"Issues of World War III" Survey

"Is it appropriate for the U.S. government to sue tobacco manufacturers?" At first glance, we were a bit surprised at the feedback on this one; but on second thought, we realized that people's thinking is very different from media propaganda, and so the results weren't so startling after all. Although the choices were a mix between our defined options and "other," 85% of respondents took some clear, identifiable position on the issue — and they all agreed that cigarette production should neither be prosecuted nor restricted! Based on the comments, all answers seemed to be variations on the "smokers' rights" viewpoint; here are a couple of them:

• "…the use of tobacco is not the concern of a government. It is entirely the resonsibility of the individual.…"
• "…I do think tobacco is dangerous and I don't use it, but I also think consuming shellfish and pork is dangerous, but would not want the government suing bacon producers. This is where each person has the responsibility to educate himself and act accordingly."

Factual Background:
Since at least the 1880s, the "Public Health" movement has tried to label smoking a health hazard, albeit without any scientific basis in earlier decades. By the 1930s, the Nazi regime of Germany had elevated Public Health to a national movement (based on proposals in Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf), including an aggressive campaign to fight smoking. After World War II, British researcher Richard Doll (noted for his involvement in radical left organizations) published studies showing a statistical link between smoking and lung cancer; according to his analysis, the more a person smoked over his lifetime, the greater his chance of developing the disease. Over the course of several years, Doll's data actually showed that the great, overwhelming majority of smokers never developed such cancer, and that some non-smokers did get lung cancer. But Doll insisted that the increased risk was due to smoking, rather than some other unidentified factor.

In the years since those studies, similar scientific papers (many by Doll himself) connected smoking with literally dozens of other diseases, thus blaming smoking for a growing percentage of deaths by almost any cause. The Public Health movement, as it became increasingly powerful politically, began enforcing Doll's results as official dogma. In 1964, the Surgeon General issued his famous warning against smoking; in 1971, President Nixon launched the War on Cancer, including hefty funding for researchers willing to blame smoking for anything (versus no funding at all for those who wouldn't play along); and the war on tobacco massed into a multi-faceted attack on every aspect of tobacco production, sales, and use, including mega-lawsuits for hundreds of billions of dollars (!) against cigarette manufacturers.

While most scientists didn't believe Doll's conclusions in the 1960s, after the War on Cancer changed the funding picture, most scientists correspondingly changed their minds, too. By now, most people believe that smoking — and even "second-hand" smoke — causes a long list of fatal diseases, and that a smoker's lungs are black and misshapen, while a non-smoker's lungs are supposedly pink and healthy. Whenever anyone dares to raise a question, he is abruptly told the evidence is "overwhelming" and not subject to challenge. But is it?

Doll's evidence was entirely statistical correlation, which, scientifically, is a notoriously unreliable way to establish the cause of any disease. More often than not, even the tightest, most solid statistical connections turn out to be utter nonsense. So the real question is, have the other scientific investigations established smoking as the cause of lung cancer? The answer is an eye-popping "no":

• To this day, no scientist has ever been able to produce lung cancer in any animal through forcing the animal to inhale large amounts of cigarette smoke, despite well-funded experiments for decades performed by the world's leading inhalation toxicologists on dogs, cats, rats, mice, guinea pigs, monkeys, and other species. Normally such experiments work quite well for other substances that cause cancer.
• The ingredients in cigarette smoke have been chemically analyzed, and there is no cancer-causing substance found in any appreciable quantity in that smoke. Chemically, there is no reason to expect such smoke to cause cancer.
• Contrary to popular belief, smoker's lungs are not black and malformed, nor are they covered with tar or residue; any person whose lungs would be filled with even a smaller amount of residue would die of asphyxiation immediately, and would not live long enough to get any cancer. The notoriously black lungs seen in propaganda photos are those of people with lung cancer — regardless of whether they have smoked. Cancerous tissue often becomes miscolored, similar to the darker skin pigments seen in moles. This has nothing to do with cigarette smoke.

