Dear Dr. Jensen: 
 
I read your article on MWC (http://mwcnews.net/content/view/14834/26) with considerable interest and a corresponding element of confusion. 
 
First of all, you appear to condemn the stance taken by Dr Weinberg vis a vis the various British attempts at boycotting Israel based on an offhand remark made to you in a casual conversation.  I am not quite certain how, exactly, that compromises the validity of his stance on the British boycotts.  By my lights, your argument seems to be illustrative of the logical "fallacy of irrelevant conclusion" (ignoratio elenchi), to wit, something is advanced as an argument when it has nothing to do with the point at issue.  The point is (is it not?) the validity of the boycott; not the personal posture of Dr Weinberg.   
 
Second, if one were to casually review your article, a certain "prejudice" on your part might be found:  "Hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians were displaced when the settler state of Israel was created".  I refer, specifically, to the obvious pejorative in your sentence; "settler" state, connoting colonialist, land expropriations, illegitimacy, etc.  Your data, might I note, was initially published by...an Israeli (though one might also dispute the connotations of "indigenous" as used in this context). Does your posture compromise your argument, as well?  If not, why not?  Is this, "moral blindness", as believe you called it in your article. 
 
Next, on the topic of governmental "crimes", one might (and many have) made the quite compelling argument that the US Government's long-standing boycott (older than I am, in fact) of the sovereign State of Cuba is illegal:  it is.  So, for that matter, is the Sudanese government's genocide in Darfur.  But, then again, so is use of proxies to destabilize other sovereign nations (Iran and Syria in Lebanon, for example).  Threats to obliterate a member State of the UN (Israel by Iran) are also in violation of international "law" (the UN Charter).  So, one might reasonably wonder, exactly what is so heinous about the conduct of Israel against various groups that prefer to conduct a war of attrition, rather than reach some sort of negotiated settlement.  As I recall someone once remarking, instead of picking themselves up and rebuilding after 1948, instead of analyzing their defeat and understanding their adversaries, Palestinians have spent the decades whining and pining, composing poetry to a lost world, believing that a rejection of compromise was evidence of virtue and wisdom. Maybe this is what Weinberg meant by "primitive", or perhaps he meant (speaking as a scientist) that the total number of scientific publications from *all* Arabic countries is

Guest