Friday, December 22, 2006
[Once again, this blog has become a locus for the controversy over the controversial Barnard Anthropologist. Here another anonymous academic chimes in. Note that others may also wish to contribute signed or unsigned pieces. Some previous entries on the subject: Who's Coming Up For Tenure: Nadia Abu el-Haj, Abu El Haj and the Skepticism of Fires, Nadia Abu el Haj, Bulldozing the Facts at the University of Chicago and Barnard College, and Archaeologist David Ussishkin Responds to El Haj Accusations.]
Denial d’Nadia: Nadia Abu El Haj and the Anti-Semitism of Denial
Holocaust denial is one of the hallmarks of modern anti-Semitism.
Nadia Abu El Haj, the Barnard College professor whose tenure bid became controversial when questions were raised about bad facts and questionable research methods in her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, is not a Holocaust denier, but she is something just as vile.
Rather than denying that the Holocaust occurred, Abu El Haj denies that the ancient Israelite kingdoms existed. As a form of anti-Semitism, this parallels Holocaust denial. Both forms seek to falsify history out of animus against the Jews. In Abu El Haj’s case, she seeks to deny to the Jews a right - the right to nationhood - that she confers on Palestinians.
“Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt.â€[1] Abu El Haj follows a similar methodology. Like Holocaust deniers, she presents a welter of miscellaneous allegations that have the effect of persuading the ignorant that doubt exists on the question of whether the ancient Israelite kingdoms existed.
Like Holocaust deniers, Abu El Haj dresses her lie in “pseudo-academic garb.â€[2] Facts on the Ground pretends to be an anthropology of Israeli archaeology and of Israeli attitudes toward archaeology. The masquerade is exposed by the methodology. A scholar actually interested in writing an anthropology of Israeli archaeology would become a participant observer on archaeological digs, attend the annual meeting of ASOR, and study the field. Abu El Haj did no serious field work in archaeology, she merely talked to a handful of archaeologists.
A scholar attempting a serious anthropology of Israeli attitudes toward archaeology would need to know Hebrew; it is the language Israelis speak. Without knowledge of the subject’s language, anthropology is not possible.
Facts on the Ground, then, is not what it pretends to be. It is neither an anthropology of Israeli archaeology, nor is it an anthropology of the manner in which archaeology shaped Israeli society. The true nature of this book is, nevertheless, revealed in the title. The assertion of this book, the big lie, is that Israeli is a “self-fashioned†society in the sense that a “myth†– “that an ancient Israelite social collectivity†existed – has been created by archaeologists who impute Israelite ethnicity to artifacts, despite the fact that the existence of the Israelite kingdoms is “a pure political fabrication.â€[3]
“The ongoing work of archaeology, after all, was constitutive of the territorial self-fashioning of Jewish nativeness out of which a settler-colonial community emerged as a national, an original, and a native one, which would thereby have legitimate claim not just to the land as a whole, but, more specifically, to particular ancient artifacts that embody the Jewish nation’s history and heritage.â€
The Jews, in Abu El Haj’s book, have connived with dishonest archaeologists to make up ancient Jewish kingdoms so that they can claim to be native when, actually, they are colonizers with no historical ties to the land of Israel.
The final parallel is to deniers not of the Holocaust, but of the Armenian genocide. Turkish genocide-deniers like to turn reality on its head, claiming that the true atrocity was the large-scale massacres of innocent Turks by armed Armenians. Abu El Haj, writing at a time of recurring, large-scale, deliberate destruction of archaeological sites by Palestinian Muslims, accuses Jewish archaeologists of the deliberate destruction of Muslim artifacts.
As lies go, Abu El Haj’s book is a big one.
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[1] Denial as Anti-Semitism, Anti- defamation League.
[2] Denial as Anti-Semitism, Anti- defamation League.
[3] All un-footnoted quotations are taken from Facts on the Ground.
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"“Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt.â€[1] Abu El Haj follows a similar methodology. Like Holocaust deniers, she presents a welter of miscellaneous allegations that have the effect of persuading the ignorant that doubt exists on the question of whether the ancient Israelite kingdoms existed."
Bingo. Perhaps obviously, but both for holocaust deniers and for other situations such as this one concerning Nadia Abu El Haj's deceits, it's rarely the bald, unadorned lie that seduces and lures, instead it's the carefully crafted interweaving of "half truths" that are capable of deceiving the ignorant, the poorly informed and the unsophisticated. The bald, unalloyed lie can be forwarded in the Arab Muslim and Persian Muslim world, at least so within broad sectors of those arenas, but in the politically decisive West the lies need to be camouflaged and intermixed with half-truths in order to carry the day among susceptible polities. The one exception, in the West, being sectors of the sophistical and academic Left wherein a certain, predisposed receptivity to certain lies is cultivated and nurtured.
