Friday, April 15, 2005
This is only partially about religion. You didn't need to be a Buddhist to have been disgusted by the Taliban when they blew up those ancient Buddhist statues, and you don't have to be a Jew to be disgusted at the wanton Muslim destruction of ancient archaeological ruins on the Temple Mount.
Israeli archaeologists are sifting through the rubble of a garbage dump in order to recover the remains of antiquities destroyed and history lost as the Islamic Wakf, responsible for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, built a new, enormous underground mosque and simply dumped what they didn't destroy.
Do visiting Columbia scholar Claire Smith and the World Archaeological Congress know about this? Do the people calling for the Israelis to turn the entire old city of Jerusalem over to the PA know about this?
A disgusting crime of religious intolerance. A disgusting crime against history.
Temple Mount relics saved from garbage
The five-month old privately-funded project underway at the site, which is being directed by Bar Ilan University archeology professor Dr. Gabriel Barkay, is being called virtually unprecedented since archaeological excavation has never been permitted on the Temple Mount itself.
Six years ago, following the Islamic Wakf's unilateral construction of a mosque at an underground area of the Temple Mount known as Solomon's Stables, Wakf officials discarded more than 10,000 tons of rubble with history-rich artifacts, at a municipal garbage dump in the Kidron Valley and other locations outside the Old City.
The November 1999 destruction and removal of the antiquities in the wake of the mosque construction was later called "an unprecedented archaeological crime" by the head of Israel's Antiquities Authority, the state-run archaeological body nominally charged with supervision at Judaism's holiest site, as well as by Israel's leading archaeologists...
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I wanted to write about this, but the topic is so upsetting to me that I can barely read the stories. Luckily, Solomonia has done the work for me: You didn't need to be a Buddhist to have been disgusted... Read More
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I followed the hotlink to your old post on Professor Smith, I happen to have a young relative taking her class this year. It's not a great class. One of those lazy courses where the first day the prof assigns topics and dates to each student, then they teach the course. For this we import professors form Australia and pay astronomical tuition bills.
This by way of explaining how I know that Smith is indeed one of the "bad guys." She regularly allows students to trash Israel and those evil Zionists in class, slanders Israel herself in tutorial, mocked a student going on a dig in Israel this summer and, oh yes, she's heading off to the west bank to consult with Palestinian colleagues this summer. She made no mention of consulting Israeli colleagues - although some of the world's finest archaeologists are Israeli.
The pro-Israel kids just bite their tongues a lot. But, hey, pro-Isael college kids specialize in biting their tongues these days, and not just at Columbia. There is very real fear that if you say something positive about Israel, your opinions on all subjects will be denegrated. After all, having identified yourself as siding with the imperialist, racist, war-mongers, why should yor opinion on anything else be listened to. That may sound like an exaggeratio, I assure you that it is not - I have neices and nephews at Columbia, Yale, adn Penn - and all of them have become obligatory tongue biters. It's not so much that they'll flunk you, as that they'll laugh at you, mock you, and not take you seriously.
After all they want to get into good graduate schools, and the professors - like Smith - who trash Israel and mock students who support Israel are the ones who write the reccomendations.
Why aren't there more conservatives on the faculty? I think the road block comes very early, when the professor fails to recommend you because your political views "reveal" that you are not a serious scholar. And when kids get tired of being laughed aand mocked for their opinions and say, screw this - I'll go to business shcool.