwined with healthy ones. Israel faces just such a case.

This mirrors precisely Gillerman’s sentiments:

This cancer must be excised. It cannot be partially removed or allowed to fester. It must be removed without any trace or as cancers do and will it will return striking and killing again.

But perhaps this is unfair to accuse just you of plagiarism. After all, Gillerman is merely regurgitating the previous comments of the IDF’s then Chief of Staff, Moshe Ya’alon, who said in a 2002 interview with Ha’aretz:

The characteristics of that [Palestinian] threat are invisible, like cancer. When you are attacked externally, you see the attack, you are wounded. Cancer, on the other hand, is something internal. Therefore, I find it more disturbing, because here the diagnosis is critical. If the diagnosis is wrong and people say it’s not cancer but a headache, then the response is irrelevant. But I maintain that it is cancer.

Ya’alon, however, differs from you in his prescribed treatment, preferring “chemotherapy” to your more radical suggestion of “amputation”:

There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy, yes.

But a case can be made all three of you are plagiarizing this cancer metaphor from a perhaps unlikely source. It is eerily similar in idea and style to that of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who in April of 2000 supposedly said:

This [the state of Israel] is a cancerous body in the region… When a cancer is discovered, it must be dealt with fearlessly; it must be uprooted.

Of course, to your defense, you do take the analogy of excision a bit further than both Nasrallah and Gillerman when you ask:

Is a mastectomy excessive when the alternative is to let the cancer spread unchecked?

So perhaps Israel should perform a mastectomy—surgical removal of all or part of a breast, sometimes including excision of the underlying pectoral muscles and regional lymph nodes—on the the cancerous scourge of Lebanon, metaphorically speaking, of course. Gillerman just uses the more general “excised”, likewise Nasrallah uses “uprooted”, whereas you choose to associate Lebanon with cancer of the breast variety by using the word “mastectomy.” So maybe here you aren’t plagiarizing Gillerman or Nasrallah.

But give credit where credit is due: associating a group of people based on their religious belief and ethnic identity with breast cancer is an old idea and should be properly cited. It goes back to Adolf Hitler who said, “The Jews are a cancer on the breast of Germany.” Sure, the details are different; you’d have to substitute Muslims for Jews and Israel for Germany to really nail it, but it is undoubtedly of the same “essential style.”

Eighty-six years ago, almost to the day, Hitler gave a speech very similar in style, tone, and substance to your article appearing today:

For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.

Similarly, Joseph Goebbels wrote his article “Die Juden sind schuld!” (The Jews are Guilty!), using a fungal, rather than cancerous analogy, but still with a solution echoed by your “mastectomy”:

The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out.

I would’ve thought “mastectomy” style final solutions to social problems to have fallen out of favor by now, especially among presumably well-educated people like yourself, but here you are espousing the tactic that left six million Jews dead and lead to the demise of the state Hitler was trying to “defend.”

But your unacknowledged borrowing of Hitler’s ideas doesn’t end there, either. You ask:

Should the surgeon be blamed for the pain caused by the surgery? The real blame lies with the disease. So while Israel mourns the death of every civilian, the guilt for those deaths belongs to the terrorists.

Likewise, Hitler asks in 1933: “Why does the world shed crocodile’s tears over the richly merited fate of a small Jewish minority?” As you do, he casts responsibility at the feet of his victims saying, “The pitiless and merciless war that has been forced upon us by external Jewry will lay the entire Continent in ruins,” as does Goebbels, “The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved” and “The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all,” for “They started this war and direct it. They want to destroy the German Reich and our people.”

Beyond plagiarizing the cancer analogy, you borrow heavily from another dubious tradition when you “questioned whether the entire Qana incident may have been a lie” and state that you “would not be surprised if the whole incident were staged by Hezbollah to place Israel in a bad light.” We can see the same essential style in the sermon of Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, who according to the Middle East Media Research Institute is supposed to have said on Palestinian Authority Television in 2001:

One of the Jews’ evil deeds is what has come to be called ‘the Holocaust,’ that is, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazism. However, revisionist [historians] have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews’ leaders, and was part of their policy.

All in all, there is very little, if any, original work present in your editorial. The themes, analogies, and cynicism are all borrowed, knowingly or unknowingly, from others. Your perspective of bigotry, your genocidal suggestions, and flat out ignorance have a long and well-documented history. You would do well to acknowledge it. After all, it’s one thing to be a genocidal bigot, its quite another to be one that doesn’t adhere to the minimum standards of citation.

There is only one source of cogency in your article, again borrowed, but properly cited: Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Perhaps if you took the time to understand the historical precedent for your opinion you might take a slightly more rational stance.