Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

It’s not often one gets mentioned in The New Yorker as my blog did today, so I’m wearing a small intellectual glow. I used to read the magazine religiously back when I was a literature major in college and grad school. I read it from cover to cover. I can still remember vividly profiles by John McPhee and Pauline Kael’s remarkable film reviews. I’m trippin’.

Jane Kramer writes a long article, The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Barnard, about Nadia Abu El Haj’s ultimately successful battle for tenure at Barnard College. It profiles her anthropological research and the pro-Israel detractors who made her tenure process a cause celebre for the Israel-First crowd. Many of you know that I devoted considerable time, energy and words to this subject before she earned tenure. I thought a gross injustice was being perpetrated by the Campus Watch-Frontpagemagazine crowd and that the Barnard anthropologist deserved someone monitoring the campaign against her, which was what I did.

Kramer notes that this blog was one of the first to take up the cause, something of which I’m very proud:

Stern’s facts were wrong. Within a few months, she was exposed in the progressive Zionist blog Tikun Olam and in the Jewish press–most notably in the Jewish Week…

She goes on to credit Larry Cohler-Esses’ work there in unmasking Stern’s vilification and falsehoods. I’m also proud of the teamwork between myself and Cohler-Esses which advanced this story, though I want to make clear that Larry did all his own research and drew his own conclusions. Hell, he even spent 10 days wading through Facts on the Ground for which he deserves a medal since it is a VERY DENSE text. Even I didn’t do that.

Kramer doesn’t note the critical role played by Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine. While I was already interested in Abu El Haj’s battle, Jesse first brought to my attention the deliberate misquotations of the academic’s work by her opponents. This in turn opened up the subject in a way it might not have otherwise done. Jesse published his research in his publication.

The New Yorker story is interesting not just for its recap of the tenure battle, but because the author puts that battle in the context of a furious tug of war taking place in higher education over academic freedom and the right of third party advocacy groups to intervene in the tenure process and inject political considerations into scholarly discourse.

I never thought of this analogy until just now, but it appears to me that what Campus Watch and Paula Stern did was akin to the Terry Schiavo circus. In the latter case, a group of religious fanatics with a vested interest attempted to intervene in both a personal family tragedy and a medical process out of which they should’ve kept their noses. Their effort demeaned the family involved and dragged the field of medicine into a political arena in which it had no business being. I’d argue that the Schiavo fiasco contributed significantly to the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections.

The Abu El Haj detractors have paid no such price. In fact, they’ve gone on to new targets of opportunity in their propaganda battle on behalf of Israel. But articles like Kramer’s and efforts like mine help shine a light on such smearmongering so that it may be discredited even more firmly the next time it rears its ugly head.

I thought one particular section of Kramer’s essay was particularly evocative and helpful in understanding the political motivations of Abu El Haj’s opponents. Here she quotes Jonathan Boyarin, an Orthodox Jewish academic and friend of the Barnard professor:

Sometimes, I think the Jews who attack Nadia are really grasping at the idea that Israel is THE standard of Jewish life and faith–so, for them, defending Israel, even against scholarly debate, becomes the way to express Jewishness. I haven’t advanced much in my understanding of this kind of anxiety. But I know that if you’re looking for a reasoned, progressive scholar who’s on the same side as those guys, you’re not going to find him.

This is an important epiphany. The mission of Campus Watch and Paula Stern has everything to do with Jewish identity (and a narrowly defined identity at that) and little or nothing to do with academics. That is why their efforts should be derided and disqualified by the academy.

Pipes reinforces the intolerance and extremism of his approach in this passage:

…I very much dispute the notion that academics cannot function freely and be accountable at the same time. It doesn’t come free, this very special set of privileges they have, and there’s nothing to be said for the abstracted position that they can disdain the public, the students, and only engage with each other. They are financed by the public and are thus accountable in some way to the public. They say, No, only we can judge and evaluate each other’s work. Well, that’s not how things work in this country.

This is a profoundly important distillation of Pipes’ anti-intellectual philosophy. The academy is not to be trusted with decisions affecting itself. The public and its representatives like Pipes are the best judges of what is best for the academy since they take into account not just academic needs, but society at large’s needs. I can’t think of a much more pernicious approach, one that is more inimical to the very foundations of scholarly inquiry and academic freedom, than this.

