History Textbooks Unbalanced in Presenting Islam

Does History Alive devote as many pages in its publications to Christianity or to Judaism, the religion which gave monotheism to the world, and from which Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith were derived? From History Textbooks Unbalanced in Presenting Islam:

Modern textbooks shy away from presenting a positive picture of Christianity and Judaism as important influences in molding America. Thanks to multicultural activism, that caution does not hold for the way many history textbooks now present Islam. History Alive: the Medieval World and Beyond, a middle-school text adopted by California for statewide use, offers a decidedly unbalanced characterization of jihad, a concept invoked by radical Islamists as a rationale for warring against Americans.

"Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and to do things that would be pleasing to God," the textbook asserts. "Muslims strive to respond positively to personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they might work to become better people, reform society, or correct injustice."

History Alive devotes five chapters, 62 pages, to putative accomplishments of Islam, complete with an entire chapter on such teachings as the Five Pillars of Faith, lavishly illustrated.

Muslims hope to redefine Israelis as "Arab Jews"

It is outrageous to the extreme the extent with which the entire world refuses to accept the right of the Jewish people to live freely in their own land. Via DebkaFile:

In an interview with Reuters, Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the US and UK, again touted the 2002 Saudi peace initiative requiring full Israeli withdrawal from “occupied Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese land” in return for “full normalization of relations.” But Turki added a refinement: If Israel signed a comprehensive peace, “one can imagine the integration of Israel into the Arab geographical entity.” He went on to say: "We will start thinking of Israelis as Arab Jews rather than simply as Israelis."

DEBKAfile’s political sources note that this influential Saudi, a former intelligence chief and brother of foreign minister Saudi al Faisal, is keeping up the relentless Arab assault on the Zionist ideal of a sovereign Jewish state in its ancestral homeland.

Furthering his vision of an Arabized Israel, the Saudi prince holds out the promise of: "Exchange visits by people of both Israel and the rest of the Arab countries would take place."

The interview took place at a conference in Kronberg on the Middle East and Europe staged by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation think-tank.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is granted tenure

As unbelievable as it is to we who know the truth, Barnard College just granted tenure to a palestinian archeologist who denies the Jewish presence in Israel before the 20th century. From The Chronicle:

Barnard College just announced that Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist whose tenure bid has been the subject of online debate for weeks, has been promoted to the rank of associate professor.

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", says Hugh Fitzgerald. Click here to read about the Nadia Abu El-haj that Barnard College doesn't want you to know.

A few problems with Wikipedia's Jewish/Yiddish entries

Received by email:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A request for assistance from those knowledgeable in Yiddish culture and history. A rather tendentious Wikipedia headed Doctor's plot really could use some editing by people who have information as well as insights into this matter. While purporting to be a scholarly academic wikipedia entry, it appears to be, alas, a quite tendentious opinionated entry.

See here: http://en.wikipedia%20.org/wiki/%20Doctors%27_%20plot. This entry begins thus:

The Doctors' plot (Russian language: дело врачей (doctors' affair), врачи-вредители (doctors-saboteurs) or врачи-убийцы (doctors-killers)) was an alleged conspiracy to eliminate the leadership of the Soviet Union by means of Jewish doctors poisoning top leadership. After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, the new Soviet leaders declared that the case was fabricated.

This is not the only entry dealing with Jewish matters / Yiddish matters that is in need of editing / correcting.

This is not the only entry dealing with Jewish matters / Yiddish matters that is in need of editing / correcting.

The entry on Yiddish language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish I am sure could use some work by people in the know. Take a look at it.

This section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish#The_20th_century in partular appears deficient.

I must add that even Wikipedia has a disclamer that:

this article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.This article has been tagged since August 2006.

Help Stop Nadia Abu El Haj from getting tenure

Nadia Abu El Haj's whole "thing" is that the ancient Israelites never existed. She also supported the destruction of Joseph's Tomb. Received by email:

Another important and pressing issue at Columbia is the upcoming tenure decision for Barnard professor Nadia Abu El Haj - whose single manuscript is a corruption of honest fact in order to achieve her political agenda.

We are running a petition to prevent Nadia Abu El Haj from getting tenure. There is a lot of material on my site: www.paulasays. com explaining why she doesn't deserve this honor and more on the petition site itself.

Please, please take two moments now - one to sign the petition and the other to forward this email to as many people as you can.

The petition is located here. We are at 1,047 signatures - our goal is at least 5,000.

Don't forget - this is a minute of your time...but tenure lasts forever.

Paula R. Stern
http://www.paulasays.com/

Click here to learn more about Who is Nadia Abu El Haj?

"Palestinians," and the need for things to be seen aright

Hugh Fitzgerald on the The usage of the slogan "Palestinians":

"She said Asha, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage, contacted the agency within the last year, but apparently did not take the test for foreign medical school graduates... ." [see: http://kdka. com/topstories/ topstories_ story_187110435. html ]

Jordan is Palestine east of the river Jordan. So the correct way to describe "Dr." Asha is as an "eastern 'Palestinian' Arab of western 'Palestinian’ origin."

