How academics sneak anti-Israel propaganda into unrelated research papers ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, December 07, 2025

How academics sneak anti-Israel propaganda into unrelated research papers

Last summer, at the Socialism 2025 conference, Princeton University professor Lorgia García Peña described how to bring anti-Israel activism into every corner of academia, including science, engineering and math. (As a bonus, she said her goal is to “abolish the university as it is” while getting paid by “the colonizing racial capitalist white supremacist institution that pays my salary, which I very much need.”)

This is already happening. I see lies about Israel being smuggled into many academic papers that have nothing to do with Israel, with "genocide" as the preferred term stated as fact.

A recent example that is especially hypocritical is buried inside a paper on ethics in "Qualitative Research in Psychology."

Ethics, power, and responsibility in qualitative psychology: a duo-ethnographic inquiry
Chiara Fiscone, Guido Veronese ,Desmond Painter & Ashraf Kagee
Published online: 11 Nov 2025

ABSTRACT
This paper emerges from a collaborative duo-ethnographic inquiry into the lived and contested dimensions of ethics in qualitative psychological research. Grounded in our diverse positionalities as researchers situated across disciplinary, institutional, and geopolitical contexts we reflect on the persistent dissonance between institutionalized procedural ethics and the ethical complexities encountered in practice. Through reflexive and collaborative analysis, we identify four interwoven tensions that structure our inquiry: the mismatch between institutional ethics and ethical responsibility; informed consent as a point of ethical and political tension; the challenges of navigating the tensions and paradoxes within ethical practice; and the entanglement of ethics with political structures and power dynamics. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, we dwell within these tensions – inhabiting the discomfort, contradiction, and uncertainty that define ethical research as an ongoing, situated struggle.

There is nothing about Gaza or Israel in the abstract, but the paper mentions "Gaza genocide" based on a keyword search. And all four of the authors have expressed in different areas (social media, signing petitions, other papers) that they consider the "genocide" in Gaza to be incontrovertible fact.

As I proved last week with the Accuser's Trilemma - a simple logical test exposing the structural impossibility of a "Gaza genocide" under the Genocide Convention - none of this holds water. Any paper, speech, article, children's book, conference or podcast that uses the term "Gaza genocide" without qualification is lying.

Where I come from, lying is unethical. (The crime of using the word "positionalities" instead of "positions" doesn't quite reach that level.)

Even more unethical is smuggling lies into other fields where people are not expecting them. And this is where the modern antisemitic blood libels are jarringly effective - when one reads or hears the term "Gaza genocide" in a context far from politics, psychologically, they think that this must be a proven fact. People expect that what they read has been edited, vetted and is largely true; they may be on guard and able to look critically at the main arguments given but the supporting facts for those arguments are assumed to be given in good faith. And that is no longer the case.

This is just one paper. A recent bibliometric scan of Gaza-war papers found a huge number in top journals like The Lancet and BMJ framing it as "genocide" without caveats - pro-Palestinian pieces dominating by 2:1 over pro-Israel ones, often in unrelated fields like public health. And that paper itself was one of them, repeatedly invoking "Gaza genocide" as fact.

Over the past month, some 47 papers were published in Taylor and Francis publications alone that referred to "genocide" in Gaza. Arguing against the lie is quickly turning into professional suicide akin to Holocaust denial.

And here's the chilling part: This is straight from the Nazi antisemitic propaganda playbook of the 1930s. Infiltrate institutions with "facts" that aren't, normalize the big lie through repetition in "respectable" channels, and watch society fracture until the unthinkable becomes inevitable. The haters aren't innovating: they're executing the script, aiming for those same 1940s results.

We can't let them. Call it out. Every time. Put them on the defensive. Force them to prove every word, every time. Force their editors to act responsibly. Shame the journals that publish these libels. Write letters to each journal showing that their editorial processes have failed, and that these failures have real world harm.

Shine a light on the lies, every time.