Here's an event that seems a good response to "scholarship" like Abu El Haj's:
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East presents
The Underground Lecture Series: What Archaeology Tells Us About Ancient Israel
I. What Biblical Archaeology Tells Us About the First Temple Period
Speaker: Alan F. Segal, PhD
Professor of Religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies
Barnard College
Location: 304 Barnard Hall
Date: Monday, September 17, 2007
Time: 7:00 pm
Professor Segal's CV at the link. Sounds interesting if you're in the area.
Meanwhile, Anti-Racist Blog has a couple of good posts on Nadia's next scholarly pursuit: The Bad Genetics of Nadia Abu El Haj:
Nadia Abu El Haj, the Barnard College professor whose tenure bid is being challenged by professors who maintain that her book on Israeli archaeology is shoddy, is now working on a book on Jewish genetic origins, a book that her colleague and friend Joseph Massad describes as being about the "
Zionist movement('s)…desperate contemporary search for Jewish 'genetic markers’."
Zionists are engaged in a “desperate†search for Jewish genetic markers? Who knew?
Zionists like other Jews and, frankly, like most peoples of the world are intrigued by the new data genetics provides about the history of human populations. But “desperate†search undertaken to support an “investment in the racial separateness of the Jews.†I don’t think so.
There may be Jews who believe in “the racial separateness of the Jews,†though it’s hard to understand how. It’s pretty hard to believe in “the racial separateness of the Jews†when Israelis come in more colors than a Benetton commercial.
The person who actually is on a desperate search for Jewish genetic markers seems to be Nadia Abu El Haj. She has been working for the better part of a decade on her projected book about “Genetics, Jewish Origins and Historical Truths,†or, “Bearing the Mark of Israel? Genetics, Genealogy and the Quest for Jewish Origins,†as two of her lecture titles phrase it...
Nazi stuff. I'm telling you, Abu El Haj is destined to be Barnard/Columbia's Arthur Butz, but unlike Butz, who Northwestern prevents from discussing his theories in class (Butz teaches electrical engineering), El Haj will have free reign and an unassailable, paid platform.
Also: Nadia Abu el Haj and Junk DNA
...Did you get that? She wrote a nice little paper. (Nice, that is, except for the bad facts about the Jews, and the fact that it's wrong. But if you ignore the facts, the theory is very elegant.) And then somebody told her that the assumption upon which the paper is premised, that noncoding DNA is biologically functionless, is no longer valid. So her methodological assumptions do not hold. Yet she went ahead and published it. And, inexplicably, the American Ethnologist (edited by Abu El Haj's thesis advisor Virginia Dominguez) printed it...
Finally, here's a piece in the Columbia Spectator, discussing El Haj and Joseph Massad, written by a student who gets it: No More Tenure.
Update: Phil Orenstein has a thoughtful post on the issue, which ends with this challenge:
...I invite President Shapiro, President Bollinger, Professor Brand, and other supporters of El-Haj to respond publicly, especially with regard to the current tenure case, which Shapiro has assured me “depends upon just that kind of public, professional speech†that concerned alumni and others have initiated. I will post legitimate intellectual replies if they rise above the level of innuendo and personal insults of the sort comparing me to Mr. Collins from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But please spare us the “censorship†and “orchestrated witch hunt†nonsense. There is a great difference between “public, professional speech,†in which we are engaged, and mob violence to shut down a speaker with whom one disagrees.
Update 2: An emailer writes in:
You would challenge President Judith Shapiro to state what her relationship was with Abu El Haj at Bryn Mawr. Abu El had was a student there, she graduated in 1984 and then went on to do a Phd in Anthropology at Duke.
Judith Shapiro was at Bryn Mawr in those years as Chair of the Department of Anthropology.
If they knew each other, Shapiro had a duty to reveal that fact to the Barnard faculty. Hiring a former student is not a misdemeanor. Hiring and defending one without mentioning a relationship that predates the hiring of that professor at Barnard is.
Interesting.
She hates all the right people. She hates all the right movements. She's publishing all the right lies. Her shoddy scholarship is being used to discredit all the right groups. She's being criticized and challenged by all the right people and organizations (and she's being supported by all the right people and organizations).
Nor can Columbia use DePaul's lame excuse that her scholarly tone doesn't conform to the university's code of scholarly discourse, since for Columbia, the more strident, the more outrageous, the more hateful, the better.
She ought to be a shoo-in.
Fight the good fight dude, but don't get your hopes up.
Columbia U (of which Barnyard is a subsidiary) is run by jihadis, and the faculty is more worried about union type issues, such as making sure that their tenure committees are undisturbed by outside influences, than they are about the survival of western civilization. Of course, they are all LLLs in good standing on the Upper Left Side of Manhattan, and what they really want is to destroy bourgeois civilization through socialist revolution.
Before the long war is over we shall have to dismantle the universities like Henry VIII dismantled the monasteries. The useful pieces like the med schools and engine schools can be spun off. But the anthropologists, philosophers, and other parasites will have to learn about the really important questions in life, like: "Do you want fries with that?"
Further proof, as if any were needed, that Columbia U. is in the grips of jihadis:
On Monday, September 24th, 2007 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and participate in a question and answer session with university faculty and students at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum.
Read it and weep.
I hope some people raise the flag of the "Islamofascist Regime of iran",
and rip it to shreds (can't set it on fire due to FDNY regulations)
within view of the midget Sack of SHITler.