The identification of someone according to where one's ancestors came from is, in the case of those trying to make a political point, getting to be transparent. Henry Kissinger may be a "German Jewish refugee"; his son, however, is not. A Hindu who fled what is now Pakistan in 1949 may be a Hindu refugee; his grandson is not. Only in one case do we permit a certain pseudo-group from handing down, as if in the genes, the quality of being a "refugee" -- and this is in the case of the so-called "Arab refugees," who after 1967 were named "Palestinian refugees." That word "refugee" can only apply to those who actually moved from country A to country B. It cannot legitimately apply to their children born in country B, and it certainly cannot legitimately apply to those who moved out of the country in 1948, thinking they would soon be returning in the wake of a successful Arab military campaign.

And then there is one other thing.

What are the people in Iraq called -- or most of them? Arabs, and Kurds.

In Egypt? Arabs, and Copts. (The Copts speak Arabic, but they are not Arabs.)

In Algeria and Morocco? Arabs, and Berbers.

Why then, when it comes to Israel, is the ethnic group "Arab" forgotten? Why is it only there that suddenly the local Arabs must be referred to as "Palestinians, " with their so-called "nationalist" project, to be contrasted with the Jews of Israel?

The transparency of the careful renaming should be obvious. It hasn't been, just as the nature of the war against Israel has also been obscured. In reality, it is a classic Jihad against an Infidel state. And in fact, it began even before that state was declared, and burst into open warfare at the time the state was declared. It continued as diplomatic and economic warfare, punctuated by as much terrorism as proved possible, between 1948 and 1967. During that period there was not a single Israeli soldier in Gaza or the "West Bank." Then it continued after the defeat of 1967, with the goals re-packaged as having something to do with the "nationalist aspirations" of the just-invented "Palestinian people."

Things need to be seen aright. Things need to be seen aright in Thailand and Pakistan, in India and Bangladesh, in Pakistan and Sudan and Nigeria (where the Biafra War was a war, by the Christians, of self-defense against the Jihad conducted against them by the Muslims of the north), in France and Great Britain and elsewhere in the Bilad al-kufr, where Jihad by all means, but chiefly by use of the Money Weapon, along with campaigns of Da'wa and demographic conquest, proceed. And also, and not least, things need to be seen aright in Israel. That remains true whether or not the benighted and not very impressive current leaders of Israel recognize that what they are fighting against and have always been fighting against is a Jihad, even when they had no idea that it was a Jihad. And it is directed at their state not because of its size -- that is irrelevant -- but because it is a Jewish, and thus an Infidel state, on land that belongs to Islam. And it does not matter that the land is a mere sliver, without any natural resources. Nor does it matter that Jews, like the Kurds and Berbers and Armenians and Assyrians and Copts, were also people of the vast area so misleadingly by some now called "the Arab world," or that they might "deserve" a defensible state of their own. The very idea of the Infidel nation-state is abhorrent to Muslims, though of course those who now live in those nation-states will, for now, largely shut up about that abhorrence.

The question is: how deliberately, willfully ignorant will Infidels, and especially those Infidels whose duty it is to instruct and protect us, continue to remain?

Posted by Hugh at July 7, 2007 8:27 AM

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/017298.php

Book Review: A Palestinian Two-Step

From Book Review: A Palestinian Two-Step:

In Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, Sari Nusseibeh misses no opportunity to denigrate and delegitimize Israel through sharp, short, often subtle yet always false readings of history.

His text is marred by countless factual errors and inaccuracies that cast a serious doubt on the validity of his personal narrative, not to mention the wider historical and political picture he seeks to paint.

But Mr. Nusseibeh is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His text is marred by countless factual errors and inaccuracies that cast a serious doubt on the validity of his personal narrative, not to mention the wider historical and political picture he seeks to paint.

--The British foreign secretary who made the famous declaration (in November 1917) on "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" was Mr. Arthur James Balfour, not " Lord Alfred Balfour," and the declaration was made in a letter to Lord Rothschild, not to Chaim Weizmann.

--Lawrence of Arabia had nothing to do with the Anglo-Hashemite correspondence that led to the "Great Arab Revolt" of World War I, and the person with whom the British plotted the revolt was Emir Hussein ibn Ali (later King Hussein of the Hijaz), not his son Emir Faisal (misrepresented by Mr. Nusseibeh as " Sheikh Faisal Hussein").

--Neither did the British ever promise Faisal (or Hussein for that matter) the headship of the Arab kingdom that would be established on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

--General Edmund Allenby did not occupy Palestine with his Mule Corps but rather with the powerful Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and the Ottoman potentate Djemal Pasha did not surrender to the British in 1917, as it was only in late September 1918 that Allenby scored his culminating victory, in the Battle of Megiddo.

