Palestinian Columbia University Professor Condones Looting of Jewish Antiquities [incl. Nadia Abu El Haj]

In the Palestinian narrative, literally anything is justified as a “resistance.” This propaganda is a shield for the jihad against Israel, justifying the murder of its citizens and promoting antisemitic hatred globally. The article below by Elder of Ziyon discusses a book anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj of Barnard College wrote 20 years ago which highlights the unchanging practice of attacking the State of Israel at every level, from the streets to academia.

Islamic antisemitism is rooted in Islamic texts, in both the Quran and Hadiths.

In the 2002 book, the title of which actually begins “Facts on the Ground.....,” Abu El Haj praises the looting of Jewish heritage in the name of a “resistance.” Abu El Haj, a Palestinian jihad sympathizer with an Episcopalian mother and a Palestinian Muslim father, lambastes Israeli authorities for dutifully stopping the looters, calling it a “quasi military occupation in their character.” She blames the authorities for causing the Palestinians to “refuse to cooperate.”

Abu El Haj is also a member of the Palestine Land Studies Center advisory group. Six months ago, she referred to Israeli “settlement” expansions in Judea and Samaria as “radical ethnic cleansing of the sort we saw in 1948,” thus justifying the jihad violence that has been perpetrated against Israel from the day of its birth, with, of course, no mention of the violent efforts by Ottoman South Syrians to keep Jews out of their own ancient homeland.

All this is regarded as acceptable in colleges and universities, and demonstrates how students are being indoctrinated on American campuses. The propaganda is stark. By now, the Palestinian MO should be widely known. Yet most people remain ignorant of both the history and the documented ambitions of the Palestinians (who are, of course, fully supported by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation). Many others do know, but they ignore it all and perpetuate their own Jew-hatred.

“What kind of an anthropologist would condone looting of Jewish antiquities? A Palestinian one at Columbia,” Elder of Ziyon, March 7, 2022:

Nadia Abu El Haj is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University’s Barnard College.

In 2002, she published “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” The book is meant to be a discussion of how Israel uses and misuses archaeology for its own political purposes.

But she asserts, in her own voice, something so shocking that it should disqualify her in her own field, in a section of her book that discusses Palestinian looting of Jewish artifacts at archaeological sites – something that is rampant.

Looting could well be analyzed as a form of resistance to the Israeli state and an archaeological project, understood by many Palestinians, to stand at the very heart of Zionist historical claims to the land. In James Scott’s words, looting is perhaps a “weapon of the weak” [1985].

Here we have an anthropologist who is praising Palestinian looting of Jewish heritage – because it is “resistance.”

(James Scott’s book, called “Weapons of the Weak,” does not talk about looting of archaeological sites, and indeed does not appear to discuss the permanent destruction or loss of any major items. Abu El Haj is twisting his thesis.)

In Palestinian thought, any crime, including murder, is justifiable under the rubric of “resistance,”.....

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