Joseph Massad loves the word "colonialism"

Joseph Massad, the anti-gay and virtually anti-semitic Columbia University professor whose hatred of Israel is legendary, has written another screed for Al Ahram that exposes his faulty methods of reasoning.

I wrote a critique of one of his previous articles in 2007 where he argued that Israel was inherently racist. Yet an analysis of that article showed that he never really defined what racism was - effectively, his argument was an argument by repetition. In that article, he used the word "racist" or "racism" over thirty times. It was nothing more than proof by assertion, with many straw-man arguments to buttress his nonexistent proof.

Now, he has a new article in Al Ahram, where he talks about Israel's "colonialism." In this case he must have shattered a record of overuse of a word, employing it over sixty times in the course of the article. Even more absurdly, he bases the article on this phrase: Colonialism is peace; anti-colonialism is war, as being Israel's policy - using variants of that phrase some seven times.

Again, it is a gigantic straw-man argument, because he again assumes that Israel is by definition colonialist and he never bothers to define exactly how. Just as he did with the racism charge, he states it as a fact first and his "proof" is just by repeating it ad nauseum.

Israel is not a colonialist state using any reasonable definition of colonialism. As I have written previously, Israel is by definition anti-colonialist:

Arabs feel that Zionism has the same effect as colonialism, therefore they conclude that the two are functionally identical.

However, Zionism is more like anti-colonialism: it is a national liberation movement, with the nation being the Jewish nation. Zionism's 's intent is not to rule over others nor to subjugate others. The vast majority of early Zionists wanted to re-build the Jewish national home in the same place that the original home was, the biblical Land of Israel. Judaism had maintained a strong emotional tie with ancient Israel; daily prayers long for a return to Zion;Jews annually mourn for the destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem; and not only Jews had maintained a continuous presence in their original homeland, but Jews had returned there in much smaller numbers throughout the ages.

Definitionally, they two aren't even close. The Zionists didn't want to offer allegiance to the British Empire, they wanted to be independent of it. The colonialist requirement for a "metropole", or mother country, doesn't exist in Zionism.

The Arab motivation to apply the colonialist label to Zionism purposefully ignores the definitions or goals of the Jewish national liberation movement and instead tries to fuzz the definition so that the metropole is the entire Western world. Israel indeed has the hallmarks of a modern, Western nation and more closely identifies with the West and the ideals of democracy and liberalism than with the Arab world. And in more recent decades, when the word "colonialism" has turned into a dirty word, the Arabs have been keen on using it as a weapon against Israel among the nations that have the most colonial guilt.

Massad and those like him know all of this, of course - but they love misusing the words "colonialism" and "racism" to score points with the West. It is a libel that gains currency by dint of repetition, not by the merits of the argument.

And no one knows more about repetition than Joseph Massad.

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Intimidation 101 - Massad at Columbia

A must read article from the Daniel Hertz at the Columbia Spectator:

