Conflict of Interest Police and the Academic Boycott of Israel are Birds of a Feather

Recently an organization representing major academic research institutions introduced a resolution proposing that such entities consider the moral and political implications of educational links with pharmaceutical and to discuss such association with individuals and institutions concerned, including researchers in industry with whom they are collaborating."  It also called for a moratorium on research  with industry because industry has damaged the fabric of academic medicine over the past 40 years.

Actually, the ban and the resolution came from the UK University and College Union and it applied to Israel, not Big Pharma. I have just returned from Israel and spoke to several of the world's leading researchers in their fields to -- who receive no pharma funding -- and have heard of how their research has been shunned, ignored, passed over by other academics in a corrupt, biased, small minded peer-review process.  Being Jewish -- especially if you apply for funding in Europe -- does not help.  So much for purifying academic medicine by driving pharma out!! 

But I digress -- sort of.   But the presumption of damage and the guilt by association -- and the unsubstantiated nature of it all fueled by a leftist hatred that is unbalanced and blinds the conflict of interest kapos to other forms of conflict that are more pervasive and corrupt that conveniently reward their cronies. Mitchell Cohen notes in Dissent regarding "Anti-Semitism and The Left That Doesn't Learn"

If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;

if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis; you probably are an anti-Semite.

Similarly

if you judge pharmaceutical companies or those who receive pharma funding to support their research no matter how transparent or for whatever research that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Big Pharma but you've done no more than tsk "well, yes, terrible about PBM drug switching or peer-review panels stacked with cronies";

if there is no medicine you can't write about without claiming it wasn't developed by pharma or is not really effective;

if your anger at drug companies doesn't sound any different from the unthinking American conservatives attacks towards those who support universal health care out of a true sense of compassion? 

Then you are simply part of the group seeking to stifle and suppress and eliminate debate out of hate.  As Labor MP Dennis McShane noted: “there is an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.”

The same tonality runs through the anti-pharma, conflict of interest blogs.  

Birds of a feather.