Sunday, September 27, 2020

The Difference between Research and Research

 Imagine yourself as head of the anthropology department at a university, and you hear about a site in a remote area of the country where somebody is said to have discovered what looks like remnants of a settlement that may go back hundreds of years if not go back to prehistory.

 

You call on one of your researchers to form a team and go work on that site. You authorize the university to make available to him all that's necessary in terms of equipment, rations and funds for the team to spend several days in a sparsely populated and desolate region of the country doing diligent work, which you expect will shed much light on the history of that part of the country.

 

A few days pass, and you get an emissary, sent by the leader of the team. He gives you a preliminary report that says the place is a treasure trove full of items that will revolutionize our understanding of prehistoric life. There is so much in that site, he says, he must remain a few more days to complete the work he came to do. But to do it efficiently, he'll need more funds and more provisions to sustain a team that's working hard.

 

Excited by this revelation, you pressure the university to appropriate more money for the project, and the university acquiesces to your request. A few days later, you get another emissary, sent by the leader of the team to hand you yet another preliminary report that says the same thing as the previous, and requesting much the same thing as before.

 

You try to pressure the treasurer of the university to appropriate more funds but the refuses, suggesting instead that you go with him to the site and see for yourselves what's going on out there. You agree it's a good idea, and you both go to the site. Once there, it takes you only a minute to establish that this is a modern landfill containing garbage that has accumulated for many years before the site was abandoned decades ago. Ashamed at the ignorance of your researcher, you walk back to your vehicle and head home.

 

Well, my friend, consider this story to be a metaphor because in a manner similar to that, the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies is trying to pull a fast one on its readers. This foundation is a comical outfit that should not be dabbling in geopolitical matters, but there it is, doing just that. It should be ashamed of Tzvi Kahn, a so-called researcher in its employ that keeps coming up with reports so dumb, they should be called comical skits but they are also absurd to such extreme, they make you weep, not laugh.

 

Kahn's latest absurdity came under the title: “As UN celebrates 75th anniversary, dictators still dominate,” an article that was published on September 25, 2020 in The Washington Examiner. The author is attacking the United Nations (UN) because he says that the world organization, which created Israel in the first place, has two faults: It hates Israel and loves its enemies of the day … which happen to be most of the world.

 

And so, to justify his attacks on the UN, Tzvi Kahn says that the world body is full of dictators who suppress their own people––which is the wrong thing to do according to him––whereas Israel suppresses and kills someone else's people––which is the right thing to do––all the more so because they are Palestinians.

 

As to the reason why there is a Palestinian-Jewish issue in the first place, is that there has been a confusion as to what the Jews represent. Are they remnants of the ancient Hebrew tribes who were genuine to Palestine in the same way that the Palestinians are, having never left the land? Or are they recent multi-ethnic dumps, considered refuse by the Europeans who discarded them into a landfill called Israel?

 

Even if the Jews are the authentic remnants of the ancient Hebrew tribes that roamed the region, and even if they can prove they have not intermarried so often as to dilute the Hebrew side of their ethnicity, they still would have no legal right to go to Palestine and tell those who never left the place to go away because the so-called Jews are back to their ancient homeland. They cannot do that anymore than America's Irish can go back to Ireland and replace those who never left the land. The same is true of the Italian-Canadians, the Spanish-Australians and so on and so forth.

 

But if the so-called Jews have nothing to do ethnically with the ancient Hebrews except that they stole their identity by converting to their religion, then Jews must be considered the refuse that the Europeans got tired incinerating, thus decided to dump them into a small part of Palestine they called “Jewish Homeland,” whose borders are delineated by the 1948 UN Resolution.

 

This being the reality of what's unfolding in the Middle East today, someone ought to tell Tzvi Kahn he is doing the wrong kind of research, and that he can be more useful to humanity if he spent his excess energies recycling the refuse that his city is throwing away. If lucky, he may someday stumble on a treasure: perhaps a box of jewelry someone discarded by mistake.