Radio Silence

It has been several days since I launched this blog and so far no response from DovBear. The offending posts remain and not even an acknowledgment of wrongdoing from DovBear. Nor has anyone come forward with a defense of any substance. That is because there is none. Instead, in comments to the prior post, many in the "old bloggers club" have laughed off my blog with "big deal" or "he has too much time on his hands." Of course, these comments do not respond, explain or justify DovBear's plagiarism. I may have "too much time on my hands," but is that worse than passing off someone else's political commentary or Torah thoughts as one's own? And then turning around and criticizing others for being soft on plagiarism?

The only comment which attempted to make a substantive defense of DovBear, was this one left on a different blog:

About half of the alleged plagiarisms are not that at all. If you look at them, you’ll see they’re made up of a large quote from a common third source, a source that is not unique and whose unse is not unique. The text indroducing or following the quote has the same meaning in both cases, but the wording is different.

I frankly don't understand what this means. Of course, in some of the examples, parts of DovBear's plagiarized posts consist of citations to a common third source. But the remainder of those same posts are lifted word for word from DovBear's source as well. See this post for example. While both DovBear and his source, Robert Kaiser, cite common classical Jewish texts, such as an verse in Ezekiel and Gemara in Sanhedrin, DovBear also rips off the introductory language from Robert Kaiser's essay word for word (e.g., "Classical Jewish texts concur that God did *not* destroy Sodom and Gemorrah because their inhabitants were homosexual...."). This is plagiarism plain and simple.

DovBear's repeated cutting and pasting swaths of text from other websites can only be explained as an attempt to make readers believe that those texts originate from DovBear, rather than writers like Robert Kaiser, Jonathan Chait or Andrew Sullivan. The clear effect of these posts is to make readers believe, "man, that boy can write." And this impression has been procured fraudulently.

In researching DovBear's plagiarism, what struck me was the fact that every other blog that cited the articles cribbed by DovBear properly attributed the original author. Blogs like Orthomom and Godol Hador often paste articles collected on the Internet. But they attribute the source. So the notion that "it's just a blog" should offend the many bloggers that have chimed in in support of DovBear.

It may be that DovBear is smart, witty and articulate. But to the extent he gets this reputation from his blog it is a result of lying and stealing. It's that simple.