Perhaps my first post back after a wonderful family get-together (much tail-wagging, drooling, chow hounding, snoozing) ought not to be an angry one. But I noticed our resident savant Rob's moderate (no names, no pack drill) appeal fell on deaf ears and our dueling docs are even further advanced in their dementia. 

The proximate cause of my ire is Dr. Toots (shor, she blows her own horn a lot), whose lack of expertise in areas outside of JAMA sidebars on vaginal implants and jellyfish  could be dismissed as laughable were it not used for despicable causes in deceptive ways.

That a person should use a false connection to the Holocaust to support a cause is worse than meretricious, it is beyond the pale. Herman Rosenblat has been pilloried for his fiction.  Dr. Toots deserves a similar fate.

The Backstory:

Padraig Colman , who is as wise as he is witty, asked her a direct question about the claim which she proceeded to obfuscate with bullshit (technical term a la Harry Frankfurt) numbers as well as a ham-handed textual change in her original assertion.

Of course, both my hermeneutic and statistical sensibilities (two of my many fields of expertise, as my loyal readers know by now) are outraged.

The Text Change:

Her original assertion which Padraig challenged: "most Israelis are refugees of the Holocaust or children of refugees of the Holocaust".

Her response after an attempted dazzle with BS numbers (more on that later): "almost the entire Jewish population of the country is refugees or descendants of refugees. "

Huh? What happened to the Holocaust -- perhaps the most emotionally charged and symbolically potent single word in the language and fraudulently used by her here to lend power to an untruth?

And how did "Israelis" change to "Jewish population"?

She lost them and hoped no one would notice.  But Detective Dawg here stays up nights not for nought. These words were used falsely to attempt to achieve a base purpose.

The Numbers Fudge:

She then proceeds to give a slew of numbers  (with an offhand citation, no link) which nowhere supports her own assertion regarding Holocaust refugees.  So she then slide steps into Russian pogroms, Communist persecutions, alien invasions (known to statisticians as the "kitchen sink maneuver"). But the Holocaust connection just cannot stand, thus the lame ending "the entire Jewish population is refugees".  And the price of tea in China is...?

The facts are as follows   ( data derived slogging through the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics site; the Wikipedia article on Israeli demographics provides a good summary):

1.  The current (2007) population of Israel is 7.25 million, with 5.5 million Jews.
2. 2.6 million or 37% of the population are self-defined Ashkenazim (i.e. "European" Jews). Clearly, only they could be counted as Holocaust related. So her claim ("most Israelis are Holocaust refugees or children etc.") fails at the outset.
3. They are 47% of the Jewish population. So even here her claim fails.
4. There were 400,000 Jews in Mandatory Palestine by 1939 as a result of the Five Aliyahs. These cannot be counted as either refugees or Holocaust related.
5. By 1950, pretty much the end of Holocaust related immigration, the population of Jews was 1.2 million. Of this 800,000 increase, at least half were Mizrahim and Sephardim expelled from Arab countries after 1948 (ref. Tony Judt and others.)
6. So at most 400,000 Jews could claim Holocaust related status in 1950. At the average birth-death rate increase of 1.5% per annum (a source of great concern to Ashkenazim) in 2008 this group may number 1,000,000 at most.
7. This is less than 20% of the Jews in Israel, less than 14% of all Israelis.
8. All the other crap Dr.Toots threw out is pure eyewash, to mix metaphors.

What can one do with this? Prove Toots plays fast and loose with facts? Will alter text and weasel word and scream and shout and hold her breath till she's blue rather than admit she's wrong or flat out lying? That's a larf, tell us something we don't know.

For one thing, along the lines of Rob's treatise, it's a shot across Toots' bow that there are other real experts out there, whose bullshit detectors aren't dead. (There's even, apparently, another old school tie guy calling her on her execrable rhetoric.)

But this post primarily has to do with the gravity of her offense. The Holocaust as fact and symbol is so powerful, so evil, so horrifying, so ONE,  that it adjudicates the moral standing of those who would pronounce upon it. To invoke the Shoah falsely,  for private purpose or pecuniary gain, is to place yourself outside the pale of civilized public discourse. It belittles the Shoah, it demeans it, it gives comfort to the deniers, it is anathema.