(Brick, N. J.) The New Yorker Magazine ran a particularly important story in the edition of April 14. The story was a lengthy piece on an obscure scholar of Archeology, Nadia Abu El-Haj. The story was not entirely about Archeology. The story was about truth, and the horror of the consequence of the suppression of truth, and the unwelcome, most dreadful, calamity of monumental lies.

Nadia Abu El-Haj was a brilliant academic. In 1990 as a gradate student at Duke University she was searching for a field work project for her Doctoral thesis. She wanted to do something out of the ordinary, something unique, and important. She decided on a project in epistemology. She wanted to examine knowledge in a social context, connected to time, place, politics and identity. That is knowledge of cultural, political, historical identity, to which a society, or a people, define themselves. She also wanted to find a place where that identity was the subject of dispute. She chose Israel/Palestine. What she did next was to have profound consequence to her and the very nature of free speech, and academic freedom in the United States.

She spent months in Israel learning Hebrew and examining the historic records of the British Mandate and Israeli Archives to document or in some cases dispute Israeli historical claims to the land of ancient Israel in Palestine.

In essence she was to examine the truth of Israeli archeology in the creation of, and establishment of, the State of Israel. These claims by Israeli archeologists were used to establish the political and social identity of Israeli, and sustain their claims for the lands in Palestine as having an ancient Hebrew presence. She was not the first to dispute the politics of Archeology that was used to establish the legitimacy of Israel as a continuum spanning centuries of continuous Hebrew occupation of the land in Palestine. Israeli Archeologists and Social Scientists had been debating the politics of Israeli Archeology for some time.

She was however the first Palestinian to make such a challenge. Or at least she had a Palestinian name. Nadia Abu El-Haj was born in New York. Her mother was of French, Norwegian descent. Her father was a Palestinian who had left Jerusalem in the 1950's to study at Columbia University in New York. He received his Doctorate in Economics from Columbia in the late 50's. In 1975 her family was living in Teheran, where her father was employed by the United Nations. She learned Farsi there. A few years later the family moved to Lebanon where she became fluent in Arabic. Her family frequently visited her father's relatives in East Jerusalem. In 1980 she began her undergraduate education at Bryn Mahr.

She was awarded her Doctorate in Archeology in 1995. She then turned her doctoral thesis into a book. "Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society" The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001. In 2002 she won a Middle East Studies Association award for scholarship. The book examined the role of Archeology in what was essentially a political context. That is; the Biblical validation of Jewish claims to the land of Palestine; nee Israel. The book traced the history of how archeological discoveries, pottery, ancient stones, even human remains, were used in a particular way, a decidedly manipulative way, to establish the legitimacy of Israeli claims to the land.

Her academic career flourished. She was described by colleagues at the University of Chicago where she taught Archeology as brilliant, and someone who brought "a sense of civility and repose" to the department of Archeology at the University.

She moved on from Chicago to Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, a particularly prestigious University appointment. In the fall of 2002 she applied for a job at Bernard College, the women's College of Columbia University, in New York.

That is where it all began to unravel. In April of 2006 Nadia Abu El-Haj applied for tenure at Bernard College... The thought that someone as brilliant, and as capable as she, would not be given tenure at the University, was a most remote consideration.

On August 7, 2007, a petition entitled "Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure" was posted on petitionline.com. The petition then gained momentum and was shown on a

number of email lists, and web sites. The petition at the end of the month had amassed nineteen hundred signatures. Many of the signers were graduates of Columbia and Bernard.

The petition described her as a scholar of "demonstrably inferior character" who indulges in "knowing misrepresentations of data" denies Israel's claims to the Holy Land, "asserts that the ancient Israelite Kingdoms are a "pure political fabrication" "does not speak Hebrew" and is "patently ignorant about the subject of her only book" it further said, " that her use of evidence to sustain her writing fails to meet the standards of scholarship that are expected of Columbia and Bernard undergraduates" All of these claims are, of course, demonstrably false. The petition was begun by Paula Stern a resident of the occupied West Bank, and a 1982 graduate of Bernard.

Stern is quoted as saying she does not believe "a Palestinian like Nadia Abu El-Haj, could be expected to write objectively about Israel" Stern also said El-Haj was "dangerous, and wrong”.

Several groups now began to support Stern's attempt to deny El-Haj a position at Bernard. The SPME faculty forum, the blog of pro-Israeli professors known as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Campus Watch, which monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern History in Colleges and Universities in the United States. Campus Watch was begun in 2002 by Daniel Pipes, a neo-conservative, and son of the founder of the "Committee for the Present Danger" a pro Israel group whose ad hoc membership includes, among other, Richard Perl, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, the same men who brought us the war in Iraq.

David Horowitz is another member.

Horowitz last week sponsored an "Islamo-Fasciest Week" at more than a hundred and fifty of this countries Colleges and Universities" to bring what he claims an awareness to the countries college population of the intricate connection between the Arab world and Fascism.

Stern was exposed as a fraud and liar by the progressive Zionist Blog Tikun Olam, and in the Jewish press, most notably by Larry Cohler-Esses, a highly regarded journalist who writes for the progressive Jewish Week. Cohler-Esses describes El-Haj's book as "hostile in fundamental ways to the State of Israel" but nonetheless rebuked Stern for inaccurate, misquoted, or deliberately misleading, claims of the substance of El-Haj's book.

Stern and her supporters warned Bernard that if El-Haj was given a tenured position at Bernard a most important source of the colleges funding would disappear. That is the various alumni associations. One third of Bernard graduates are Jewish and her threats were taken seriously by the College.

El-Haj was provided tenure at Bernard on November 1st. of 2007. The college in clearly an act of some heroic merit decided Nadia Abu El-Haj was most deserving to join the faculty of Bernard. That should make the citizens of this country rejoice. It is a small victory, but an important one.

That may seem like a happy ending, but it is by far not so. El-Haj's ordeal only demonstrates the extraordinary lengths, including lies, manipulations, threats, disreputable mechanizations and intimidations, to which the pro-Israel lobby will go to ensure the truth be suppressed in the agonizing search for peace in the Middle East.

This most important example demonstrates fully, what can only be described as the evil that engages so fully the issue to which those deceitful, unprincipled; supporters of Israel in this country are infected with.

The pro-Israel lobby, gratefully only a few but an inordinately powerful few, is most similar in their political philosophy to those they decry as fascists. They would suppress and deny the citizens of the United States the truth so they might in all good conscience, apply that truth to advance an equitable, and just resolution for the people of the Middle East who suffer so thoroughly of these lies, and spare us, the people of this country further shame and humiliation.