Television news viewers around the world, as February progressed, saw images of Muslims rioting at the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem. As has happened so often before, Muslim radicals accused Israeli authorities of historical and cultural vandalism, this time because the Jewish state’s personnel are reconstructing an access ramp from the vicinity of the Western Wall to the upper level Islamic precincts.

While witnessing such violence, it might surprise Americans to know that an assistant professor at Barnard College, Nadia Abu El-Haj, has emerged as a leading academic agitator seeking to discredit the historic Jewish connection to Jerusalem and even to the land of Israel. In her volume Facts on the Ground, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1992, El-Haj surrenders herself to an unrestrained revision of Middle Eastern, Biblical, and Islamic history. Her outward intent is to transform the image of Israeli archeology into that of an ideological enterprise aimed at destroying Muslim heritage, while she blatantly seeks to obliterate Jewish heritage. Her underlying objective is to deny that Jews as a nation ever existed. Viewed without anti-Israel bias, El-Haj’s work appears about as reliable and legitimate as theories that space aliens created Stonehenge.

But in the politicized world of Middle East research, to be a crank is to be honored – as a “scholar” no less valuable than a rent-a-mob of stone-throwing street youths to the anti-Jewish cause “intellectualized” by another charlatan, the late Edward Said. And when bogus theory is provided with the seal of approval of Barnard and a dust jacket from the University of Chicago, the Israel-bashers have won a major victory. Prof. El-Haj can congratulate herself for introducing into the American academic environment the hallucinated claim that Jewish identity is a modern, nationalist, and Zionist-imperialist “construct” rather than a product of thousands of years of recorded history and religious tradition...

Muslim rioting in Jerusalem, driven by conspiracy theories, is especially absurd when one compares Israel’s record in protecting monuments of all faiths with that of Saudi Arabia, where fanatics of the Wahhabi sect, the state interpretation of Islam, have devastated the ancient architectural and cultural heritage of Muslims. In one of many appalling such examples, Saudi Wahhabis destroyed the house in which the Prophet Muhammad lived with his wife Khadijah and replaced it with public toilets. Similar madness impelled the destruction of the Bamyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan at the urging of al-Qaida. When Islamist radicals destroy, Muslims are silent and the rest of the world, if they even hear about such depredations, soon forgets them. When Israelis engage in legitimate reconstruction and research, they are targeted for brutal disorders, and the global network in which Barnard professor El-Haj is a leading figure supports a renewed campaign of anti-Jewish aggression. But as a Saudi liberal dissident has commented, “unfortunately, the Wahhabis have oil income, while the Israelis have only intellectuals.”