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No Tenure for Massad
By Armin Rosen
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 12, 2007
It’s a wonder that MEALAC professor Joseph Massad isn’t a hoax perpetrated by conservative activist David Horowitz. No doubt Horowitz excites over academics who so perfectly epitomize everything wrong with the academy, and whose published works read like dossiers from Campus Watch. But politics and the problems surrounding the intersection of politics and academia shouldn’t preclude a close and critical examination of Massad’s work, especially since, for Massad, politics is so preclusive of basic intellectual and academic sense. He might be David Horowitz’s best asset. But that isn’t why Columbia’s academic credibility hinges on Massad’s tenure bid ending in failure.
Massad’s work is characterized by illogical extremes and by a knee-jerk paranoia of anything even vaguely Western in its origins or goals. If he weren’t a professor, his argument in Desiring Arabs that a cabal-like “Gay International” (in which agents of neo-imperialism like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are card-carrying members) is using an invented notion of “homosexuality” to demonize the Moslem world would be denounced as veiled homophobia—especially since reviewer Brian Whitaker writes that “Massad offers no evidence to substantiate his claim.” This is a demented argument, especially considering all the work that’s been done on the emergence of gay identity in the Middle East. But it’s incredible what you can get away with when you’ve got “Associate Professor of Arab intellectual history” attached to your name.
Indeed, the extent to which “academic freedom” can act as a shield for the most unfounded, anti-scholarly rhetoric is one of the few substantive lessons that can be gleaned from Massad’s body of work. With this in mind, his “magnum opus” is a 2002 article for New Politics entitled “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy,” itself a study in how an important examination of a provocative and difficult question—in this case, whether the Zionist project is inherently racist—can degenerate into an intolerant and wildly anti-academic rant.
In the article, Massad notes the “ideological convergence between anti-Semites and Jewish supremacists.” He bases a claim that “Zionism’s project is nothing short of turning the Jew into the anti-Semite” on an Israeli newspaper article in which a Washington, D.C. rabbi states, “The U.S. no longer has a government of [non-Jews], but an administration in which the Jews are full partners in the decision-making at all levels.” To a reasonable reader, this is an innocuous and even factual statement. To Massad, it helps prove that “Jewish supremacists” promote a worldview whereby “Jews will be supremacists over the native Palestinians who they conquered and must continue to conquer; they are also said to be supreme on a global scale.”
The logic is tough to follow but inflammatory nonetheless: Massad is accusing “Jewish Supremacists” (basically, every Zionist Jew, regardless of nationality) of endangering the greater Jewish community through wanting their people to be “supreme on a global scale.” Basically, Massad argues that Zionists generate anti-Semitism through confirming to an anti-Semitic stereotype. But it’s a stereotype that Massad finds valid—to him, a goodly percentage of Jews really are living, breathing anti-Semitic caricatures.
But he doesn’t stop with his Protocols-like critique of Zionism. In the article’s final paragraph, Massad calls for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” This is significant, since he earlier describes how everything from “Jewish symbolism” to “ceremonial national days” to “Jewish society in Israel” is an instrument of “Jewish supremacy;” doubly significant because the article was published in the winter of 2002, during the violent early days of the Second Intifada.
Massad is effectively saying that anything “Jewish” in Israel (which, to Massad, means practically everything), is fair game to whoever is “resisting” it. This is an offensive position, although I suppose the violent or nonviolent destruction of “Jewish society” might be theoretically defensible if you advocate a similar fate for other ethnic, national, or religious groups. But two paragraphs earlier, Massad writes that after the future dissolution of the Zionist government, “the Palestinians can either have a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza or ... opt for a binational state in all of Mandatory Palestine.” While Jewish nationalism is supremacist and racist, Palestinian nationalism and statehood is not. Far from it—in fact, Palestinian national ambitions are so urgent that they warrant the erasure of the social and national structuring of a country of seven million people. Meanwhile, Jewish national ambitions are insignificant when they aren’t racist, although Massad seems to take this discrepancy for granted and, unsurprisingly, makes no attempts at justifying it. He doesn’t oppose nationalism per se—just Jewish nationalism.
