Joseph Massad's insane antisemitic curriculum

StopAntisemitism received these photos of material that Joseph Massad is teaching in his Columbia University "Palestinian/Israeli Conflict" course. It came from a student taking the course.

Ths comes from "Holy land, hollow jubilee: God, justice and the Palestinians" which is a collection of speeches given at the1998 Sabeel International Conference. Sabeel is the antisemitic Palestinian Christian organization that preaches Christian supersessionism. The co-editor of the book, Naim Ateek, is an antisemite. 

The quote here is undeniably antisemitic, saying that Jews collaborated in the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to save Jewish lives, Nazis were trying to destroy Jewish lives. If this isn't antisemitic, nothing is.

And this is in a curriculum of a Columbia University professor.

This is from an out of print book published in 1967 before the Six Day War. Commentary wrote a review:

Anyone who has ever perused a John Birch Society pamphlet about the Communist Conspiracy will experience a similar sensation on reading this little book about Israel and Zionism. An impressive mass of data and facts has been assembled; historical perspectives have been traced; all the right quotations have been adduced; a good deal of the argument even manages to make sense; yet the outcome corresponds to a reality that exists solely in the mind of the author.

The point of the book is that Israel acted in a racist way towards its Mizrahi citizens. This is true - but this was also 54 years ago. The author of the book says that Israel should become more Oriental and integrate more fully into the Middle Eastern culture in order to have a chance to make peace with Arabs, and what has happened since then is that the Arab nations have (slowly) become more Westernized - and many of them have made peace with Israel.

The irony is that every time Israel adopts Middle East culture, whether it is cuisine or dance or dress or music, people like Joseph Massad freak out and say that Israel is stealing it. 

Massad has a history of antisemitic rhetoric. The late Petra Maquardt-Bigman once made a quiz to see if anyone can distinguish between phrases written by Massad and the far right antisemites at Stormfront. He pushes the discredited Khazar theory. Oh, and he's a homophobe. 

The question isn't whether Massad is an antisemite who is teaching antisemitism to his students. The question is why Columbia allows a professor to spew hate disguised as pseudo-academia.

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