The death blow to Doll's smoking hypothesis was dealt by another British researcher, Dr. Hans Eysenck of the University of London. In a long series of startling studies, Eysenck discovered that smoking was not even statistically linked with lung cancer, once the data was corrected for other factors, and that the true link was between nervous personality types and lung cancer; Doll's correlation, in other words, was simply a reflection of the fact that people with nervous personality types also tend to smoke more (to calm themselves). According to Eysenck's studies (which have never yet been answered or refuted, to our knowledge), people with nervous personalities are more likely to get lung cancer than those who smoke but are not nervous. He also discovered that smokers who believed smoking was unhealthy were more likely to develop cancer than equivalent smokers who considered it harmless — meaning that anti-smoking publicity actually causes cancer by making people more anxious. And Eysenck showed that cancer could be both prevented and, to some extent, treated by psychological methods of helping people to be more calm.

Eysenck's results fit well with a plethora of studies in recent decades showing a strong link between stress and diseases, including fatal conditions such as heart disease and cancer.

Relevant Torah Principles:
1) The rules of Torah explicitly forbid a person from recklessly endangering himself or causing himself harm, unless there is a good reason (i.e., to perform a mitzvah or carry out the general mission of Torah). This applies to gentiles as much as Jews.

2) Consequently, people do not have the right to take unnecessary risks, especially just for fun or pleasure. This means that the government does have the responsibility to intervene and stop risky behavior when such intervention will not interfere with legitimate activities.

3) If there is no particular risk involved, the Torah does allow mild, everyday pleasures such as coffee drinking, eating tasty foods, or drinking alcohol. In fact, Hasidic custom encourages a certain amount of drinking, for example (in proper context), as a means of calming the animalistic soul of a person and allowing his higher, human self to function with greater clarity.

4) Psychoactive drugs, in contrast, are forbidden by Torah for two primary reasons: because of their confirmed destructive effect on the body's health and the functioning of the mind (the higher human aspect, thus reducing a person to an animalistic state), and because their use constitutes genuinely evil indulgence in extreme, intense "pleasure." Heavy drinking, which produces drunkenness, has a similar effect, and is likewise discouraged or prohibited within the Torah outlook.

Analysis:
The fact that, scientifically, smoking cannot be established to cause any disease, much less fatal ones, means it is not prohibited. And the fact that scientific data shows a great potential danger from advertising a non-existent risk (by creating disease-causing anxiety) means that the Public Health offensive against smoking is itself absolutely forbidden by Torah. Any attempt to frighten people into thinking smoking harms them is a malicious and dangerous lie, and the government must step in by prohibiting all anti-smoking activism; this is a matter which could save lives, and is therefore urgent. All anti-tobacco propaganda must be banned (for the same reason yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, or announcing a fake bomb threat, are illegal). And, of course, the War on Cancer must be repealed, allowing science to function normally again — which will mean many scientists returning to agree that smoking is clearly harmless.

The Public Health agenda behind the anti-tobacco war is tied to the promotion of heavier drug use; some of the same Public Health authorities who viciously attack tobacco also promote, even publicly, a call for the government itself to provide marijuana, cocaine, and heroine to the public. Public Health activists believe that, by making tobacco seem grotesquely dangerous and evil, the use of other, harder drugs will seem less destructive by comparison. Incredibly, this has partly worked; today, many people actually believe tobacco is worse than harder drugs.

For both moral and medical reasons, the Public Health agenda must be exposed and neutralized as quickly as possible.

And now for this week's survey question:

After two decades of fighting, Sudan's Arab regime in the north has apparently reconciled with Christian rebels in the south. Should Sudan's government now receive U.S. support? (1) No, it's still a terror-supporting regime. (2) Only the semi-autonomous region in the south should be supported. (3) Yes, it's now a peaceful state and potential ally. (4) Other

Only one answer per e-mail address will be accepted; only e-mail addresses on our subscription list are eligible. Please send your input by Tuesday, November 29, 2005, 12pm PST.

THE HALL OF SHAME…
Have Some Chabad Shluchim Betrayed Their Rebbe?