While I tend to think that Kramer bent over backwards to portray Abu El Haj in the most favorable light possible, in this passage she finds a weakness in the latter’s work which bothered me during my entire time writing about this. Kramer notes:

…a tendency to reduce the complexities of Zionism to colonial terms…

I think this idea deserved amplification because it does deeply inform Facts on the Ground and renders it a less persuasive critique than it might otherwise have been. There is too much dismissive ideological grandstanding and speech that trumpets an academic anti-colonial approach that detracts rather than amplifies.

There were a few moments in reading the New Yorker piece when I thought the author stretched too far in portraying Abu El Haj as a mainstream academic figure:

[Virginia] Dominguez [Abu El Haj's dissertation advisor] says that Facts on the Ground was received by Israeli social scientists “not as a scathing critique but as right in line with what they were doing there.”

In fact, I have read no Israeli social scientists who defended Abu El Haj’s work. I’m not saying there aren’t any since I don’t read Israeli academic publications. I AM saying that there were many Israeli academics, especially archaeologists, who reacted with high moral dudgeon to her attacks on them. Again, I’m not saying their views were correct or justified. But I believe we should call a spade a spade and not ignore the academic uproar her work caused in certain Israeli circles, as both Kramer and Dominguez seem to do. [NOTE: Ms. Kramer informs me that the Columbia Spectator does feature comments by Israeli academics who support Abu El Haj's work, so I stand corrected on that score.]

A tidbit: those of you who follow the Jewish right will enjoy Charles Jacob’s (founder of the David Project) description of himself as a “classic liberal.”

I wish there had been a little more in Kramer’s article about the mysterious “Hugh Fitzgerald” who wrote the Frontpagemagzine-Campus Watch article which helped fuel the tenure battle.  Personally, I don’t believe that Fitzgerald is a real person. I would love for Kramer to have gone back to that original story and researched its origins further, including Fitzgerald’s real identity.  [NOTE: Ms. Kramer informs me that she made a considerable effort to do just that and was ultimately unsuccessful.]

A note about the New Yorker cartoon above: I thought it was an interesting and powerful evocation of the conflict. It portrays the lone academic standing on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library (precisely where the Alma Mater statue normally sits), battling against political forces outside herself and the campus. In that sense it conveys well some of the issues involved. But it also misses something important. While Abu El Haj may see herself as purely an academic and scholar, in her work she does take a political position. She is engaged in the debate though perhaps in a more nuanced way than Pipes or Stern. If she was not engaged, then she would have used a different set of rhetorical tropes to describe Israeli archaeological practice than she did. Again, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with her being engaged in this way. But I think that everyone needs to put all their cards on the table and in this battle none of the parties have fully done so, though Abu El Haj has done so much more transparently than her enemies.

Thanks to Seth Flaxman and Dan Sieradski for almost simulateneously notifying me about my 20 seconds of New Yorker fame.

tags campus-watch, charles jacobs, daniel-pipes, david project, facts-on-the-ground, jane kramer, jewish-week, larry-cohler-esses, nadia-abu-el-haj, new-yorker-magazine, paula-stern, the petition israel palestine and a tenure battle at ba

It’s a might strange world, that’s for sure. A hat tip to Joachim Martillo for pointing me to this post from Ethan Stanislawski’s blog about Peretz. Stanislawski is the son of Columbia Jewish historian Michael Stanislawski, who once had a close relationship with Marty Peretz. What is delicious is that the younger Stanislawski chronicles the gradual alienation that developed between Peretz and his father, a good deal of which revolved around the issue of Ahmadinejad’s canceleed speech at Columbia last year and his rescheduled speech of last week.

He begins with a Peretz rant against Columbia in The Spine. To read Marty Peretz is to watch a grown man make an utter fool of himself. And Peretz does it virtually every time he opens his mouth, especially if he’s talking about Israel. Here are some of the non sequiturs, howlers, distortions, lies, myths and just plain errors which both Stanislawski and I note in his post:

Columbia is “reeling,” reads the headline in Wednesday’s New York Times. Columbia is the Sulzbergers’s university, and they had traditionally put a wordy buffer between what really happened at the institution and their paper’s readers. Of course, that’s virtually impossible to do these days.