Incredibly, Massad manages to top himself in a 2002 essay for the Journal of Palestine Studies entitled “Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness” (available on JSTOR), in which he makes the appalling claim that “the majority of American Jews are so assimilated into ‘whiteness’ that they are no longer Jews ... except by name.” Although Massad cites a 1998 book by Karen Brodkin as proof, he doesn’t see this statement—essentially, that American Jewish identity is at best a socio-cultural flight of fancy—as being quite problematic enough to closely interrogate or even casually examine. I would hope that someone granted tenure at Columbia wouldn’t gloss over something like this en route to an even more ludicrous argument; that he wouldn’t, for instance, use the assumed illegitimacy of American Judaism to slam Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry for providing too much of a “Zionist understanding” of the Jewish experience.
It’s disconcerting that a tenure candidate with no expertise in modern American Judaism would be so baselessly dismissive of it. But his much more disturbing dismissal is of the entire notion that controversial issues can be discussed without having to resort to cheap insinuation and borderline intolerance. Supporters of Israel should welcome the pointed challenges that the most provocative and well-reasoned anti-Zionist discourses present. But nobody should welcome a scholarship in which poisonous and intellectually flimsy methods of argumentation act as stand-ins for the careful, academic thought process that universities are supposed to encourage and reward. And nobody should welcome the day when our University determines that the world’s most important issues deserve nothing more than the immature and polemical treatment that Massad gives to them. We’re not about to give Bill O’Reilly a full professorship. Massad doesn’t deserve one either.
The author is a sophomore in List College.
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The fact of the matter is that Massad's crazy, ignorant, bigoted views relate directly to his own area of scholarship, Middle Eastern culture and politics. This isn't a chemistry professor with crazy views about Latin American agrarian policy. This is more like a biology professor who advocates homeopathy. (And who blames its lack of popular acceptance on the Zionists, of course.)
Honestly, can't Columbia find anybody better than this guy? There are simply too many qualified academics fighting for tenure for an Ivy league university to bestow the privilege on this airhead.
And considering the things he says these days, *before* having gotten tenure, do you have any idea what a headache Massad would be for the university if he had job security? Columbia denies tenure to lots of people all the time, with far less justification.
The worst part of the MEALAC controversy a few years ago (in which Massad was accused of classroom misbehavior) was the composition of the ad hoc investigatory committee. Why not select as its members people who had no connection to the controversy? Why not avoid even the taint of a conflict of interest?
No. Two of the committee members had signed the Israel divestment petition, one was Prof. Massad's former thesis advisor, and one was on public record comparing Israel to a Nazi state. It should not be a surprise, then, that the report finally issued by the committee largely exonerated the professors in question from any serious wrongdoing and devoted some of its words to criticizing pressure on the university from external, pro-Israeli groups.
About two and half years ago, I received an email that the Middle East Institute and the School of International and Public Affairs were sponsoring a lecture to be given by Joseph Massad on what I felt was a most intriguing topic, entitled Zionism and Jewish Supremacy. Coincidentally, Ambassador Ross and his wife had been our guests the evening before to see the Producers and had stayed over in the morning before returning to DC. I attended the noon lecture and was dismayed by what I experienced.
Purporting to be a scholarly lecture, I regret to say that it was instead an anti-Semitic diatribe with only a patina of scholarship that one might have perhaps heard at a neo-Nazi rally. Massad's thesis in summary was that Jews--Zionists-- viewed themselves as superior to other people and Arabs as less than human, that as a consequence they would never give up the West Bank and Gaza and therefore they had to be boycotted, blockaded and destroyed.
A few people out of perhaps 50-60 who attended the lecture in the question period raised their hands and praised him for his insight and balance. At that point, I raised my hand and said that I was profoundly disturbed by what he was saying, that while his delivery was matter-of-fact, the words were incendiary but most importantly his underlying premise was simply not accurate. I said that it was contradicted by what had been offered to Arafat at Camp David Two and at Taba, with the Clinton bridging proposals, namely, as we now all know some 97% of the West Bank, 100% of Gaza and a compromise on Jerusalem and holy sites, with the Right of Return to Israel being waived for compensation. Massad said, no that was not correct, that what was actually offered was merely 65% of the West Bank and that it was all bantustans, not contiguous.
