Scientific American Removes Anti-Israel Op-ed after Sharp Criticism…From Scientists

The last time we checked on Scientific American it pushed the normalization of “climate emergency” terminology.

The publication’s descent into progressive madness continues apace.  Now people have criticized the once venerated magazine  roundly for publishing an opinion piece titled “Health Care Workers Call for Support of Palestinians.”

I would offer a link to the piece, but it was so awful that Scientific American had to retract it.

The screechy diatribe accused Israel of “vaccine apartheid” and “war crimes” among other alleged abuses. The piece blasted “Israeli settler colonial rule” and called on US health care and academic institutions to condemn “long-standing oppression” against the Palestinians and adopt the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the country.The screechy diatribe accused Israel of “vaccine apartheid” and “war crimes” among other alleged abuses. The piece blasted “Israeli settler colonial rule” and called on US health care and academic institutions to condemn “long-standing oppression” against the Palestinians and adopt the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the country.The piece was written by Harvard University research fellows Osaid H.K. Alser and Asmaa Rimawi; Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Sabreen Akhter; the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin; Harvard med students Anand Chukka and Qaali Hussein; Arizona trauma surgeon Ariän El-Taher; and Bryan Leyva, an “AfroLatinx Scholar-Activist from the Dakota Territory.”The opinionated screed was swiftly retracted after the magazine received a letter from three Nobel Prize winners and 100 other scientists calling out the article.

You would think that serious researchers would know wokeness is incompatible with reason. Now the editorial team is doing a veritable “walk of shame” by publishing a piece clearly “not supported by the facts.

“In publishing the cited article, Scientific American’s editors jettisoned appropriate editorial standards and ignored easily verified facts that counter the authors’ one-sided invective,” the letter read. “While purporting to be a scientific statement about public health, the paper addressed important historical and political issues superficially, inaccurately, and prejudicially. In reality, the piece is a call for activism that, in our view, is unsupported by the facts.”The letter was signed by a number of doctors, accusing the authors of the op-ed, which included an “AfroLatinx Scholar-Activist,” of falsifying facts.”I have been on editorial boards for so many years. You can have differences of opinions, and you can even challenge facts, but it’s quite another thing to completely falsify a fact. So that is what I objected to in the article,” one of the op-ed’s detractors wrote.

The magazine is promising to revise its internal review processes. Given the sentiments expressed by the magazines leading editors, I suspect that there will be further retractions in the future.

Scientific American’s Editor-in-Chief, Laura Helmuth, tweeted in 2015, “Not looking forward to this: Congress invites [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu to another lovefest. Bibi, shut up.” That same year, Helmuth tweeted her opinion that it was “awful” that Netanyahu won reelection.Scientific American Senior Editor Sunya Arshad Bhutta tweeted on May 28, 2021, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which is widely viewed as a call for the erasure of Israel. In June of 2021, Bhutta tweeted, “the united states has caused significantly more terror worldwide than the taliban and hamas combined…it’s a fact.”In a 2019 tweet, Bhutta said, “Israel is an apartheid state.” In 2021, Bhutta tweeted, “Israel is the only ally of American white supremacy.” In 2020, Bhutta accused Israel of “countless human rights abuses,” and stated, “I support the BDS movement.” BDS is the movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel.In 2021, Bhutta accused Israel of a “criminally negligent coronavirus response.” Of course, she ignored the Oslo Accords, which call for the Palestinian Authority to provide healthcare to its people, and includes the statement that “Powers and responsibilities in the sphere of health in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be transferred to the Palestinian side … the Palestinian side shall provide vaccinations.”

Tags: Antisemitism, Culture, Israel, Science, Taliban, Vaccines

CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY