SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL PULLS ARTICLE

SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL PULLS ARTICLE THAT FINDS PALESTINIANS AND JEWS FROM
SAME GENE POOL

ROBIN MCKIE, OBSERVER, UK - A keynote research paper showing that Middle
Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been
pulled from a leading journal. Academics who have already received
copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending
pages and throw them away. Such a drastic act of self-censorship is
unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread
disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of
scientific work that questions Biblical dogma. 'I have authored several
hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has
never happened to me before,' said the article's lead author, Spanish
geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University
in Madrid. 'I am stunned.' British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added:
'If the journal didn't like the paper, they shouldn't have published it
in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like
this?'

The journal's editor, Nicole Sucio-Foca, of Columbia University, New
York, claims the article provoked such a welter of complaints over its
extreme political writing that she was forced to repudiate it. The
article has been removed from Human Immunology's website, while letters
have been written to libraries and universities throughout the world
asking them to ignore or 'preferably to physically remove the relevant
pages'. Arnaiz-Villena has been sacked from the journal's editorial
board. Dolly Tyan, president of the American Society of
Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, which runs the journal, told
subscribers that the society is 'offended and embarrassed'.. . .

In common with earlier studies, the team found no data to support the
idea that Jewish people were genetically distinct from other people in
the region. In doing so, the team's research challenges claims that Jews
are a special, chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.
Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East share a very similar gene pool
and must be considered closely related and not genetically separate, the
authors state. Rivalry between the two races is therefore based 'in
cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences', they conclude.

But the journal, having accepted the paper earlier this year, now claims
the article was politically biased and was written using 'inappropriate'
remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its editor told the
journal Nature last week that she was threatened by mass resignations
from members if she did not retract the article. Arnaiz-Villena says he
has not seen a single one of the accusations made against him, despite
being promised the opportunity to look at the letters sent to the
journal. He accepts he used terms in the article that laid him open to
criticism. There is one reference to Jewish 'colonists' living in the
Gaza strip, and another that refers to Palestinian people living in
'concentration' camps.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,605798,00.html

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I just want to interject here that Rachael Corrie is from Olympia, WA, not Seattle as is stated in this story. Thanks...........Scott

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PLAY ABOUT WOMAN RUN DOWN BY ISRAELI BULLDOZER PULLED FROM NEW YORK
SCHEDULE

NATION - The play My Name Is Rachel Corrie, directed in London by actor
Alan Rickman and due to open in New York City in March, has been
canceled for fear of controversy. The play adapts the diaries of the
23-year-old woman from Seattle who was murdered in Rafah in 2003, when
she was deliberately run down by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer.
Rachel had traveled to the Gaza Strip during the last intifada as an
activist for the International Solidarity Movement.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie has enjoyed two sell-out runs in London at the
Royal Court Theatre and great critical acclaim; it was due to open at
the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village. In private
conversations with those who staged the play in London, the Theatre
Workshop cited the election of Hamas in Palestine, Ariel Sharon's
medical condition and the furor over the Danish cartoons as reasons for
refusing to stage the play. "The decision is incredibly frustrating,"
said one of the people closely associated with the play. "It
underestimates the intelligence and compassion of the American people."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20060227/cm_thenation/
1564288&printer=1;_ylt=Akq8RkPCilWOrbpacy.Qhz0__8QF;_ylu=
X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-


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A HIT PLAYWRIGHT IN LONDON FINDS HER WORK SELF-CENSORED IN NEW YORK

KATHARINE VINER - The Royal Court production of My Name Is Rachel
Corrie, the play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring next
month to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the groundbreaking
musical Rent, following two sellout runs in London and several awards.

We always thought that it was a piece of work that needed to be seen in
the US. Created from the journals and emails of American activist Rachel
Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescent life in Seattle,
Washington, to her death under a bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we
considered it, in a sense, to be an American story, which would have a
particular relevance for audiences in Rachel's home country. After all,
she had made her journey to the Middle East in order "to meet the people
who are on the receiving end of our [American] tax dollars", and she was
a killed by a US-made bulldozer.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled the production -
or, in their words, "postponed it indefinitely". The political climate,
we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As
James Nicola, the theatre's artistic director, said yesterday: "In our
pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our
communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's
illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections,
we had a very edgy situation." Rachel was to be censored for political
reasons.

It makes you wonder. If a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded,
and dead, American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental
health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggle to find out
who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and
discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live -
if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is
there for anyone else? The non-American, the non-white, the non-dead,
the oppressed?

Anyone who sees the play, or reads it, realizes that this is no piece of
alienating agitprop. One night in London, a group of American students
came to a performance and mobbed us afterwards, thrilled that they had
seen themselves on stage, and who they might, in a different life, have
become. Another night, an Israeli couple, members of the rightwing Likud
party, on holiday in Britain, were similarly impressed. "The play wasn't
against Israel, it was against violence," they told Cindy Corrie,
Rachel's mother. I was particularly touched by a young Jewish New
Yorker, from an Orthodox family, who said that he had been nervous about
coming to see My Name Is Rachel Corrie, because he had been told that
both she and it were viciously anti-Israel. But he had been powerfully
moved by Rachel's words and realized that he had, to his alarm, been
dangerously misled.

But the director of the New York theatre told the New York Times
yesterday that it wasn't the people who actually saw the play he was
concerned about. "I don't think we were worried about the audience," he
said. "I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered
her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an
opportunity to position their arguments." Since when did theatre come to
be about those who don't go to see it? If the play itself, as Mr Nicola
clearly concedes, is not the problem, then isn't the answer to get
people in to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship? With
freedom of speech now at the top of the international agenda, and George
Clooney's outstanding Good Night, and Good Luck reminding us of the
dangers of not standing up to witch-hunts, Americans should not be
denied the right to hear Rachel Corrie's words - words that only two
weeks ago were deemed acceptable.

I'd heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been
getting worse - wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing anti-war
T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from
afar how bad things really are. Here was personal proof that the
political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the
scope of free debate and artistic expression. What was acceptable a
matter of weeks ago is not acceptable now. . .

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1720592,00. html