Who is Nadia Abu El-Haj?

She is a young Palestinian-American who is also Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard. According to Jameel at The Muqata, its tenure time at Barnard College, and Nadia Abu El Haj is aspiring to attain the coveted Barnard professorship title in her field of Anthropology.

And the problem with that? In her doctoral thesis, which she morphed into a book, “Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.”, she denies that the Jewish people lived in Israel in ancient times.

This, coming from a so-called expert in anthropology. What is anthropology? One definition is the study of humanity - our physical characteristics as animals, and our unique non-biological characteristics we call culture. The subject is generally broken down into three subdisciplines: biological (physical) anthropology, cultural (social) anthropology, and archaeology.

According to Diana Muir, herself a 1975 graduate of Barnard College and an award-winning author,

Nadia Abu El-Haj pulls... off such a magic trick ... and .... is apparently worth the effort since denying that Jews are indigenous in Judea, [she] enables the redefinition of Israeli Jews as colonizers; foreign settlers with no legitimate right to the land. Or perhaps the post-modern rhetoric Abu El Haj employs with such facility is mere window dressing covering a far older
tradition, that of deploying the scholarly paraphernalia of footnotes and arcane language to make a political assertion appear as responsible scholarship. By either interpretation, Abu El Haj’s first book, Facts on the Ground; Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, derived from her doctoral thesis, is part of a wider intellectual effort intended to persuade the world that Israel is illegitimate, a European outpost with no indigenous roots in the Middle East, and, therefore, that the Israelis deserve to be driven out of Israel much as the French were driven from Algeria.

In agreement with Diana Muir are historians who are also appalled by Nadia Abu El-Haj's junk research, including Hugh Fitzgerald , of Jihad Watch, who wrote on FrontPage:

El-Haj, it seems, is not really an archeologist. There is not the slightest evidence that she has ever seen the work of Israeli archeologists, ever visited a dig, ever studied the history of the development of Israeli archeology, ever inquired as to how Israeli archeologists choose the sites they do choose for digs (do they get instructions from the Jewish Agency? The ZOA? The Mossad?). She appears not to have any record of the kinds of artifacts the Israeli archeologists, often working with Western, non-Israeli and non-Jewish colleagues, have discovered, catalogued, and meticulously studied.

With all the profound evidence that has been uncovered revealing Jewish life in Israel, which pre-dates Islam by several thousand years, documented and categorized here, it can be concluded that Nadia Abu El-Haj's fraudulent expertise is just a disguise for her true aim - to assassinate the character, people, culture, history, biography, agriculture, and architecture of the indigenous Jewish people of Israel.

Are you an alum of Barnard or Columbia?

Why not drop an email to Barnard College President, Judith Shapiro at jshapiro@Barnard.Edu or to Columbia College President Lee Bollinger at Bollinger@columbia.edu and let them know that tenure for Nadia Abu El Haj degrades your alma mater.

Know someone who studied at Barnard or Columbia who values academic research integrity? Send them a link to this posting and to Jameel's posting at The Muqata.