As an engineering student at Columbia, the issue of bias in the classroom has been, for the most part, nonexistent—unfortunately, this is, in my experience, not the case for a significant number of classes in the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS, formerly MEALAC). Despite the constant reminders of professors’ one-sided agendas, I have always tried to take as many of these classes as possible. This semester, my curiosity for the subject led me to check out the class titled “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society,” taught by the renowned Joseph Massad. Although I entered the class with a hopeful outlook, it only took a handful of lectures for Massad to prove so many of his detractors right—he not only made his biases obvious but also embarrassed me in the process.
After attending a few lectures, I was still unsure as to whether I wanted to register and remain in the class. While Massad’s reputation had preceded him for the most part, his statements were often tainted with a hue of partiality, making me, and several other students, extremely uncomfortable. With a skillfully crafted curriculum and required reading list filled to the brim with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment, Massad had no intention of teaching history—he planned on rewriting it.
The course began with an extremely “brief” introduction to the history of the land. Starting in the 16th century and briskly moving into in the 19th and 20th centuries, Massad had completely avoided the historical context that would nullify his own agenda. During these first few lectures, there was absolutely no mention of the 3,000-year-old Jewish presence in Israel, which is backed by an exhaustive amount of both written and archeological proof. In his subsequent description of the founding of Tel Aviv, Israel’s major economic hub and richest city, Massad once again turned history upside down. Through the use of disturbing anecdotes and baseless accusations, Massad claimed that Tel Aviv was built through a process of Arab labor and expulsions by Jews, disregarding the plethora of proof that discredits these allegations, including dozens of photographs before the city’s founding and endless official British documentation describing the city as built and inhabited by only Jews.
Several weeks into the semester, Spectator interviewed me about Campus Media Watch, a Middle East watchdog group I founded at Columbia. After reading the article, I noticed I was incorrectly described as the sole contributor to one of the group’s innocuous blog posts regarding Massad. The following day, I attended class for what I thought would be a regular lesson. After a few minutes of friendly banter with Massad, I sat down as he brought order to the class. With the full attention of his students, Massad singled me out and asked several questions about my attendance. Although I tried to clarify that I was still unsure about registration, my explanation was useless­—Massad told me to leave his class immediately, explaining that I was in violation of school policy. Confused and embarrassed for being singled out in front of nearly 60 of my peers, I left the class with an uneasy feeling. Over the next few days, many of my former classmates approached me and described Massad’s disturbing reaction to the incident. Although I was not present at the time, I was told that Massad had gone on a “paranoid rant,” denouncing me as a “Jewish spy” for the same organization that “had tried to get him in trouble before.”
After reviewing school policy, it turns out that Massad had the right to ask me to leave the classroom for not being registered. He did not, however, have the right to deliberately humiliate me in front of my peers. Massad’s claim that I was spying on his class is just as bizarre as it is baseless. During the times I attended his lectures, I sat in the front row, making my presence even more obvious with the handful of questions I asked each class. By not confronting me about registration during the time we talked before class began, Massad had the clear intention of making an example of me. I had entered the class with an optimistic mind-set—I had left it embarrassed and shocked by the unprofessional behavior of an instructor at Columbia University. Massad has since filed a grievance against me, which was thankfully resolved, in yet another attempt to stifle free speech and intimidate those who do not blindly follow his teachings. After four years at Columbia, a university known to encourage free speech and debate, I have never encountered a professor who has fought so diligently to vilify and silence a student who he believed had done nothing more than discuss his class on a blog, which leads me to ask a simple question—what does professor Massad have to hide?
The author is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in computer science. He is a campus fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

I've discussed Massad a number of times before.

Massad's reading list can be seen here.

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Massad getting tenure at Columbia?

The New York Daily News writes why Joseph Massad should not get tenure at Columbia, and they choose an interesting angle:

To the board of trustees of Columbia University we recommend reading a book titled "Desiring Arabs," written by a faculty member who aspires to a tenured, lifetime appointment.

The volume should also be of interest to gay and lesbian activists because author Joseph Massad accuses them of being anti-Arab conspirators.

Massad is associate professor of Arab culture and politics. His abhorrent views about Jews are well known. Now, his book reveals a man whose professed scholarly expertise amounts to crackpot racialist paranoia.

In a central thesis, Massad targets a movement he calls the "Gay International," made up of "white male European or American gay scholars" and advocates. He accuses this Gay International of, in effect, creating homosexuality in the Arab world.

He writes: "It is the very discourse of the Gay International, which both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology."

Echoing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous claim on a visit to Columbia that Iran has no homosexuals, Massad attacks the Gay International for assuming that "homosexuals, gays and lesbians are a universal category that exists everywhere in the world."

Massad also asserts that the "white Western women's movement" had similarly tried to force gender equality onto "non-Western countries."

Columbia stands for respect regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation. Believing that the military's don't-ask-don't-tell policy discriminates against gays, the school bars ROTC from campus.

It is preposterous then that the university would consider tenure for a man who espouses that homosexuality may not be a global human phenomenon and argues based on race. Massad's scholarship is lunacy.

That he is personally unfit for tenure at Columbia has been clear. He has likened Jews to Nazis and written that they suffer from a kind of psychosis that makes Jews persecute Palestinians. His idea of academic freedom is throwing a student out of class for questioning his picture of Israel as the great Satan of the Middle East.

When last we wrote about Massad, it appeared Columbia President Lee Bollinger and the trustees had granted tenure. But that may not be so.

While the university refuses comment, it may not be too late for the board, composed of leaders like Chairman William Campbell, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and real estate magnate Philip Milstein, to do the right thing: Deny Massad tenure.

We took apart articles written by Massad here and here.

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Joseph Massad thinks the gay movement is colonialist

This article by James Kirchick is too funny:

Of all the absurd claims expressed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his recent address at Columbia University, his assertion that homosexuality does not exist in his country is the most ridiculous....

Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man--ensconced at Columbia University, no less--who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

...Massad's thesis rests largely on Queer Theory, a voguish academic theory from the 1990s that stipulates that homosexuality is merely a "social construction" and not an inherent state of being. Massad writes that, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating (emphasis mine)." Thus, not only are gay rights activists unleashing "epistemic... violence" on Arabs and Muslims who have same-sex relations by claiming them to be homosexual, they are responsible for the "political violence" of the regimes that oppress them. As one illustration of his thesis, Massad chooses the "Queen Boat" incident of May 11, 2001, when a horde of truncheon-wielding Egyptian police officers boarded a Nile River cruise known as the Queen Boat, a floating disco for gay men. Fifty-two men were arrested, and many of them were tortured and sexually humiliated in prison.

...Massad claims that those Arabs who do accept a Western-style homosexual identity "remain a miniscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics." He makes this sweeping assertion--upon which his entire, 418-page book is predicated--without any statistical evidence. Furthermore, he does not consider that the reason why Arab homosexuals may not "express a need for gay politics" might be because they would be killed if they did.

Yes, the academic Left's darling misozionistic Joseph Massad has opinions about gays that are decidedly anti-liberal, so much so that he's written an entire book denying that homosexual Arabs are...gay. They are just another Western imperialistic tool, you see.

The author of the piece above goes further today:

[The phrase “Muslim fags don’t exist”] is attributed to a neighbor of Azedine Berkane, a Muslim immigrant who, in 2002, stabbed Bertrand Delanoe, the gay mayor of Paris. The neighbor justified the attack on the grounds that because Islam is perfect, impure things --- like gays --- don't exist within it. Therefore, by this logic, it is appropriate to kill those who mock Allah's law.

The above quote could also be attributed to Joseph Massad, the very learned, very cosmopolitan, very scholarly professor of Arab politics at Columbia University. He was a hero of that campus's "progressive" community, who championed him as a victim of the right-wing Zionist campaign to "silence" criticism of Israel, during the controversies several years ago about the school's department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). As I've explained before, his latest opus -- the book that he hopes will get him tenure -- purports to expose gay rights activists as part of a dreaded, imperialist "Gay International," and, to my knowledge, might just be the most pernicious book ever published by a respectable academic press. The writer and political activist Wayne Besen aptly states that Massad is "mainstreaming murder" with his overwrought, cynical theories. One wonders if the ostensibly "progressive" students who rushed to Massad's defense several years ago when the evil Zionists attacked him will warm up to him now that he's written a volume attacking and justifying the oppression of one of the Left's protected victim classes: gays.

It appears that Massad's "scholarship" is not only suspect when talking about Israel.

Massad's tenure review is becoming much more interesting....

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Big Satan, little satan

My earlier posting about the critical review given to "The Israel Lobby" by left-wing writer Stephen Zunes gave him too much credit. His major points came directly from Joseph Massad, the infamous Columbia associate professor who is effectively anti-semitic.

It is instructive to look at the argument a little closer, seeing that it is from an intellectual Arab perspective that is being parroted by gullible or malicious left-wing useful idiots like Zunes.

Massad wrote his critique of the "Israel Lobby" paper last year for Al-Ahram:

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.

From the funhouse mirror perspective he is essentially right - the US policies towards the Arab world would hardly be different without the Israel lobby. His problem is not primarily with Israel but with America.

The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.

Massad is where leftist intellectualism and Muslim fundamentalism meet. The "national liberation" movements that he refers to must mean the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. There is no doubt that Egypt, Syria and the rest of the Arab countries are autocratic dictatorships with little regard to human rights, but there is equally no doubt that the alternatives would be worse from anyone who is not a Muslim terrorist or sympathizer.

The US supported the independence of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and all the others who emerged from the Ottoman Empire and colonial rule. Massad doesn't seem interested in Arab independence - he is interested in replacing these independent states with fundamentalist ones, all in the name of "liberation." He skillfully uses leftist talking points to help build an Arab world that is fully aligned with terror.

This following paragraph is particularly enlightening in more ways than one:

Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor. While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel.

Massad now gives a powerful argument for Israel as an effective ally of the US. He even understates Israel's ability to do anything unilaterally, making the assumption that both the Six Day War and the Osirak raid were really American initiatives carried out willingly by their Israeli puppets.

Ultimately, his hatred of America is far greater than his hatred of Israel (which is legendary.) Although it appears that he was born in the US he clearly considers the United States to be the real source of evil on the planet, with Israel just an appendage.

This is not particular to Massad - the entire Arab world looks to the United States as the "big Satan" even as they are happy to keep taking money and weapons from us. Israel is a lightning rod for their hate, and the fact that dhimmi Jews control what they consider Arab land is certainly a contributing factor for their misoziony, but if Israel didn't exist their hatred for America would not be abated at all.