I responded that it just so happened that I had spoken with Dennis Ross, the evening before and that morning, that we had discussed this very point and that he had said that such contentions were regrettably becoming part of a false mythology increasingly prevalent in the Region. At that point, someone in the audience shouted out, Dennis Ross is a JEW! the purpose of which obviously was to undermine a flat contradiction of the speaker. Neither the moderator nor anyone in authority in the room said anything. I sat there stunned.
What happened next stunned me even more. After a few questions from the floor, a graduate student raised his hand and tried very gently, in my opinion, to deal with Massad's contention of Jewish supremacy by saying that perhaps he misunderstood what he called Jewish particularity, that arose from unique Jewish experiences most recently during World Ward II. He then gave in a few brief sentences a quick summary, for the benefit he said of perhaps some students from the college who might not know the history of the region. Shortly thereafter, an older gentleman said that he too was disturbed by Massad's talk, that he felt anxious that if given to a student audience in an Arab country who were told how incorrigibly evil Israel and the Jews were, that it could incite not only hatred but also extreme behavior, even acts of terrorism.
At that point, a professor whose name I do not recall spoke up and said if I recall correctly that he was the head of the Middle East Studies program at the college. He then did two things that surprised me. First, he said that he did not need a graduate student to patronize him; in fact saying, How dare you patronize me!--since he was already fully knowledgeable about the Region and was in fact the head of the department. Second, he criticized the moderator for allowing the last person in the audience to call Massad a terrorist, which of course had not been either said nor intended. But he then went on to say that Massad's view was correct, that he was very brave to say what he said and then made it clear, at least to me, that this was essentially the orthodoxy being taught in the college and upon which grades were determined.
It was apparent to me that Massad was using his position as a Columbia professor, entitled to the respect of students, to promote vile and insidious anti-Semitic hatred in the language of anti-Zionism, He was ostensibly using his scholarship in doing so, but what in fact it entailed was transparently flimsy and more importantly factually and demonstrably untrue.
(From an essay by James Schreiber, 2005)
Students were even more critical of Joseph Massad, a protégé of the late Edward Said. Among the more serious accusations were Massad's likening of Jews to Nazis and his disparagement of Israel as a racist state. Reportedly, Massad taunted one student, who had served in the Israeli army, "How many Palestinians have you killed?," and informed another that he would not "have anybody here deny Israeli atrocities." One student recounted Massad's telling his class, "The Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi."
In December, faced with growing public indignation, Columbia's president, Lee H. Bollinger, grudgingly announced the appointment of a committee to review student complaints. Three of the five members were known critics of Israel, and two of these three had signed a petition calling on Columbia to divest its holdings from companies selling arms and military hardware to Israel. Another member had served as Massad's dissertation adviser, and shortly before being appointed to the committee had signed a letter decrying press reports about MEALAC's prejudice as "the latest salvo against academic freedom at Columbia."
In its report, released at the end of March, the committee predictably circumvented the core issue. Focusing on "significant deficiencies in the university's grievance and advising procedures," it ruled that Massad had acted inappropriately by responding "heatedly" to "a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved," while consigning to "a challenging gray zone" his taunt about the number of Palestinians a student had supposedly killed. At the same time, the panel had nothing but praise for "Massad's dedication to, and respectful attitude toward, his students" and for his "willingness . . . to permit anyone who wished to do so to comment or raise a question during his lectures." Indeed, so open-minded was Massad in the committee's estimation that his "pedagogical strategy" actually "allowed a small but vociferous group"—presumably, pro-Israel students—"to disrupt lectures by their incessant questions and comments."
Adding insult to whitewash, the committee found "no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic." Above all, it scanted the majority of the complaints, which centered on none of these matters but rather (as the committee itself noted) on "what a number of students perceived as bias in the content of particular courses" as well as on charges that "particular professors had an inadequate grasp of the material they taught and that they purveyed inaccurate information."
All this was too much even for the New York Times, which had been overtly sympathetic to the Columbia faculty throughout the crisis. "Most student complaints," it now editorialized correctly, "were not really about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors." Since the committee had failed, in the words of the Times, "to examine the quality and fairness of teaching," the university was still left with the need "to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor."
