Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes about a New York Times report (sorry–you gotta pay to read it) on a study from the University of Utah suggesting that what a lot of people think about Jews is true: They really are (as a group) smarter than anyone else. Most Jews in Europe had to deal for more than 1,000 years with discrimination that limited them to certain commercial occupations that called for brains. Those who did well tended to have more children than those who didn’t, so the overall intelligence level of  European Jews gradually rose. Naturally, as the scientists made clear, this generalization doesn’t mean there are no stupid Jews. But it accounts for the fact that although Jews constitute only 2 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 27 percent of U.S. Nobel Prize winners.


So if a study such as this one about Jews doesn’t raise any hackles, why did the militant fems get so riled up when Harvard president Lawrence Summers pointed out that men (as a group) really do perform better at the high end in math than women?


Cohen wonders the same thing. He poses the question:


“I cannot be certain that…Summers…has read the article. But if he did, I bet he wondered why it is possible to suggest that certain Jews are smarter than other people but not remotely possible to suggest that women might not be as brilliant in science and engineering as men. When Summers did precisely that back in January — when he wondered out loud about such matters as ‘intrinsic aptitude’ — he got his head handed to him. He was not, mind you, stating this as a fact — just throwing it out along with other factors that might account for why men outnumber women on the science, engineering and math faculties of first-rate universities. What he did not do — and this was his mistake — was limit the possibilities to the only politically correct one: sexual discrimination of one sort or another.'”


Here’s Cohen’s analysis:


“He was shouted down not because he was wrong, but because he ought to be wrong; not because he might not be right, but because he should not be right. It did not matter to many of his critics that at least since the 1980s, researchers have found boys doing better at math than girls — not all boy and all girls, mind you, just those at the highest ranges of achievement. Among the very best, boys are the very bestest.


“The reason the Utah study of Jews produced no outcry is that it suggested Jews were, like the children of Lake Wobegon, above average. The reason Summers got into trouble is that he wondered if, so to speak, women were below average. But if one is possible, why not the other? The answer escapes me — and it cannot be, as we all know from the Utah study, because I’m dumb.”


I’ll provide the answer, Richard. Militant feminism (as I wrote a couple of months ago in the Dallis Morning News) is a totalitarian ideology, the last sucessful one in the Western world, now that Marxism and Nazism are dead. When ideologues are in power, science and scientific studies that might contradict their belief systems don’t matter. Indeed the ideologues will move ruthless to suppress the science and punish its proponents. That’s why Lynsenko’s genetics were dogma in the Soviet Union and half-baked racialism the dogma in Hitler’s Germany. And it’s why Harvard has scrambled to set up a pointless multimillion dollar program to establish faculty gender quotas in order to appease the feminist militants in the wake of Summers’s statement.