Google Censorship: Scariest Thing for Academic Freedom

Please forward this message widely, because it is the scariest thing that can happen to academic freedom of researchers in this country.

Today Dr. Elhaik, who published a population biology paper titled “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses” in Genome Biology and Evolution, contacted us and reported that his lab website is censored by Google. Let us walk you through the process step by step.

Here is Dr. Elhaik’s lab website at John’s Hopkins University.

Here is what you find when you search ‘eran elhaik’ in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Do you see the difference? His lab website is not the top hit in Google, even though it was right there yesterday. In fact, his website is not found in the first few pages of Google hits. We had patience to check only three pages before deciding about reporting on this oddity. Other two search engines report him at the top.

This is really scary for academics trying to do independent scholarly research. The best way to challenge them is through finding flaws in their papers and publishing competing papers. Many bad scientific theories were discarded by detailed investigation, and we expect the same to happen to Dr. Elhaik’s results, if he is wrong. Asking Google to block websites ad hoc and imposing censorship on him bypasses the whole process.

What next? Will Google be asked by government to block Dan Graur from its search engine for creating trouble for NIH-funded ENCODE projects? Will Mark Ptashne be blocked for challenging epigenetics projects, where plenty of government money is flowing?

We discussed about medical importance of his research in this link.

Dr. Elhaik sent a chilling group email that also includes very convincing analysis of Khazar hypothesis. It is from a paper he is currently working on and therefore we decided to remove his discovery from the attached note. If you are checking our mailbox through homeland security website, please click on the second email from the top.

Hi All,

Call me crazy but today my website has disappeared from google and I am pretty sure I am being followed.

So. here is one of the final pieces of evidence to the Khazarian Hypothesis, to be published by all of you in the case that I will have a date with my maker.

[….]

The map without the legend was already posted to my facebook page.

I am probably just being paranoid, but just in case.

Feel free to make fun of me if I’ll get past this.