Note the notion that the Sulzberger family has an ownership stake in Columbia, making it of course responsible for all the university’s sins in Peretz’s eyes.

…It is not the Times that has excelled in reportage on Columbia during the past few tempestuous years. It is the Sun which has taken on that burden — and, with some pleasure, I would think, since the university is a model of what the upstart daily thinks of as paradigmatic of the cowardice of liberal institutions in general. Or worse, the pusillanimity of liberal institutions when their very liberalism is being undermined from within.

This is Peretz hailing the journalistic courage of one of the scummiest neocon rags in the nation, the New York Sun. What Peretz admires is the Sun’s yellow journalistic pursuit of the Arab studies professors at Columbia; and the Sun’s obssession with, and distortion of the the anti-Semitism meme. You’ll note that Marty Peretz, proud possessor of one of the finest liberal arts educations money could buy from Harvard and later a professor at that august institution derides Columbia, and by extension all liberal arts institutions with the phrase “the cowardice of liberal institutions in general.” Methinks he bites the hand that fed him so well for so long.

Rashid Khalidi has not been heard from on the A’jad matter. He has bigger fish to fry: making sure that…the Barnard tenure aspirant, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who believes that archeology proves there were never any Hebrews in the Holy Land, also is tenured. My guess is that, this time, the gang loses.

I’ve read many distortions of Abu El-Haj’s scholarly oeuvre but I don’t think any quite match Peretz’s for sheer outrageous audacity. She doesn’t even come close to believing “there were never any Hebrews in the Holy Land.” But this is certainly characteristic of the academic character assassination launched by Campus Watch, Shulamit Reinharz, Alexander Joffe (formerly of Campus Watch and currently with the David Project), Paula Stern and others. Their motto seems to be there is no lie too great for the purpose of stopping Abu El Haj from getting tenure.

The notion that Abu El Haj is Khalidi’s academic pawn in an Arab campus power grab is noxious and insulting. Also ludicrous is the notion that Peretz predicts that Massad and Abu El Haj will not get tenure when Lee Bollinger, who he spends the entire post insulting, is the one who will make the final decision in the matter.

…It is not only Columbia that is reeling. It is Bollinger himself. The faculty see this; the students certainly see this; and the trustees who typically will give a president enough rope to hang himself see that he has. My conclusion is that Bollinger is on his way out. The mandate of heaven has deserted him. He has no authority, least of all moral authority.

Note Peretz’s prediction of Bollinger’s imminent demise. Of course, he presents no facts to support his claim. In his grandiosity, Peretz need only want the event to happen for that to make it the truth. Also, note how the Spined One alludes to Bollinger as an academic emporer (”the mandate of heaven…”), more scenery-chewing overstatement on the writer’s part.

I also have a speculation about why the earnest protestations of Jewish students and others who were pro-Israel never could touch Bollinger about their terrible experiences in classes in the Middle East: he himself is Jewish, maybe an ambivalent Jew, maybe a frightened Jew, but a Jew nonetheless.

Stanislawski points out Peretz’s gaffe in that Bollinger is NOT Jewish. Too bad Ethan had to spoil the party. Marty was having such a good time spinning his fantasy about Bollinger not being able to feel the pain of those poor pro-Israel students because he himself was allegedly Jewish.

John Coatsworth, whom Bollinger lured from Harvard…What can one say about Coatsworth without having oneself strung up as a McCarthyite? Let’s leave it at this: at least since graduate school at the University of Wisconsin he has been extremely radical.

I don’t know much about John Coatsworth’s acaemic background. He is currently the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and issued the Ahmadinejad invitation. But to think that any dean of any major school at any major national university could achieve such a position by being “extremely radical” strains credulity. And knowing it is Peretz making such a claim automatically dismisses the charge.

Richard Bulliet is the Columbia historian who negotiated with the Iranians for their president’s visit…Bulliet was a supporter of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Again, I don’t know much about Bulliet as a historian. But to claim he “was a supporter of the 1979 Iranian revolution” without supplying any evidence in support of the charge also strains credulity.

