The Union for Reform Judaism, which is the most liberal of the Jewish denominations and which I used to affiliate with, recently began a fundraising campaign called “Nothing But Nets.” A $10 donation will buy a net to cover the sleeping area of an African threatened by malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Well screw that! The millions of people suffering from malaria in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere don’t need nets; they need DDT. Forty-five years after Rachel Carson’s environmentalist manifesto Silent Spring launched a movement hell-bent on banning the insecticide, studies have shown that its advantages vastly outweigh its drawbacks. This claim was even made by the World Health Organization in 2006.
So, what is the URJ’s position on DDT? A simple search on their website yielded this resolution, which passed at its 50th General Assembly — in 1969.
50th General Assembly
October 1969
Miami Beach, FL
ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
WHEREAS environmental pollution is a crime against life, it results from our highly industrialized, mechanical society and exploding populations, afflicting areas both urban and rural throughout the world. It effects, going unchecked, can end only in the tragedy of the destruction of all human life on earth.
The industrial and automotive pollution of our air has made the life process of breathing a dangerous health hazard in some areas. Industrial wastes, sewage and oil are contaminating many of our precious water resources. The penetration of poisonous pesticides into all living organisms is now becoming critical, thus disrupting the ecological balance of nature. This is especially the case with DDT. The indiscriminate use of DDT and other poisonous chemicals must be stopped now. [...]
Forty years later it is clear, given its latest “Nets” campaign, that the URJ still stands by its resolution deeming DDT too much of an environmental risk, even though we know now that there is no justification for such fears.
But if you need further confirmation of its stance, go to their web page for Tu Bishvat (the Jewish Arbor Day) and you can download the lyrics to the song “Big Yellow Taxi,” in which farmers are implored to "put away that D.D.T. Give me spots on my apples. But leave me the birds and the bees!"
Yeah, and let millions of humans die of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in the process.
How deplorable.
The tragic consequences of the nearly worldwide ban on DDT—Some countries, like South Africa and Uganda, have started using it again, at the risk of sanctions by countries with a powerful environmentalist lobby—is well-documented. One informative article appeared yesterday on Townhall. The young lady who wrote it, Ashley Herzog, is only a junior in college and evidently wise beyond her years. [Emphasis mine]
An Environmental Failure: Restrictions on DDT
When DDT was first mass-produced in 1939, it was regarded as a miraculous life-saver on the level of penicillin. Malaria—which had once plagued Europe and the U.S. as well as the tropics—was well on its way to being eradicated. During World War II, soldiers and concentration camp survivors were doused with it. DDT was considered so essential that its first producer, Dr. Paul Muller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948. As the National Academy of Sciences declared, “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT ... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
But this life-saving chemical had yet to face the environmental movement. In 1962, Rachel Carson (whom Al Gore counts among his inspirations), wrote a book titled Silent Spring, which blamed DDT for killing birds and causing human diseases. The book launched a massive propaganda campaign against DDT. [...]
Under threat of trade sanctions from the West, African nations have been forced to use less effective and more expensive methods to fight the malaria epidemic, such as mosquito-repellent bed nets—which, according to World Health Organization estimates, have about a 50 percent success rate. (Countries that have reintroduced DDT, such as South Africa, have found it has a 90 percent success rate.) In any event, the DDT alternatives don’t seem to be doing much good: Every year, up to 300 million Africans get malaria, and it costs the continent’s economies billions in medical expenses and lost work days.
The situation was so dire that, in 2006, the World Health Organization announced its support for indoor DDT spraying in countries ravaged by malaria, saying the chemical had “a clean bill of health” and any possible negative effects of DDT did not outweigh its benefits. The usual suspects went nuts. As the environmentalist group the Sierra Club whined, “Studies have linked widespread reproductive disorders in animals to DDT exposure—including reproductive failure in the American Bald Eagle.” This is what happens when people start rating wildlife more worthwhile than human life. [...]
... Africans—many of whom are lucky to afford any food at all—have made it clear that they’re willing to accept the risk of potential side effects if it means avoiding the very real threat of malaria. Two weeks ago, Uganda initiated a program to spray houses with DDT, even though it will probably hurt their trade with the U.S. and the European Union. As Ugandan businesswoman Fiona Kobusingye told reporters, “I lost my son, two sisters and two nephews to malaria. Don’t talk to me about birds. And don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse than the risk of losing more children to this disease. African mothers would be overjoyed if that were their biggest worry.” [...]
(By the way, I thought the Left was pro-choice. Why can’t countries where environmental Leftists don’t even live decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies like Ms. Kobusingye. Oops, was I trying to find consistency in liberalism? Silly me.)
To be sure, URJ’s participants in the “Nothing But Nets” campaign think they are doing good by keeping Africans shrouded in inconvenient and unsightly nets. But they really aren’t. Like most liberal solutions to problems, they’re plugging up a dyke with chewing gum, while feeling good about themselves in the process.
The bottom line is this: If the URJ wants to truly save Africans from malaria, they should fight for lifting the ban on DDT. But they won’t, for the same reason the URJ aligns with the Left on virtually every socio-political issue:
For Jewish liberals, liberalism comes before Judaism.
And so, this major religious organization—which once vilified George W. Bush for his stubborn, inflexible, and religion-based opposition to government funding for embryonic stem-cell research—will maintain its stubborn, inflexible, and liberalism-based opposition to DDT.
I’m sure the millions worldwide who currently suffer from malaria or who have lost loved ones to this preventable disease are really proud of them.
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