--Sheik Izz al-din al-Qassam, the Syrian religious fanatic operating in Palestine in the mid-1930s, was not hanged by the British but killed in action.

--The Higher Arab Committee (established in 1936) comprised 10, rather than six, members and Jaffa's Arab population in 1948 didn't amount to 200,000 people, but to about a third of this figure.

--The Dome of the Rock was built by Caliph Abdel Malik ibn Marwan and not Mu'awiya, and Caliph Omar did not capture Jerusalem in 638 C.E. after the bloody conquest of Baghdad and Cairo for the simple reason that both cities were established long after the Muslim capture of Jerusalem. And so on and so forth.

If the Arabs reverted to violence, as they occasionally did, it was invariably the Jews' fault, according to Nusseibeh. The 1929 massacres, for example, in which 133 Jews were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors, and hundreds more were wounded, were but "a nasty backlash among Muslims" to Zionist nationalist aspirations regarding the Wailing Wall; just as Arafat's war of terror was a logical reaction to Ariel Sharon's short stroll along the Temple Mount. But then, why should Muslims act differently when Jews, who have no valid claim to Palestine, let alone to the Wailing Wall - "a most likely candidate for being the wall of a fortress built for Roman legions" - make outrageous demands on this holy Muslim site.

This absurd assertion — part of a lengthy historical fabrication of Jerusalem's history posted on the homepage of Al-Quds University, an institution headed by Mr. Nusseibeh — is hardly different from the countless misrepresentations and distortions contained in "Once Upon a Country." It is also congruent with the persistent Palestinian denial of the existence of King Solomon's Temple, and by extension the Jewish millennarian attachment to Jerusalem and the land of Israel. Small wonder that in 2002 he was appointed PLO Commissioner for Jerusalem affairs by Arafat, who in the Camp David summit of September 2000 had told President Clinton that the Temple had been located in Nablus rather than in Jerusalem. To judge by the gist of "Once Upon a Country," Arafat could not have made a better choice.

Israel Criticizes Egyptian Media Attacks

From Israel Criticizes Egyptian Media Attacks:

Israel's Foreign Ministry Wednesday criticized Egyptian media statements accusing Israel of killing 250 Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 War, based on an Israeli documentary film broadcast last week. Senior ministry officials viewed the documentary and concluded it "shows clearly that this was not a case of the 'murder of helpless POWs,' but rather a battle between Israeli soldiers and an Egyptian commando unit....The movie leaves no doubt that the soldiers were killed in battle and were not POWs." "Thirty years after Egyptian President Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem, and 28 years after the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty and the beginning of a new era in the Middle East, it is inappropriate to dig up issues from the distant past, especially when there is no factual basis to the accusations," the ministry said. "Israel views with grave concern the campaign to slander and incite against Israel in the Egyptian Parliament and media" and hopes Egypt will "bring the facts" before its public and "restore quiet."

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.

Sweden is drowning in Eurabia's sewers

Sweden's state alcohol retail monopoly Systembolaget has recently decided to label wines produced in Israel's Golan Heights as made in "occupied Syrian territory" instead of as coming from Israel.

Benny Morris defends Israel

For the past two decades, Benny Morris - a prominent Israeli and international academic, and a leading figure in Israel's Post-Zionism camp - has been advocating the notion that Israel's official version of history is filled with misconceptions and misleading myths.

Benny Morris, to the chagrin of Jew bashers and palestinian apologists, has changed his perspective and says that (1) Arabs are to blame for lack of peace; (2) Arabs are to blame for the refugee problem; (3) Arabs will never accept Israel; (4) Arabs are lying when they say that they can compromise with the Jewish state; (5) Israel has always been willing to compromise and do the fair thing for the Arabs.

Now, Benny Morris rips apart Mearsheimer and Walt's conspiracy paper and defends Israel by writing:

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. They imply that down to 1948, the Zionist leadership rejected the partition of Palestine. This is simply false. After 1937, the Zionist mainstream understood that the Jewish people needed an immediate safe haven from European savagery, and that the movement would have to take what history was offering and could gain no more.

The Palestinian story was different. The Palestinian national movement, from its inception up to 2000, rejected a two-state solution. There was no great debate. The Palestinian leadership rejected the 1937 and 1947 partition plans (and the Begin-Sadat "autonomy plan" of 1978, which would have led to a two-state solution), and insisted that the Jews had no right to even an inch of Palestine. And the Palestinian government of today, led by the popularly elected Hamas, continues to espouse this uncompromising, anti-partitionist one-state position. All of this is completely ignored in Mearsheimer and Walt's "history."

From Mearsheimer and Walt, you would never suspect that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 occurred against the backdrop, and as the result, of a war that for the Jews was a matter of survival, and which those same Palestinians and their Arab brothers had launched. To omit this historical background is stark dishonesty.

Not too bad for the world's most famous far-left, post-Zionist who is famous for criticizing Israel. Kinda puts a smile on your face, you know what I mean?

Keyword(s): Benny Morris