ACADEMICS DERIDED

Lindsay Tanner unwittingly compliments Australians' collective intelligence:

Australia is one of the few countries in the world where academic is a term of derision.

Many academics do deserve ridicule: Jake Lynch, for example. As already noted, he doesn't present the full facts in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article.

Factual error isn't the only problem with the article, however, which accuses Israel of piracy:

Israel sent six military vessels to seize a ship, the Spirit of Humanity, sailing from Cyprus with relief supplies for the people of Gaza, and arrested - no, make that abducted - 21 people on board, including the Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire. After a week in detention, they were released and deported.

At no time did the Spirit enter Israeli waters, so Israel's action could be deemed piracy under the definition of the International Maritime Bureau...

This aligns the Herald's reporting with that of Socialist Worker Online, Al-Ahram Weekly, Alarab Online, Global Arab Network and other fringe news source.

Then there's "adjunct professor of international human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University" Noura Erakat's article at Huffington Post. Erakat ignores the piracy issue, concentrating instead on Israel's blockade and destruction of Gaza:

While blockades are not new to the international legal order, think to the decade-long US-imposed sanctions on Iraq or the 49-year US-imposed embargo on Cuba, the blockade of Gaza is unique for including the prohibition of basic goods, being applied against an occupied nation, and persisting in spite of a military attack that left 14,000 homes, 240 schools, and 219 factories destroyed. In Gaza, the otherwise sterile moniker, 'blockade,' amounts to a policy of starvation.

Ignoring that no Gazans are reported to have starved as a result of the blockade, operation "Cast Lead" did not destroy 14,000 homes and 240 schools. Also, Iraq sanction were imposed by the United Nations, not the United States.

Highly educated academics are supposed to be better informed and more intelligent than the "average" person. This notion is obviously incorrect.