Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Reading Sand's "Invention..." right now. He demolishes the political archeology premise. Worth a read.

One is immediately reminded of those 'finds' from a few years ago that purported to offer evidence of King David and the historical Jesus. Forgeries, of course.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (U. of Chicago Press, 2001)

Dig this fascist art I encountered last night:

http://artfulgoods.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/smokin-obama/

Obama as tired worker/beatnik. Sick shit.

John Rose's The Myths of Zionism also does a decent job of debunking the claims of Zionist archaeologists:

In October 1999, Herzog summarized their discoveries in a sensational article in the magazine of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz ('Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho', Ha'aretz Magazine, 29 October 1999: 6-8). In the article, Herzog described how what he calls the 'crisis stage' in Israeli archaeology has matured in recent years. He described it as nothing less than a scientific revolution. It is a process well known to all research scientists familiar with the dynamic of scientific break through:

"A crisis stage is reached when the theories within the framework of the general thesis are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies. The explanations become ponderous and inelegant, and the pieces do not lock together...

"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David &: Solomon described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom... (Ha'aretz, 29 October, 1999)"

In other words, no Abraham, no Moses, no Joshua; David and Solomon at best pagan tribal chieftains.

Masada, a tourist trap for George W. Bush, on his last visit to Israel is also a myth:

Why did the archaeologists involved, all scientifically trained scholars, ignore scientific evidence in favor of a version of history that now appears to be largely a myth? The answer is the focus of this intriguing study, which looks not only at Masada, but at the whole issue of deception in science and the social construction of knowledge. Ben-Yehuda considers the larger question of how society creates the symbolic moral boundaries between truth and deception, as well as the subtle interplay of science, politics, and ideology.