Indicating his deep understanding of his subject:
"...the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism." ("Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question." Al-Ahram, Dec. 9 - 15, 2004)
On April 17, 2002, Israel’s independence day, an anti-Israel rally was scheduled to compete with a pro-Israel celebration. According to the campus paper, the Columbia Spectator, MEALAC’s Joseph Massad addressed the rally, proclaiming that Israel is "a Jewish supremacist and racist state," and that "every racist state should be threatened."
(At an "Israeli Apartheid Week" event in February 2007)
At one point, after air-quoting the term "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Massad asked the audience, "does it [Palestine] threaten Jews? Absolutely not. ... The only thing threatening Jews is its commitment to Apartheid and its racist people."
During the following question-and-answer period, Massad called for "A non-violent solution [to the hostilities] based on human dignity," further suggesting that "our world does not have to pay anymore for the Holocaust."
Asked if there was any evidence that Palestinians would consent to equal living with Israelis if given more rights, Massad received heavy applause when he said, "My concern is to fight the government already in power as opposed to a projected government."
Massad called for the creation of what he called a democratic, non-racist state, saying that "When that happens I think Hamas will change seriously. ... Let's try that and see what happens."
"The problem is concerning colonialism maintained by racist law," Massad said, saying later that Israelis have "no right to an ethnic state" and that Palestinians are "continuing to fight racist laws as we speak."
A clear majority of the Columbia students that I have known are not unlike those that you would find at any other major university. Their parents expect them to do well in school and to get a good job after they graduate. To be sure, there are some really foolish students at Columbia, and this is now obvious to the entire country. They are a problem at Columbia in the same way that drunken frat guys are a problem at some Big 10 schools, but our fools present a much more serious challenge to Columbia than drunken frat guys do at a school like Penn State. Why? It is because in the case of the former the behavior in question finds significant support among the faculty in some departments. If you want to understand the real problem at Columbia, then you need to look at how the postcolonialism/literary theory/bullshit crowd has been allowed to gain power at Columbia. Will this continue? I think that some people expected that things like the Sokal Affair of 1996 would expose this part of academia for what it is. Clearly this did not happen at Columbia, at least not in a significant way. Part of the problem might be attributed to the fact that scientists, along with other academics who respect rational thought, tend not to make as much noise beyond their research area (perhaps because they are too busy doing work). I hope that Columbia's latest foot-in-mouth-head-up-asshole move to invite Ahmadinejad to campus will prove to be the turning point. Flushing Massad would be a step in the right direction.
By the way, "Jewish Supremicism", the title of articles and speeches by Massad, is also the title of a 2003 David Duke book. "Great" minds think alike, eh? Columbia must be proud to have such a fine scholar.
In all fairness: the term Dukes used in the title of his book was "Jewish Superracism." The ideas may or may not be similar, but the titles certianly aren't.
-Armin Rosen
Ah, but it *is* his scholarship that is shoddy. See again Massad's use of fraudulent quotations of a defamatory, anti-Semitic nature. (Specifically, the fake Sharon quotation from his paper in New Politics, Winter 2002, Vol. VIII, Iss. 4, pg. 89. The exact quotation is duplicated in some of the other messages posted to this online forum.)
It's fine when a professor of, say, chemistry has atrocious views on some other subject, like politics. But just as a biology professor who advocates creationism is not fit for tenure, neither is a professor of middle eastern politics and culture who is so blatantly ignorant and tendentious and mendacious about the middle east.
Has it occurred to anyone that Massad's political views -- at least to the extent they are not made as part of his scholarly work -- should play no part in his tenure decision? Even where his opinions do enter into his scholarship, they matter less than the caliber of his work. Many scholars in his field consider him not just good but exceptional. Even if his political beliefs offend us, why should that matter?
When and if Nicholas De Genova comes up for tenure, his comment about "a million Mogadishus" should play no part in the decision-making process. It was something he said on his own time about his own politics, and was not part of his scholarly portfolio. Massad is entitled to the same treatment. Things he says in op-eds, at political fora, etc. just shouldn't matter.
If political beliefs become a litmus test for tenure, where will lines be drawn in the future? Can a heavily liberal faculty deny tenure to someone because he supports President Bush -- either in general or in specific decsisions like going to war in Iraq? If the tables are one day turned, could a conservative faculty deny tenure to people because they're liberal?
Even if Massad's politics are more extreme (and I don't know that they are), the differences between his situation and the ones I describe are of degree rather than of kind. This is a slippery slope people should not step onto lightly.