As an alum of Columbia, I highly suspect that Nadia Abu El Haj will make tenure quite easily. The ghost of Edward Said looms large over the whole foul Columbia/Barnard/Union/Teachers College complex (and, sadly, has wafted into The Jewish Theological Seminary, as well.) Said made a career out of telling lies--lies about himself, about great writers (Austen, Conrad, etc.,) and about "palestine." And, of course, many of his colleagues lauded him to the heavens for "speaking truth to power." Abu El Haj has her own (totally erroneous) "narrative." Objective facts are out at Columbia and at most of the major universities in the U.S. "Narratives"--especially when they involve victimology--are in. Long, long gone are the days when Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling trod the campus at Morningside Heights. The place is now an intellectual hellhole.
Finkelstein=Abu El Haj parallel
Op-Ed: Holocaust denial comes to Stanford
THE STANFORD DAILY - Opinions
January 25, 2007
By Amichai Magen
The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and its splinter group, Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI), are at it again; pulling no punches in their relentless campaign to demonize the Jewish People and delegitimize Israel. Tonight, the two student groups are stooping to new lows and aligning themselves with the most radical elements in the Middle East by hosting Norman Finkelstein on this campus.
Finkelstein is an academic joke, and a bad one at that. The 54-year-old Assistant Professor at DePaul University, Illinois, has been hired and let go by several middling schools, before gaining his current (untenured) position in 2003. The New York Times Book Review has described his work as “juvenile,†“arrogant†and “stupid.â€
He is an American-born son of two Holocaust survivors who began his career as an anti-Israel political agitator — circumstances which on their own make his claims to objective historical scholarship on the Holocaust highly suspect. Finkelstein can neither read nor write German. Being unable to access many of the sources that are the foundation of sound research in this highly complex and sensitive field has not prevented Finkelstein from passing sweeping, tendentious and twisted judgments on one of the saddest, and most important, episodes in human history.
In essence, Finkelstein’s argument is as follows: The Jews, in a fiendish conspiracy, have fabricated a “Holocaust Industry†in order to portray themselves as victims, cynically exploit their suffering and consolidate Israel as a power set on regional domination. If the Holocaust had never happened, the Jews would have invented it themselves, since the Holocaust served their diabolical quest for money and global imperialism.
This thesis is a hodge-podge of pathological paranoia, ignorance, malice and brutal disrespect to the memory of the millions of human beings systematically murdered by the Nazis (Christians, Jews and Muslims). If we applied Finkelstein’s warped logic, we would conclude that Blacks “exploit†the history of slavery to obtain civil rights gains or that in the 20th-century, women have created a “Feminism Industry†in a cruel attempt to gain power and subjugate men. How many Einsteins, how many Kafkas, how many Menuhins, how many lives (born and yet to be born) were lost forever in the furnaces of Auschwitz? The world will never know. But to suggest that the Jewish People, or anyone else on this planet, has “profited†from the extinguishing of so many souls — each of infinite value in its own right — is monstrous beyond belief.
Finkelstein’s brand of Holocaust denial is all the more pernicious for its relative subtlety. Unlike David Irving — who claims the gas chambers never existed and that Hitler was the Jews’ greatest friend — Finkelstein (who calls Irving “a good historianâ€) admits that it did happen, and then proceeds to turn the Holocaust into a tool with which to attack its primary victim. In the Finkelstenian mind, the Jews, and the Jews alone, are prohibited from collective mourning. Jewish insistence that the Holocaust be remembered becomes an act of unforgivable Jewish aggression, for which Israel must be “censured,†to use one of his favorite expressions of attack. This Holocaust erosion is at once more subversive and more dangerous than the outright factual denial practiced by the likes of Irving or Iran’s President, Ahmedinejad. It insidiously assaults our moral imperative to remember the Holocaust and eats away at its chief lesson to humanity: Never again!
Not surprisingly, Finkelstein has become the house favorite of neo-fascists in America, Europe and the Middle East; the dream-Jew of the post-Holocaust anti-Semites. David Duke — the white supremacist and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klax Klan — endorses him warmly on his Web site (www.davidduke.com). German neo-Nazi queen, Ingrid Rimland, has intimated that Finkelstein’s writing makes her feel “like a kid in a candy store.†And Finkelstein’s own enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden and Hezbollah have made him a welcome guest on the radical Shiite militia’s official satellite TV station, Al-Manar.
Finkelstein is an American citizen and thus at liberty to express his odious views. But free speech is not at issue here. The real question is should this academic fraudster be entertained at Stanford University? Does Finkelstein’s message of hate enhance or diminish our academic standards and community? And is it legitimate for CJME, a Stanford funded student organization, to offer its uncritical, enthusiastic endorsement to a man who defames an entire people and its six million murdered innocents purely for the purpose of making Israel look bad?
Amichai Magen is a Stanford Law School Fellow and Lecturer in Law and JSD candidate.