Is it Just My Opinion?

A Barnard graduate, Class of 1953 wrote:

If the decision for granting tenure to Nadja El Hai has not been acted on  yet, I would like to cast a vote NOT to renew her contract.

A Barnard graduate, Class of 1955 wrote:

Please know that your message was received and shared by many of us. We have been in contact with President Shapiro et al and we have received a document explaining the college's process. I am grateful for your concern and your sharing all of the info that you had. Hopefully, the college process will produce the result that we would like.

A Barnard graduate from Florida wrote to me:

I would be interested in knowing in how many other tenure decisions you have become involved, other than this one, in order to protect Barnard’s professoriate.  It is disingenuous of you to say that you, although unqualified academically to judge her work, have such violent views about it.  You should just be honest and say that you disagree with her views on Israel and do not want an opinion so contrary to your own view of the truth to be available in a university. It is obvious from your writing that this is what is going on.

Here is my response:

Clearly, I disagree with her views and find her racism hard to tolerate. Her ongoing "research" into Jewish genetics is chilling and her clear wish to see Israel obliterated from the map is offensive.  

You ask a question - how many other tenure decisions have I become involved in? And correctly, point out that this is the first. I have, indeed, left all others to the scholars best able to judge each candidate because in the field of anthropology, archeology, paleontology and every other "ology" I am often without a clue. Had Nadia El Haj stuck to anthropology, I likewise would have left it to the experts.

She crossed into my field (political science and history) when she started revising history. Josephus had no doubt is was the Romans who destroyed ancient Jerusalem. But Nadia El Haj (and as far as I can tell, only Nadia El Haj of the 20/21st century), knows better. She justifies the deliberate destruction of a cherished archeological site, an ancient tomb in Israel as "In destroying Joseph's Tomb Palestinian demonstrators eradicated one ‘fact on the ground'."

During that battle, a young Druze Israeli soldier bled to death because a crazed Palestinian mob wouldn't let us evacuate him. That "fact on the ground" had stood there for more than a thousand years. They were not "demonstrators"...such an innocent word, she uses...but a crazed, blood-thirsty mob that burned books, smashed the tomb and set it afire. As Alexander Joffe, of Purchase College, SUNY asks, "Are scholars now in the business of advocating the eradication of 'facts' rather than their explanation?" (full article: http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/008510.shtml).  

According to one of the most distinguished archaeologists in Israel, "the gleeful tone in which she describes this act of vandalism exemplifies how her political agenda completely overcame her duties as a social scientist." There is so much more I could quote - from the scholars who have assessed her work. I have never hid the fact that I find her views on Israel abhorrent. I do not say that Barnard should deny her tenure because she urged Columbia to "divest from all companies" that sell even defensive military supplies to Israel (http://www.columbiadivest.org/print/print_sig_list.html" I or because she condemned Israel in advance for an "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians during the Iraq war, an event that was never planned and never occurred.  

I say Barnard should deny her tenure because she committed a fatal flaw as a so-called "scientist" - she twisted facts to suit her political agenda. She assumed facts not in evidence, again, to meet her political wants. And to do this, she ignored all opinions to the contrary...including the only real historical evidence of the time period.   Confident she will get tenure and a platform from which to continue her political agenda, while we dither and dance, this dangerous person continues with her goals. According to her colleague, Joseph Massad,  her next book is “a book about the "Zionist movement('s)…desperate contemporary search for Jewish 'genetic markers' " to support "its continued investment in the racial separateness of the Jews." I don't know what that does to you as a person, but it brings back memories of Hitler and Goebbels. Recent lectures she has offered include:  

• “The Descent of Men: Genetics, Jewish Origins, and Historical Truths,” 
• “Jews – Lost and Found: Genetics and the Evidentiary Terrain of Recognition”
• “Bearing the Mark of Israel? Genetics, Geneaology and the Quest for Jewish Origins” 

Yes, it is true that in the path of the destruction that El Haj wants for Israel are my children, but the one who lacks honesty here is not me. It is disingenuous of El Haj to attempt to hide her hatred of Israel and Jews in what should have been a scholarly work. I hope you will review more of the evidence ( have posted only part of it to my site: www.paulasays.com so far and hope to continue to find time to post the rest).  You, as I, as Nadia El Haj - have the right to our opinions and the right to disagree. But long ago, in a dark and painful time, Jews learned the price of letting such hatred go.  

In this case, the fact that qualified academics not only agree with me, but have gone well ahead of me in offering proof, that her work is faulty, her judgement warped and her research incomplete and incompetent, Barnard should have an easy decision ahead of itself. One can only hope that they will choose the right path. Not because El Haj is anti-Israel, but because as a scholar, she should have had respect for history, for research, for truth, for the real facts on the ground she so easily denies to get her political agenda across.