The discriminatory Israeli governmental policies, especially in the West Bank, are reprehensible, but are not based on race, plain and simple. There is no "Jewish race", Jews come in all the "races", and many Jews are indeed racially indistinguishable from Muslim Arabs. There isn't a single law on the Israeli books that gives preference to people of one color or another, in obvious contrast to South Africa. No matter how hard he or she might have tried, a black person in South Africa could not become legally white. A woman in Saudi Arabia cannot become a man. By contrast, a Palestinian who suddently decides that he wants to become Jewish and undergoes an Orthodox religious conversion can indeed become Jewish. I suppose if you started saying "religious apartheid" (just as some people use the same phrase, as well as "gender apartheid", to refer to countries like Saudi Arabia), that might be applicable to Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories.
Is there racism in Israel? Certainly. There are lots of small-minded fools in Israel that have racist attitudes towards those of different ethnicities/cultural groups, regardless of whether the targets are Jewish or not. I guess this is so upsetting to Westerners because, by contrast, Europe and the US have completely eliminated all racism from their societies. (Uh, right! Ever been to a European football game?) But I don't condone those racist attitudes, nor do I excuse them. I condemn them without qualification. When radical Israeli Jews chant "Death to Arabs," I respond with nothing but disgust, not justifications. But just because there are Israelis who have racist views doesn't mean that the foundational philosophy of the state is racist. There is no fundamental principle to Zionism that is racist (or even corresponds the notion of "race" at all), even if some of its followers have had racist views and have even tried to interpret Zionism as justifying those racist views. History has shown movement try to pervert science to support illegitimate ideologies, but science itself is not to blame. There have similarly been many who claimed to stand for democracy while betraying its core principles. And racism is endemic to the whole Middle East. Do you know how much racism there is among Arabs toward blacks, or Roma?
When a conflict can be cast as being between a "white" group and a "brown" group, there is a knee-jerk reaction in educated circles immediately to take the side of the "brown" group (for very good historical reasons), even when the "brown" group is in actuality a thousand times as large. This is one big reason for all the comparisons of Zionism to apartheid, for example. Of course, Zionism actually has nothing to do with race (after all, you can convert to and away from Judaism), and in fact Israel is in reality very much a "brown" country. To call Jews "white" is quite racist itself! Yet one very often still sees the situation being depicted as white European colonizers against brown dispossed victims, forgetting of course that a huge segment of Israel's population consists of "brown" Jews who came to Israel because they were dispossessed---an even larger number than the original number of Palestinian refugees.
At Columbia University, Professor Hamid Dabashi, former chair of the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) departmant, refers to Zionism as a "ghastly racist ideology" and Professor Joseph Massad calls it "racist Jewish supremacy." Is that reasonable criticism of Israeli policies or fanatical and unprofessional and simply, demonstrably false? What "races" are they referring to? What "races" do they claim that Zionism is referring to? And why do they consider these to be "races"?
Do you believe in the existence of a "Jewish race?" How, when there are Jews of every conceivable ethnic group--Caucasian, Chinese, Indian, Arab (referred to as the Mitzrahi, the largest Jewish group in Israel), Kurdish, African, Latin American, American Indian--white, black, and everything else. After all, you can CONVERT to Judaism. And though there is certainly a group of "Jewish-looking" Jews of Eastern European descent, they represent only one segment of the Jewish people (and a minority of the Jews in Israel!). Is there a Palestinian "race"? (Mind you, there are Jewish Arabs and Palestinians as well.) Care to look at their historical lineage? (It's a fairly heterogeneous mixture of numerous ethnicities). Is there an Arab "race"? (The Arab League at its formation in 1946 defined an Arab as "a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples".) Like the Jews, there are Arabs of numerous "colors", and they are united by language, culture, politics, a history, and self-identity. They, like Jews, are a people, not a race. So what race is Zionism against? How is Zionism racist? Is Arab nationalism racist? Is Iranian pride racist?
