DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America - PT 1

Posted by johnhouk on May 08, 2007
Intro by John R. Houk
© May 8, 2007

I wish I could figure how to get an RSS feed to DANEgerus. That blog has excellent information. I guess the only problem I have DANEgerus is the dude is sometimes licentious. Just after his post on American University Academics enjoying a love affair with Mohammedan terrorists and the Left, he posts a Playboy article complete with links to the nude poster girl. So if you are a Christian Right kind of person like I am, be forewarned to turn on your mental filter and not indulge the flesh.

Also I was not faithful as to the essay was formatted. Sorry about that DANEgerus; however I have not changed the grammar or the words (and my spell check tells me I should have).

This is an incredible essay piecing together various resources that demonstrates the pervasive support American Professors (and Obama is even implicated) you relativity over facts to warp history to their political thought patterns.

There are some implicating pictures; however depending where I cross post this, I may use one to none.

This is lengthy. Take your time and digest the truth and prepare yourself in your social conversations to tell friends and enemies what is going on at the campuses of American Universities.

JRH
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DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America
DANEgerus Website

Genocide rationalization as scholarship
'Postmodernizing' Archaeology at Barnard

By... DANEgerus
5/6/2007 6:04:00 PM

Candace de Russy on Academic trutherism

The greatness of modern, western-style universities – the thing that separates them from all the academies that went before them – is that facts and theories asserted in universities must be supported by verifiable evidence.

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El-Haj is a young cultural anthropologist of the purely theoretical school. She has written a book entitled Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society

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El-Haj explains that she works by “rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method,” writing, instead, within a scholarly tradition of “post structuralism, philosophical
critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and … in response to specific postcolonial political movements.” And the particular theory that El-Haj puts forward is that the “ancient Israelite origins” of the Jews is a “pure political fabrication” – a machination she proceeds to blame on “Israeli archaeologists” who were called upon to “produce … evidence of ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land of Israel, thereby supplying the very foundation, embodied in empirical form, of the modern nation’s origin myth.”


Deplorably, in the rarified air of Morningside Heights, some Columbia faculty appear to celebrate this sort of “liberation” of scholarship from any necessity to encounter verifiable facts. For example, Keith Moxey, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor Professor of Art History at Barnard College and one of five members of the committee that will vote on El-Haj’s tenure bid, lauds “The abandonment of an epistemological foundation for … history and the acknowledgment that historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes collapses the traditional distinction between history and theory.” (See Moxey’s The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History.) In other words, evidence, verifiability, probability and explanatory power become irrelevant, for what counts is that an argument “coincide with our political convictions.”

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In the highly politicized, post-modern world of El-Haj, however, facts are not facts; instead, as she asserts in her book, they are “produced” as part of “the ongoing practice of colonial nationhood … through which historical-national claims, territorial transformations, heritage objects and historicities ‘happen.’” To acknowledge the mass of archaeological evidence and scholarship that establishes the existence of the ancient Israelite kingdoms would be to participate in a scholarly “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity is conferred.” Establishing such a hierarchy “privileges a particular kind of evidence.”

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El-Haj’s goal is transparent. According to her political convictions, the Jewish State was born in sin. It is guilty, she claims, of “Jewish settler-colonial nation state-building.” If, however, the Jews can trace a continuous heritage back to a series of ancient Hebrew kingdoms, Israel cannot be delegitimized by calling it a colonial settler state.

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El-Haj is not content to engage in the kind of denial of Jewish history now commonly called Temple denial.

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Why would a young academic publish libelous falsehoods about a highly regarded scholar, with no more evidence to support her assertions than conversations with anonymous informants? Why, as the Va’ad ha-Emet also asserts, would she pretend to a mastery of “archaeological practice” without having paid more then a brief visit to an archaeological dig as well as to have studied “Israeli society” without knowledge of the national language? And why would she repeatedly make statements of fact citing “unnamed informants or no sources at all”?


Likely because by slandering archaeologists working in Israel both individually and collectively, and reliance on absurd postmodern newspeak, she hopes to discredit the entire academic field of Israeli archaeology, thereby limiting the freedom of archaeologists to provide evidence that the ancient Israelite kingdoms did in fact exist.


So stands the El-Haj bid for tenure at Barnard College...
Barnard College is a Liberal arts college for women affiliated with Columbia University.


You might have seen The video which only scratches the surface:

Conduct Unbecoming


The Columbia Middle Eastern studies faculty has long been a hot-bed of pro-Palestinian activism. (This sorry history was captured by Ron Lewenberg in an article for FrontPage magazine.) The driving force behind this radicalism was the late Professor Edward Said.


Said's spirit lives on within MEALAC.

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The real problem with the report, however, lies in its hostility towards the natural responses of students trapped in the classrooms of Columbia's radical anti-Israeli activists.

MORE AT PART TWO


DANEgerus is an awesome right wing website. Again be forewarned there may be some offensive material though.

Part Two is coming up.