Lancing the Lies at The Lancet

by Steven Plaut

The paper had “no scientific standing.” Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”'
The Lancet is a British medical journal, considered the leading such journal in Britain.  Unfortunately, instead of pursuing serious research in medicine, in recent years the Lancet has become one of the main organs of anti-Israel and anti-American leftism in the UK.  Dr Richard Horton, editor of the The Lancet, is a leftist moonbat. Some other British medical journals are little better.

The Lancet has run at least 130 articles bewailing the health conditions of the poor Palestinians, yet never has denounced Palestinian terrorism as being the cause of those woes.  It regularly denounces Israel for checking Palestinian ambulances, naturally never mentioning how often those ambulances carry bombs and murderers.  CAMERA has exposed the anti-Israel bias prevalent in The Lancet.  It regularly makes moral equivalence judgments about Palestinian mass murder of Jews and Israel defending its civilians.  It falsely claims that Israel intentionally targets "innocent civilians" and makes countless political assertions that have nothing to do with health.  The Israel Hasbara Committee has also attacked bias in The Lancet and other British medicial journals.  

Perhaps the most outrageous example of the Lancet junking its scholarly standards and research agenda in the name of promoting politically correct wackiness was its decision to publish an article claiming that 650,000 Iraqis, or 2.5% of the entire Iraqi population, died as a result of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.   That article was "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", by Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. The Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9545, 21 October 2006, Pages 1421-1428.  It immediately drew enormous criticism and was denounced as fraud and quackery all over the globe.  The 650,000 number was pure "advocacy statistics", meaning advocacy lying with fraudulent statistics.  Such advocacy statistic lies are familiar, from the 10% of the population being gay to the 600 billion Africans who died in the slave trade.

Even leftist antiwar activist grouns, like "Iraqi Body Count", put the real number of dead Iraqis as no more than 50,000.   Others have also come up with estimates nowhere near that in The Lancet, and some put them below 20,000.  Michael Fumento, the leading science journalist in teh US, dismissed The Lancet piece as naked propaganda.  And naturally, The Lancet had no interest in the number of Iraqi lives that the war SAVED!   I counted 138,000 web pages that refer to fraud in The Lancet's article on Iraq.  Now even the distinguished Times of London has joined the fray and denounced The Lancet's fraudulent claims.  While the entire article is worth reading, here are some of the best points:

'Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh doubts.

'One critic is Professor Michael Spagat, an economist from Royal Holloway College, University of London...

'Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph, the use of the word “casualties” to mean deaths rather than deaths plus injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen...

'“The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,” contends Professor Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. “They published a sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the procedures that they stated.” The paper had “no scientific standing.” Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”'

Upside Down and Inside Out

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

The Knesset Traffics in Legislative Foolishness

by Steven Plaut


No doubt these prohibitions will make prostitution in Israel as unknown as it already is in Las Vegas.
The Knesset recently gave its final approval to one of the stupidest pieces of legislation in recent years. It is ostensively a law against "human trafficking". In fact, it is a legislative excursion into the trafficking of political correctness that will produce considerable harm. The new law's damages go well beyond the scope of trying to legislate away "trafficking" of prostitutes.

First, I guess I must have been out of the room when prostitution morphed into "human trafficking". But prostitution is prostitution, not human trafficking, and calling it "human trafficking" is highly misleading. Prostitutes may be a lot of things, but they are generally not slaves, media mythology notwithstanding. Certainly today in industrialized countries, most of them (of both genders) ply their trade by choice, pathetic as that fact may be.  And in Israel, any "working girl" seeking to leave the profession need only walk into any shelter, police station, or dial 100 (Israel's 911).

Israel, like every single other society in history, has plenty of hookers. Prostitution is largely out in the open, with the daily newspapers, tourist magazines, and sometimes billboards filled with ads for "escort services" and "massages". The Caring Classes have never had much to say against those.  Leftist journalists and professors regularly call for recognizing the "sex industry" as a productive sector contributing to the gross national product, and oppose massive roundups of prostitutes.

Some of the hookers in Israel are recruits from overseas, mainly from the poorer parts of Eastern Europe. These are sometimes smuggled into Israel by pimps or "brokers" of sorts, while in other cases they enter as tourists.  These are the "trafficked humans" for whom the Caring Classes are suddenly concerned. The press likes to carry lurid stories about prostitutes being "enslaved" by their pimps and beaten, abused, etc. It is especially fond of stories about nice innocent Ukrainian girls having been tricked off their farms into entering Israel, thinking they would work as cashiers or models, and then being leased out to pimps.

Yeah, sure. 

