Death Threats?

A Personal Note on Nadia El Haj's Claim of Death Threats

Campus Watch (http://www.campus-watch.org/weblog/id/77)

Judith Shapiro Claims Nadia Abu El Haj Has Received a Death Threat; Will She Produce Evidence?
May 30, 2007

In email correspondence with Phil Orenstein, Barnard College president Judith Shapiro claims that archaeologist Nadia Abu El Haj, who is coming up for tenure at Barnard, has received a death threat. Shapiro's email was prompted by Orenstein's May 16 letter to her in which he opposed El Haj's tenure bid. In one of her replies, Shapiro wrote:

"Nadia Abu El-Haj has also received death threats from those opposed to her work."

Two questions leap to mind:

• Can Shapiro (or Nadia Abu El Haj) produce evidence to back up this claim?
• Was the threat reported to a law enforcement agency?

There is no excuse for threatening scholars, and I sincerely hope that anyone who does so is arrested and prosecuted. Vigorous debate is the lifeblood of intellectual life, and only intellectual cowards resort to threats. If El Haj received such threats, no legitimate critic of hers will wish for anything other than seeing the person or persons who made the threats swiftly brought to justice. For some scholars, the claim to having received death threats or other threatening communiqués can be a badge of honor and an attempt to silence critics. It simultaneously conveys victimhood, the most lauded status in academe, and impugns the character and motives of higher education's detractors. As Daniel Pipes explained on his blog in 2005, El Haj isn't the first Columbia professor to make this allegation: Hamid Dabashi made similar claims in 2002 and again in 2005 in light of critical views of his scholarship. UCLA Islamic law professor Khaled Abou el Fadl has also publicly claimed to having received death threats.

Abu El Haj's scholarship has come in for considerable criticism over the past several years, and Campus Watch has posted nearly 30 pieces that take issue with her work. Her book, Facts on the Ground; Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, denies any historical Hebrew connection to Jerusalem, and charges that Israeli archaeologists have both invented evidence of a Jewish history of the city, and destroyed evidence that would prove that Jerusalem has Palestinian roots. Hers is a thoroughly politicized scholarship, and there is significant controversy surrounding her tenure bid at Barnard.

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Personal Comment Here

I too condemn any violence or even the threat of violence.

I also believe that President Judith Shapiro writes with complete honesty that she believes Nadia El Haj has received death threats.

And finally, I also firmly believe that the reality of death threats being made against Nadia El Haj are as fictional as much of her "research." I believe this for many reasons - but the biggest one is that she simply isn't important enough. In a world where the United Nations can condemn the State of Israel repeatedly, but ignore the issue of Darfur; in a world where people in a city live in constant fear of rocket attacks...and the world is busy condemning my country for attempting to stop those attacks, what relevance does this one insignificant person have in the real scheme of things? Even if Barnard decides to give this "professor" tenure, will the world stop? Will Israel be endangered? Will people starve and nations go to war? In the long run, it will simply be a sad mark against a prestigious college - that should have known better.

It is important to stop Nadia El Haj because her work lacks integrity; because the woman corrupts the concepts of scholarship and research for political purposes. Her "work" is riddled with lies, inaccuracies, twisted truths and intentional miscommunications. But kill her? Ridiculous! I don't believe anyone believes she is worth the effort and the one thing we don't need is another supposed martyr.

Another reason why I don't believe there were any threats will be less popular for those who read this, but still I believe it to be true. Murder is not the Jewish way. We do not murder our opponents; we discredit them by showing that they are liars. We do not kill them; we ridicule them, we expose them, and hopefully, we prevent them from continuing to spread their lies and hatred to others.

May Nadia El Haj live a long and healthy life - unemployed and dismissed from the academic world for her attempts to blur and corrupt and politicize and lie. May her name be remembered in shame - and may Barnard gain respect and honor for rejecting her for tenure.