This week's example:
Rabbi Yaakov Goldberg, Dean, Hadar HaTorah Yeshiva, Brooklyn, NY

Rabbi Goldberg was shown a copy of our Proclamation (declaring the Torah duty for everyone to help defund the PLO) by a JAHG-USA volunteer on March 30th. But when the volunteer re-contacted Rabbi Goldberg on April 1st, he was met with outright hostility. The rabbi refused to listen to any reason, and instead of trying to come up with some objection to the Proclamation itself, he hysterically began calling its author, Boruch Ellison, names — particularly "meshugge" (crazy). His uncontrolled anger was not sparked by anything in the Proclamation itself, nor by anything the JAHG-USA volunteer said; Goldberg simply lost control, apparently triggered by the fear that Ellison himself is too "controversial" (i.e., that some rabbis in the community are furious at this campaign, etc.).

Rabbi Goldberg should know better. Both the volunteer and Ellison were students of his at Hadar HaTorah, so he knows them well enough not to believe false rumors and slanders against them. And Goldberg is also a highly knowledgeable Rav, with authority to make decisions in Torah Law — which means he is more aware than most people of the Torah prohibition against repeating lashon hara (slanderous speech) against a fellow Jew. So why would Rabbi Goldberg so brazenly violate even the simplest, best-known rules of Torah? This is not the first time he has collapsed spinelessly in the face of controversy; previously, whenever enemies of our anti-PLO or Noahide campaigns have screamed (literally!) at Goldberg to take action against us, he has always broken down in fear and refused to stand up for what he himself knows is right.

Rabbi Goldberg's grandfather was much braver, having been imprisoned and murdered by the Soviet Communists for his work in the Jewish underground of Russia. Yaakov Goldberg brings shame on himself, his forefathers, and on Judaism in general when he collapses before wicked, brazen men who try to oppose holy work. Goldberg will one day wake up to realize his terrible shame; let us hope it will be soon enough to save some lives.

…AND THE HALL OF FAME
Some Chabad Shluchim Are Helping the JAHG-USA Campaign

This week's example:
Rabbi Isser Slavin, Oholei Torah Yeshiva, Brooklyn, NY

Rabbi Slavin was also presented the Proclamation in person, on June 9th, and found it to be entirely correct and well-founded, so he endorsed it immediately. We don't know whether Rabbi Slavin is aware of the fifth-column opposition to this campaign inside the Lubavitch community, but the bottom line is that he did what Rabbi Goldberg was not willing to do, and for that he deserves congratulations.

What do you think about Jewish leadership on PLO defunding? Send us your comments at newsletter@noahide.com.

For a complete listing of all rabbis who have received our proclamation, the up-to-date status of their responses, and how you can get help the campaign, visit ATTAC Report at http://www.attacreport.com/plo/.

This week's edition of our sister site, ATTAC Report, presents:

• The real story behind the Bush Adminstration's campaign to sabotage American air superiority in the Afghan War
• The Genocide Clock ticks off the ongoing mass murder in Red China — one person every nine seconds
• An overview map of the more than 2,200 concentration camps (including at least 68 death camps) throughout the Soviet republics and Mongolia

Letters to the Editor

• "The Lubavitcher Rebbe is now dead and I should think has been for some time if he was born in 1909. Please tell me who succeeded the Rebbe in leadership of the noahide movement.…" — I & TQ.

Our response: The Rebbe was born in 1902, not 1909; he passed away in 1994. Since he selected no replacement, there is no new leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. In effect, the same Rebbe is considered still the leader of the movement today. It is not uncommon for Hasidic movements to continue under the leadership of previous Rebbeim when no new one is available. But in the case of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, since he definitely announced that this generation is when Moshiach and the Redemption will arrive — and, indeed, that we are going through the "birthpangs of the Messiah" of the "End of Days" right now — the issue of leadership will be resolved soon, probably in less than five years.

As far as the Noahide movement is concerned, there is not and has never been any centralized leadership. There are subversive forces, such as the Root and Branch Association in New York, the Tennessee-based cult of J. David Davis and Jack Saunders, Professor James Tabor, and others who are trying to bring all potential Hasidic Gentiles under their control in order to neutralize the movement, but in reality every single person must exercise individual leadership in this campaign. That was the explicit position of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who insisted that every Jew and every gentile is a shliach (an emissary) of G-d in overcoming the forces of evil and bringing the Redemption. In other words, each of us is a leader of the Hasidic Gentile movement.

Send your letter to the editor to newsletter@noahide.com.

Be sure to visit our Web site, Noahide.com.