"Massad spoke next. He has already made a name for himself by his behavior towards students who disagree with his views on Israel. In less than 20 minutes, Massad managed to call Israel a 'racist apartheid' state more than 30 times. In fact, he didn't actually say anything else. He gave no data for this premise and offered no rhyme or reason as to why he thought this way or why anyone in the audience should believe him or agree with him. He was, of course, met with huge cheers and ovations by the mostly student audience. As someone, perhaps the only one in the audience, who actually worked in a hospital in Soweto, South Africa during apartheid, I wondered if anyone in attendance actually knew the definition of 'apartheid.'
"By now, it should come as no surprise that Massad was one of the key participants in last week's 'Israeli Apartheid' program where he, again, did little more than repeatedly state that Israel is a racist state. I do agree that there is apartheid in the Middle East. In many countries, women are not allowed to vote and have no rights. In some, non-Muslims are not allowed to pray in their desired house of worship or take part in the government and education is often reserved for only the richest members of society. Apartheid is present in a number of Middle Eastern countries, that is, except for Israel." --Marc Arkovitz, member of the Columbia faculty of medicine, in the Columbia Spectator, March 19, 2007
The man's words themselves:
"What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left?... While most of these intellectuals have taken public stances against racism and white supremacy, have opposed Nazism and apartheid South Africa, seem to oppose colonialism, old and new, most of them partake of a Sartrian legacy which refuses to see a change in the status of European Jews, who are still represented only as holocaust survivors in Europe. The status of the European Jew as a coloniser who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people is a status they refuse to recognise and continue to resist vehemently... No matter how much Zionism continues to resurrect it and claim it as the excuse for its racist violence against the Palestinians, the holocaust does not justify Israel's racist nature... Take Jacques Derrida as another example, who when lecturing in occupied Jerusalem in 1986 stated his position as follows: 'I wish to state right away my solidarity with all those, in this land, who advocate an end to violence, condemn the crimes of terrorism and of the military and police repression, and advocate the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories as well as the recognition of the Palestinians' right to choose their own representatives to negotiations, now more indispensable than ever.' Derrida, however, felt it necessary to assert in his speech that the Israeli State's 'existence, it goes without saying, must henceforth be recognised by all'. Despite Derrida's opposition to White supremacist South Africa in the mid-1980s, he believes that Israel, a racist Jewish state, should be recognised by all... Clearly, Derrida is attached to a certain image of Israel that is defiled by some of its actions, like the occupation. In that, he hardly differs from Zionist liberals who never minded the massacres and oppression of Palestinians under successive Labour governments but were only scandalised when the Likud governments followed a similar path during Israel's invasions of Lebanon... Nowhere in his justification does [Etienne] Balibar note the fact that Israel is a racist Jewish State; his opposition is only to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza... In his recent book, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real', famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a most unoriginal manner. What concerns him most is not the foundational racism of Zionism and its concrete offspring, a racist Jewish state, nor the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, or the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies -- all of which seem of little concern to him -- but rather Arab 'anti-Semitism' which should not be 'tolerated'." Arabs are in fact reacting to "Zionist Jewish colonialism and its commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise... Zionism's anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been, is never examined by these intellectuals. Nor do they ever examine the ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement... When these European intellectuals worry about anti-Semitism harming the Israeli settler's colony, they are being blind to the ultimate achievement of Israel: the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew. Unless their stance is one that opposes the racist basis of the Jewish State, their support for Palestinian resistance will always ring hollow." --Joseph Massad, Al-Ahram, February 2003
"All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists." --Columbia University professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History Joseph Massad interpreting Arab Holocaust denial as a form of Zionism, December 15, 2004 (Note how he twists the word "Zionist" so that it means something completely different).
"The Jews are not a nation.... The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist." --Joseph Massad
(And I suppose that any of the fifty or so Muslim states---home to about a thousand times as many people as Israel and covering a vast swath of Earth's land area---are racist states that do not have a right to exist either, right?)
"Columbia University, the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and I personally, have been the target of this intensified campaign for over three years. Pro-Israel groups are pressuring the university to abandon proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship, and want to force the university to silence all critical opinions. Such silencing, the university has refused to do so far, despite mounting intimidation tactics by these anti- democratic and anti-academic forces." --Columbia professor Joseph Massad.
(Since Massad brings it up, let's talk about "proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship." After all, he opened the door! See the next quotation.)