In the following passage Peretz gratuitously insults Michael Stanislawski, calling him Bollinger’s “court Jew,” and wonders what the Jewish historian thinks of his alleged patron, Bollinger inviting Ahmadinejad to campus:

I wondered what Stanislavski made of Bollinger’s canceling A’jad last year, giving permission for his speaking this year…There is in Jewish history the figure of the court-Jew. This Jew did financial and commercial business for the prince. Sometimes he was a medical doctor and cared for the prince and his family. He also tried to intercede for the Jews when trouble was coming their way. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed. I guess Michael failed. But Jews no longer need court-Jews, and they haven’t for at least a century. It must be sad trying to fill a function that has been obsolete for so long.

Ethan Stanislawski notes in his blog post that Peretz spells his father’s name wrong. Gee, you’d think that the least you could do for an old friend when you’re insulting him is spell his name right.

What surprises me is that Stanislawski and Peretz could ever have been friends–though I suppose that people can change radically over the course of time & someone you loved or respected when you were young can turn into something else entirely when you’re older. That’s certainly true of Peretz though I liked him neither when he was younger nor older.

What Marty Peretz doesn’t realize is that the less he says or writes the better off he is. The more drivel flows from his mouth or pen the more lies, distortions and outrageous myths flow along with them. But Marty likes the sound of his own voice too much and so makes a fool of himself serially.

tags columbia-university-ahmadinejad-speech, ethan-stanislawski, maroon-voices, marty-peretz, michael-stanislawski, nadia-abu-el-haj, new-york-sun, rashid-khalidi, the-spine

Scott Jaschik interviewed Shulamit Reinharz about her Jewish Advocate column on Nadia Abu El Haj, which I wrote about here. He elicited further damning opinions from the neocon spouse of Brandeis president, Yehuda Reinharz. In her column, she states she declined to attend her Barnard reunion for the strange reason that no one at Barnard would tell her whether or not Abu El Haj had been granted tenure. She adds another odd statement–that she could not find anywhere Abu El Haj’s birthplace:

I am not sure if she identifies as a Palestinian as a consequence of being born in what some people now call Palestine or because she identifies with Palestinians and was born elsewhere.

One cannot help wondering what the point of all this is. Thankfully, Jaschik has smoked out her prejudices for the world to see:

In an interview, Reinharz said that this was a legitimate question to ask [about Abu El Haj's birthplace]. “She makes a point of calling herself a Palestinian scholar so I was curious about why she did that. The word Palestinian is a contested term,” Reinharz said. “There is no country yet called Palestine so I didn’t know what she meant by that.” She added that “people who call themselves Palestinian garner sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and this is a book that is an attack on Israeli archaelology so I thought maybe it was relevant.” She stressed that she wasn’t inquiring about El-Haj’s religious beliefs, just what she meant by Palestinian.

You see, if you’re a scholar and call yourself Palestinian anything you write on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is immediately suspect. Reinharz neglects to say whether or not Jewish scholars should be similarly suspect though since she is one I’d guess her answer would be an emphatic No. In addition, calling oneself “Palestinian” seems to be a propganda tactic rather than a legitimate expression of ethnic identity for Reinharz.

It’s also telling that she raises the hackneyed old “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” canard used by Israeli nationalists and those as far to the right as Kahanists. One of my readers reveals that Reinharz was a leader of the David Project, a conservative Jewish group which attacks alleged Islamism on campus and in society.

The topping on the cake for this interview is this closing quotation:

“It’s not racism, it’s curiosity,” she said.

So questioning a scholar’s scholarship based on their ethnicity is not racism, but rather mere intellectual curiousity. Makes sense to me…Thankfully, the president of the Middle East Studies Association disagrees:

But others see this as the latest sign of how bitter the debates have become.

[Zachary] Lockman of NYU, called the comments “slimy” and said “I find it incredibly offensive to question someone’s place of birth or nationality.” Noting that he is Jewish, Lockman said it was inconceivable that a professor would publish a column critiquing another professor’s scholarship and devote a paragraph to wondering about what that professor meant about being Jewish. “People would acknowledge that as outrageous,” he said.

“Her origin is irrelevant to her scholarship,” Lockman said. “It’s clear people are pulling out all the stops.”

Personally, I think Reinharz is out of her academic element. She’s a women’s studies professor. Yet all of a sudden she’s expert enough in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, which are Abu El Haj’s specialties in her book, to render unbiased judgment.

