Prof Ada Yonath: A Gift to the World, and to Smart Girls
When Professor Ada Yonath, the bubbly, animated scientist with Einstein-like hair as well as intelligence, received the phone call several days ago informing her that she was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, she thought someone was playing a joke on her.
“I said, ‘Yeah, right, so should I make an appointment for the hairdresser now?’” she recalled at the press conference this week. “As you can all see, I did not make that appointment,” she laughed, with a wonderful gleam in her eye.
Prof. Yonath’s prize for discoveries about ribosomes is cause for celebration, especially for Jewish women. It gives her a place not just in the annals of human history, but also in the hearts and diaries of countless girls.
I can just picture all those science-loving girls. They are the ones who, like Prof. Yonath, prefer to be in a lab rather than at the hairdresser, who may be quiet in class or walk with their noses in a book, who are perhaps irreverent and independent-minded, girls who love a good experiment and would rather read science fiction than go to the mall, girls whose idea of a perfect birthday gift is a microscope or telescope rather than a Barbie, girls who wonder why they don’t fit in.
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October 11th, 2009 at 2:36 am
It’s a shame she had to then go and sully her own name with ridiculous political suggestions.
She suggested on Army Radio that freeing imprisoned terrorists would reduce the number of kidnappings of IDF soldiers. Why? Because then, according to her, the terrorists would have nothing to bargain for, and therefore no reason to capture soldiers. Hello??!! Maybe they’d continue to capture soldiers in order, oh, I don’t know, cause terror? Or maybe they’d bargain for something else, say, money? I don’t think the terrorists are so idiotic that they cannot think of any other reasons to kidnap IDF soldiers. (It’s interesting how the Left is consistenly the most racist faction in Israel; the Right depends the intelligence quotients of the terrorists, but the Left treats the Arabs like mentally-deficient little children.)
She further said that if we didn’t imprison the terrorists, then the terrorists would have better lives (materially), and would have no reason to commit terrorism. Again, hello??!! The terrorists are not fighting for better lives; as Rabbi Meir Kahane so rightly noted, attempting to conciliate via offerings plumbing and gardens is merely insulting to someone who is fighting for an ideological cause. Yes, Israel was a desert before and is now a garden, but it is our garden, and the Arabs want their desert back. What if the British had offered Ghandi a Mercedes in return for the right to retain control over India? What if the British had done the same for the leaders of the Lehi and Stern? Would this not merely add insult to injury? And yet Israel keeps insulting the Arabs with materialism, treating the Arabs like Western European descendants of Judeo-Christians. They don’t want McDonald’s and blue jeans; they want honor and self-respect and independence. (They also want a Judenrein Israel, even if that means calls of Itbah al Yahud.) Moreover, as Moshe Feiglin notes, that means they don’t know the meaning of “I owe you one”; if you give into the Arabs, they’ll respond like Hitler did to Chamberlain and desire more. If a wold bows down to another wolf, the superior wolf does not think, “Oh, he gave me something, so now I owe him”; rather, it thinks, “He submitted and subordinated himself to me, and so now I’m in control, and I am demand more of him”. Everytime Israel attempts to propitiate and conciliate the Arabs, it only emboldens them, because they rightly see Israel’s overtures as signs of weakness.
Professor Yonath shows what is worst in the Left, a fundamental misappraisal of the Arabs as Western European Judeo-Christian crass-materialists, rather than as proud and independent-minded Middle Easterners. Besides being incredibly racist, this additionally only further confounds the effort for peace, driving it only further away, and only increasing the size of the fig leaf that Israel wears to hide its nakedness.
It’s a shame Yonath had to make such a fool of herself.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:25 am
I don’t know. She’s been working pro bono since her retirement, has not had a vacation in 20 years, lives in a tiny little apartment across from her lab so she can be on duty 24/7, and in the end won the Nobel Prize for her brilliant work, not through cushy conditions but through hardworking dedication — I’d say she has certainly earned the right to say whatever she wants.
Besides, a lot less noteworthy people share their opinions on anything and everything. I’d say, even if you don’t like what she has to say, let her speak.
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October 11th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I’m not trying to silence her. I guess I’m criticizing her the same way I criticize plenty of celebrities who use their fame to spread their political opinions. I’m sorry, but no matter how brilliant you are in chemistry or no matter how wonderful an actor you are, I don’t care what idealistic movement you’re heading up.
Of course, were I myself given the spotlight, I’d probably just as quickly use the opportunity to foist my own opinions onto the public. If so, then the true indictment ought to be on those in the media and the public who actually care what the famous have to say on politics. Let the rich and famous say what they want when the cameras roll, but woe to the society that provides those rolling cameras.
In Israel, of course, things are even worse. At least in America, everyone - right or left - famous gets his or her moment. If it’s idiocy, at least it’s impartial idiocy. But in Israel, a prominent Leftist on radio or in print can demand Sharon’s death or call the IDF soldiers “Judeo-Nazis” or call for “death to the settlers” with no repercussions whatsoever, but as soon as a Rightist points out the solemn and sober historical fact that Rabin (by his own proud admission) is directly responsible for the Altenalena murders, he (the Rightist who pointed out said objective historical fact) is immediately accused of incitement to murder. And when a prominent Leftist media elite revealed that Yigal Amir was goaded into his act by a member of the GSS who was acting on a conspiracy with the Rabin administration, this media elite later regretted his act of revelation - not because the information was false, but rather because the information, true as it was, was damaging to the Left; by his own admission, this media elite put his own party affiliations over his duty to objectively and dispassionately report the news. When Moshe Feiglin blocked traffic, and newsmen on the ground merely filmed what was happening, the media elite chastised the newsmen for making a “sympathetic report”. The newsmen replied, “We’re sorry, but we can only report what we see”. As Lecturer Raissa Epstein points out, Israel is not a democracy; it is an elected Marxist dictatorship. Somehow, if Yonath were instead as right-wing as she is left, I doubt she’d have been given a voice on the radio.
What is unfortunate is that try as I might, every time Yonath’s name is mentioned, long before I think of her achievements in chemistry, I will first think of her political views.