'...more recently, in late September 2001, and during an acrimonious argument which erupted in a weekly Israeli cabinet meeting between Prime Minister [Ariel Sharon] and his Foreign Minister [Shimon Peres], the following interchange unfolded: Peres was warning Sharon that refusing to heed American requests for a ceasefire would endanger Israeli interests and "turn the U.S. against us." Sharon yelled at Peres in exasperation: 'every time we do something you tell me the Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clearly, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America and the Americans know it.' This major ideological convergence between anti-Semites and Jewish supremacists in Israel is hardly surprising if one understood Zionism's project as nothing short of turning the Jew into the anti-Semite." --Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad, in the journal New Politics, Winter 2002, Vol. VIII, Iss. 4, pg. 89.
(It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Sharon quotation later turned out to be a fake that Massad quietly removed in a later version of this article that he published in another journal. Considering the inflamatory and anti-Semitic nature of the quotation--that the Jewish state's leaders claim that the Jews controls the US, fitting in a long tradition of supposed international Jewish conspiracies and their supposed control over powerful world governments--this is hardly a "minor," innocent error! Massad also claims that Zionist Jews conspired with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, based on the writings of a fringe revisionist historian Lenni Brenner, claiming in the Egyptian government-sponsored newspaper Al-Ahram that Zionists helped the Nazis due to the Zionists' alleged interest in "evicting [the Jews] from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been.")
Joseph Massad: But as far as generalizations of racism, Professor Morris, it is you who seconds ago told us about the alleged Muslim tradition of xenophobia.
Benny Morris: It's not racist. It's a cultural tradition which denies the stranger legitimacy.
JM: These are Orientalist and racist claims.
BM: Christians and Jews in the Islamic empire were always considered second-class citizens and the rest of the world was considered infidel, unbelievers, and given to the sword. And you know that.
JM: This is just a rehearsing of tired old Orientalist claims.
BM: This is Koranic tradition.
JM: Perhaps from the Zionist and the racist Orientalist perspective, this is indeed the Muslim tradition as viewed by them, but not in reality.
"Anti-Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews." --Joseph Massad, Al-Ahram, December 2006
Who is responsible for a particular professor's bigoted screeds? Before tenure, it is the professor's fault, but after tenure, after the university and its deans have reviewed the professor's history and deemed the professor acceptable for the rare privilege of an academic appointment, it becomes the university's responsibility, ESPECIALLY when the applicant's history included clear examples of such histrionics. If a non-tenured professors makes blatant horrific statements indicating an ignorance or stupidity not appropriate for a university professor, s/he can be fired. After tenure, the person to be fired is the one who hired him/her.
I am sick and tired of hearing anti-Israel ideologues stating harshly that Israel should be eliminated and Jews returned to their proper roles as subjects of Muslim rule, and then, when labeled as the zealots they are, retorting by claiming that their opponents regard all legitimate criticism of Israel as being off limits. That's just dishonesty.
Columbia Professor Joseph Massad referred to the Jewish refugess from the Arab world as "the Arab Jews who were abducted into the Zionist project late in the game." Yes, I suppose that the Zionists were the ones responsible for the flight of 99.9% of the Arab world's Jews, from a population of about 1 million down to a few thousand today.
In the beginning of 2002, there was a lecture given on
campus by Joseph Massad. Called "On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy," the lecture was based on an article of the same title he published in New Politics (Winter 2002, Vol. VIII, Iss. 4, pg. 89). The article itself included passages like:
"...more recently, in late September 2001, and during an acrimonious
argument which erupted in a weekly Israeli cabinet meeting between Prime
Minister [Ariel Sharon] and his Foreign Minister [Shimon Peres], the
following interchange unfolded: Peres was warning Sharon that refusing
to heed American requests for a ceasefire would endanger Israeli
interests and "turn the U.S. against us." Sharon yelled at Peres in
exasperation: "every time we do something you tell me the Americans will
do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clearly,
don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people
control America and the Americans know it." This major ideological
convergence between anti-Semites and Jewish supremacists in Israel is
hardly surprising if one understood Zionism's project as nothing short
of turning the Jew into the anti-Semite."
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Sharon quotation later turned
out to be a fake that Massad quietly removed in a later version of this article
that he published in another journal. Massad also claims that Zionist
Jews conspired with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, based on the
writings of a fringe revisionist historian Lenni Brenner.
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