All this raises an interesting question. Now that the wife of Brandeis’ president has weighed in on another school’s internal tenure decisions can we expect the wife of Barnard’s president (if he’s an academic) to intervene in Brandeis’ tenure process? Just where does this end? There’s a reason DePaul should’ve told Alan Dershowitz to butt out of the Finkelstein tenure decision–because if you don’t, pretty soon you’ll have national campaigns by academics and outsiders regarding ANY unpopular or controversial scholar up for tenure. If we think Congress can’t govern due to intense partisanship wait till we see what the tenure field could turn into. There could be blood in the halls of academe–and only some of it figurative.

tags jewish-advocate, lies-and-tenure-at-Barnard, nadia-abu-el-haj, shulamit-reinharz-opposed-abu-el-haj-tenure, Truth

The editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (JNES), Wadad Kadi, wrote to me today expressing concern with the circumstances of Alexander Joffe’s 2005 JNES review of Facts on the Ground. I’m gratified that Dr. Kadi understands both the issue of Joffe’s potential conflict and is concerned by the misuse of the Joffe review in the campaign against Abu El Haj’s tenure process:

As Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (JNES), I am deeply disturbed to learn that Alexander Joffe’s review of Nadia Abu El Haj’s book “Facts on the Ground”…could have been written when he was in a position that creates a conflict of interest, and that his review could have had an effect on her academic appointment. At that time, the editor of JNES was my predecessor…who, I am certain, had no idea about the conflict of interest you point out in your message. I know for a fact that a number of times scholars to whom he offered a book for review wrote back declining because of a real conflict of interest or what they thought might be perceived as a conflict of interest (being a personal friend, having had a course from a person, having been on a particular dig, having seen a draft of a chapter, etc.); Joffe made no such comment, as scholars of unimpeachable integrity normally do.

You are right: it is difficult for editors to be aware of all conflicts of interest, but they should be vigilant in order to avoid such unfortunate situations in the future.

Thanking you for attracting our attention to this very regrettable situation, I remain.

Shulamit Reinharz is one of the latest academics to exploit Joffe’s review for the purpose that Kadi decries as I posted here yesterday. This should put anyone on notice who does the same that the Journal itself has distanced itself from Joffe and this abuse of his review.

Further, at least one author has come forward to decry copyright violations at the Deny Nadia Abu El Haj Tenure website. Ralph Harrington, whose own review of Facts on the Ground was appropriated in its entirely without permission at the site, wrote to me referring to this statement at his own website:

It has come to my notice that my Israeli ‘bulldozer archaeology’ essay is featured on the website of the ‘Deny Abu El Haj Tenure Committee’. I would like to make it clear that I have not given permission for my essay to be included on this site, and that its presence there represents no endorsement whatsoever on my part of that site or of the campaign of which it is part.

It is very noticeable that those behind the ‘Deny Abu El Haj Tenure Committee’ have been careful to conceal their own identities, while taking Nadia Abu El Haj’s own name and registering it as the domain for a website dedicated to attacking and denigrating her. This strikes me as questionable behaviour, coming from people who claim to be standing up for academic integrity.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. And this is from someone who wrote a review that was critical of the book and who has no vested interest in whether or not she receives tenure. By the way, his review is still at the anti Abu El Haj site despite his public notice that he disapproves of its display there. This is now a blatant copyright violation among other sins of this site.

Apparently, one academic is pleased her work is being used in the partisan political campaign to oust Abu El Haj. And she’s none to happy with yesterday’s critique of the Barnard alumni ‘hit-man’ website. If she reads this, she may want to retract the following portion of her comment:

Judging by how I was treated, I can only assume the website owners were as careful with others as they were with my article.

Wrong, Professor. Dead wrong.

tags alexander-joffe, facts-on-the-ground, journal-of-near-eastern-studies, nadia-abu-el-haj, ralph-harrington, wadid-kadi

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the scurrilous campaign waged by Campus Watch, Frontpagemagazine and their allies against Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Distressed that this Palestinian-American academic is verging on earning tenure from a distinguished institution like Barnard College (and by extension, Columbia University), they’ve circled the wagons in a valiant effort to stave off the inevitable and overturn the academic fates.

After doing considerable online research last night, I pieced together much of the negative and positive evaluations of her work and the substance of the arguments against her earning tenure including the petition campaign organized by one Paula Stern Barnard ‘82. In the comment thread for my post, one of my readers, Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason Magazine, did even more painstaking research and discovered that in one instance, the petition actually “quotes” Abu El-Haj saying the exact opposite of what she writes in her book. Here is what the petition says:

She asserts that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a “pure political fabrication.”

