Birthers thrive on faux experts, and we have another birth certificate analysis with a coat of credibility painted on in the form a report at “Israel Science and Technology Homepage.”

It appears that this official-sounding web site is just one guy, Israel Hanukoglu, who snagged a good domain, and built some hyperlinks to articles on science, particularly by Israeli or Jewish scientists. Hanukoglu has a somewhat distinguished scientific career in biochemistry and one wonders why he would publish an article analyzing Barack Obama’s birth certificate, an analysis that is naive even by birther standards. His essential argument is that the birth certificate is a fake because some parts of things are in one clipping region (usually called “layer”) and other parts are in another. A scientist might have bothered to do an experiment, like scanning a birth certificate himself, and if he had he might have found the same layer separation that I did when I tried the experiment.

Israel Hanukoglu is just another crank birther conspiracy theorist with no credentials in what he’s writing about. He doesn’t even pretend to employ the scientific method with experiment, nor does he cite sources with credentials any better than his.

The report links to The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office birther report of Mara Zebest, The American Thinker, WorldNet Daily, and other equally eminent scientific peer-reviewed journals. It appears we have full-tilt conspiracy crankery brewing, as he says:

Moreover, the lack of action on the part of the members of the United States House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the courts of the United States, despite many previous appeals to these three branches of American government, also raise a concern about how the governmental institutions of the reputedly best, and certainly the most important democracy in the Free World have avoided this issue.

What’s the motivation behind this article? Perhaps Hanukoglu explains it himself:

In my report of March 9, I said that with Barack Obama in the White House, the American government has become an overt enemy. I noted that Obama has made appointments of persons who are openly hostile to Israel. Like him and various Israeli politicians, they advocate an Arab-Islamic state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. This would lead to Israel’s demise.

Update:

This Israeli page is over a year old, just updated with more hyperlinks. It was already online in May of 2011, explaining why the analysis is so primitive.

Update 2:

Deleted

Since the publication of this article, the subject web page has been deleted. When I wrote the article, I left a contact form comment on the site noting that the article was easily debunked and embracing conspiracy theories made Israeli science look bad. The disappearance could have been the result of other criticism than mine (more likely), or perhaps the page is being updated with a modern version of birther image crankery. An older version of the article is still accessible from the Internet Wayback Machine.

Update 3:

It’s back

http://www.science.co.il/Obama-Birth-Certificate.htm