I do not believe there is a single prostitute in Israel who came to the country as part of being "deceived" into thinking she would get work as a stenographer. And if there WERE such a person, she could go to any cop, any lawyer, or any women's shelter to get a combative feminist attorney to set things right and sue the pants off any pimps or "traffickers" involved.

Previous Israeli laws already granted free public legal representation to women claiming they had been defrauded as part of "human trafficking" and also set up taxpayer-financed shelters for them. And since most of the prostitutes evidently speak Russian, along with a million ordinary Israelis, they have no problems communicating nor getting all the information they need about their rights.

The new law passed a few weeks ago again makes "human trafficking" illegal (but not prostitution itself). It makes beating up prostitutes illegal, but only by "traffickers", apparently not by customers. The new law was the initiative of the far-leftist Meretz party, along with some other individual Knesset members and leftist NGOs.

Before the new law, "human trafficking" was already illegal in Israel, including when it involves any fraudulent acts to get someone to leave her own country to come to work in Israel in prostitution. The new law prohibits pimps from "buying" and "selling" street walkers among themselves, which was already illegal in any case. No doubt these prohibitions will make prostitution in Israel as unknown as it already is in Las Vegas. In any case, all a "trafficker" now need do to get around the law is to sign the Moldava working girl on a notarized affidavit that says she knows what kind of work awaits her in the Land of Milk and Honey.

The new law simply makes the punishments for pimps stronger, with imprisonment up to 20 years (for trafficking in a minor) and in other cases 16 years, plus forfeit of all property of the "trafficker". By making it harder for the prosecution to strike plea bargains with pimps, the law actually guarantees that few will do real jail time.

There are other "feel-good" laws on the books in Israel, but in the case of this new law, the damages go well beyond those already noted. There are several reasons for this.

First, the definition of "human trafficking" and "enslavement" in the law is so loose that it can be applied to any foreign worker who is employed in Israel in legitimate, legal jobs, anything from home-care work to construction. Anytime one of these workers now wishes to breach a labor contract, or anytime some liberal lawyer or other bleeding heart decides that such workers are "underpaid" (for example when they are paid less than Israeli citizens), the floodgates of litigation will open. The bleeding hearts have long sought to price all such foreign workers out of the Israeli labor market altogether, by requiring artificially high wages and benefits for them. Should they suceed in eliminating the employment of "guest workers," they will damage the Israeli economy enormously, while forcing those same workers to return home to jobs that offer them wages at a fifth or less of what they get "underpaid" in Israel. It remains to be seen whether all ordinary Israeli labor contracts will become breachable by people claiming they also have been "enslaved" through them.

Second, the law contains several "add-ons" that have nothing to do with prostitution but nevertheless could be enormously harmful. The law prohibits "trafficking in human organs" and also "trafficking in children or minors", which could make some international adoptions problematic.

The prohibition on "trafficking in human organs" makes it illegal to buy or sell body parts, such as organ donations from living or from dead donors. The prohibition is general and even applies to voluntary donors. Now, it may well be that it is more dignified and ethical when organ donations are made by donors (or their immediate family members when the donor has died) with no monetary remuneration. But it is also true that the quantity of such donations is only a tiny fraction of the need for organs. It is a fact of life that allowing people to pay for and receive payment for organ donations makes the supply of donor organs increase significantly. Prohibition of such payment arrangements amounts to a death sentence for many of those awaiting organs. It is true that sometimes the sources for these organs may be poorer countries, where people (and surviving family members) are willing to sell them. But the squeamishness we all feel about such commerce ends the moment someone we knows really needs such an organ.

There are also potential problems in the blanket prohibition on transporting minors from outside Israel into Israel. As long as the prohibition refers to transport for purposes of employment in prostitution, all such laws are welcome. But the language of the new law's prohibition might make it difficult for infertile Israeli families to adopt children from overseas. For many years, such families have adopted children from other countries, in many cases making large payments for the children, and in some cases using "gray" and "informal" channels for the adoptions. (There are very few children inside Israel available for adoption, in part thanks to Israel's abortion-on-demand rules.) Could such families now face prosecution for "human trafficking" in minors?

Since the time of Genesis, no one has known how to eliminate prostitution as a social ill. My personal preference is to use zoning to confine it to special geographic areas, well away from residential neighborhoods and minors and economists. In the case of Israel, Nablus, Kalkiliya and Khan Yunis strike me as promising potential locations. But the new Knesset initiative is not at all designed to end this scourge. It is a "feel-good" law whose ability to end mistreatment of prostitutes by their "traffickers" is dubious, while at the same time it creates quite a few other unintended damages.

(Text of draft of new law in Hebrew here.)