In truth, this is what Abu El-Haj actually writes in her book on page 250:

While by early the 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the quest for Jewish origins and objects that framed an earlier archaeological project, the fact that there is some national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli)-Jews and such objects was not itself generally open to sustained discussion. That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. (Although archaeologists argued increasingly that the archaeological past should have no bearing upon contemporary political claims). In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as *pure* political fabrication.

Speaking of “pure political fabrication,” Jesse has caught the Stern Gang in an out and out fabrication of the Abu El-Haj record. You leave that “not” out at your peril, Paula.

The petition presents this as Abu El-Haj’s alleged view on scientific evidence and her scholarly method:

We are aware that Abu El Haj excuses herself from the expectation that scholarship will be based on evidence. In her introduction, she informs the world that she “Reject(s) a positivist commitment to scientific methods…”

Instead of using scientific standards of evidence, her work is “rooted in… post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory…and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements.”

This is what Abu El-Haj actually writes (with passages quoted in the petition in italics) on pages 8-9:

Questions concerning the relationship between interpretation and data and between theory and evidence have come center stage as increasing numbers of archaeologists are debating the politics of their own discipline, including its potential uses and the implications for their professional work. Rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method whereby politics is seen to intervene only in instances of bad science, such critics have argued that archaeological knowledge (as but one instance of scientific knowledge) is inherently a social product. Rooted in multiple intellectual traditions (poststructuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory, a sociology of scientific knowledge) and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements (specifically, demands for the repatriation of cultural objects and human remains by indigenous groups in settler nations such as Australia, the U.S. and Canada), this critical tradition is united, at its most basic level, by a commitment to understanding archeology as necessarily political.

What is clear here is that Abu El-Haj, who is NOT an archaeologist herself but rather an anthropologist, is summarizing the beliefs of a school of archaeologists and not her own beliefs at all. Clearly, she has great sympathy for these beliefs, but she is not describing her own.

University of North Carolina anthropologist Gregory Starrett wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education comment thread on this story the following about the mendacity of those attempting to smear Abu El-Haj:

It’s a pity so few of the people who express outrage about Abu El-Haj’s book have read it. Most of the accusations the petition makes are false, distorted, or without evidentiary support, including the claim that Abu El-Haj does not read or speak Hebrew, the claim that she denies the existence of ancient Israeli kingdoms, and the notion that scholars never use unattributed quotations. The latter, at least, is standard practice in cultural anthropology, intended to protect the identity of the individuals with whom we speak. On other occasions, Abu El-Haj’s opponents have claimed that she spent almost no time in Israel for her research (she was there for two years) and that she cites no Hebrew-language sources or archaeological reports, a claim which is easily checked—and disproved—simply by looking at her bibliography. The irony in this latter charge is the odd assumption that Israeli archaeologists and scholars only write for their colleagues in Hebrew, making the Israeli scholarly community sound far more insular than it is. The thoughtless and irresponsible claims of the petitioners, not Abu El-Haj’s research, is the real shame.

Conclusion: the petition is a fraud as is almost everything that comes from organizations like Campus Watch and FrontpageMagazine. To those who disagree with Abu El-Haj’s views I say “fine.” Oppose her or her tenure process. But sign this petition knowing it is a tissue of lies and distortions.

tags campus-watch, Facts-on-the-Ground-Archaeological-Practice-Territorial, frontpagemagazine, gregory-starrett, inside-higher-education, nadia-abu-el-haj, paula-stern-campaign-to-deny-barnard-tenure

The Jewish right-wing is on the warpath again against an imagined academic foe of Israel. Groups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch and David Horowitz's Frontpagemagazine have turned their life's work into making the lives of such academics a living hell. They and their allies have gone on the warpath against Princeton when it offered an endowed chair to Rashid Khalidi, Yale when it did the same to Juan Cole, Khalil Shikaki and Natana DeLong-Bas at Brandeis, and most recently Norman Finkelstein, done in by a full court press orchestrated by Alan Dershowitz. They also generally harass other academics like Stanford's Joel Beinin on principle though they cannot wound him through a tenure battle ...