It is interesting that leftists have adopted this anti-American, pro-terrorist line of thinking at the same time that the Arab intellectuals have started framing their arguments in leftist terms. It is also ironic that if the "liberation movements" that Massad champions would win control of their countries, Massad and his fellow Christian Arabs would be at the mercy of the jihadists.

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Answering Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad, an associate professor at Columbia University, wrote an article for Al-Ahram Weekly and reprinted at Electronic Intifada about Israel's "racism." Since he is far brighter than the typical Neanderthal that writes for EI it is worthwhile to review his argument and show that not only is Israel not racist, but his claims amount to a form of anti-Semitism.

His thesis is laid out in the first two paragraphs:

Israel's struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbours, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands its military occupies by force. Israel's desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive and deeply psychological. With few exceptions, prominent Zionist leaders since the inception of colonial Zionism have desired to establish peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs whose lands they slated for colonisation and settlement. The only thing Israel has asked for, and continues to ask for in order to end the state of war with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours, is that all recognise its right to be a racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere. The resistance that the Palestinian people and other Arabs have launched against Israel's right to be a racist state is what continues to stand between Israel and the peace for which it has struggled and to which it has been committed for decades. Indeed, this resistance is nothing less than the "New anti- Semitism".

Israel is willing to do anything to convince Palestinians and other Arabs of why it needs and deserves to have the right to be racist. Even at the level of theory, and before it began to realise itself on the ground, the Zionist colonial project sought different means by which it could convince the people whose lands it wanted to steal and against whom it wanted to discriminate to accept as understandable its need to be racist. All it required was that the Palestinians "recognise its right to exist" as a racist state. Military methods were by no means the only persuasive tools available; there were others, including economic and cultural incentives. Zionism from the start offered some Palestinians financial benefits if they would accede to its demand that it should have the right to be racist. Indeed, the State of Israel still does. Many Palestinian officials in the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organisation have been offered and have accepted numerous financial incentives to recognise this crucial Israeli need. Those among the Palestinians who regrettably continue to resist are being penalised for their intransigence by economic choking and starvation, supplemented by regular bombardment and raids, as well as international isolation. These persuasive methods, Israel hopes, will finally convince a recalcitrant population to recognise the dire need of Israel to be a racist state. After all, Israeli racism only manifests in its flag, its national anthem, and a bunch of laws that are necessary to safeguard Jewish privilege, including the Law of Return (1950), the Law of Absentee Property (1950), the Law of the State's Property (1951), the Law of Citizenship (1952), the Status Law (1952), the Israel Lands Administration Law (1960), the Construction and Building Law (1965), and the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Notice how Massad states Israel's racism as a fact, and only later does he make his argument. The argument is fundamentally that since Israel is meant to be a Jewish state it is by definition racist against non-Jews, and he brings as proof various laws and national symbols that mean to maintain Israel as a Jewish state.

The rest of his long and articulate article boils down to some strawman arguments as to why Israelis believe that they have the right to be racist.

Nevertheless, he does make his argument, and the crux of the issue is that it is impossible to have a Jewish state that is not racist, by definition.

First of all, the professor's use of the word "racist" is faulty and he knows this quite well. Racism is discrimination based on race, and of course neither Jews nor Arabs form a race. A good portion of Jews in Israel are descended from Arab Jews. The word is nothing but an inflammatory rhetorical device and his use of it is as absurd as those who redefine anti-Semitism as "hating Semites."

His argument would be much stronger, more accurate and not nearly as inflammatory if he used the word "discriminatory." But since that word can apply to pretty much every nation and clearly defined ethnic, racial, religious or gender group on the planet, he purposefully chooses to use a word that forces a more visceral reaction from the reader. Notice how his entire argument loses its punch if you substitute "discriminatory" for "racist" - he is not arguing based on facts, he is inciting. This is more than dishonest.

Back to his argument, framed correctly: is there discrimination in Israel against Arabs? Well, yes, there is. It is not news that there is a tension between the desire for a Jewish state and a desire for a state where all citizens are treated absolutely equally.

What Massad dismisses is the need for a Jewish state:

It is important to stress that this Zionist rationale is correct on all counts if one accepts the proposition of Jewish exceptionalism. Remember that Zionism and Israel are very careful not to generalise the principles that justify Israel's need to be racist but are rather vehement in upholding it as an exceptional principle. It is not that no other people has been oppressed historically, it is that Jews have been oppressed more. It is not that no other people's cultural and physical existence has been threatened; it is that the Jews' cultural and physical existence is threatened more. This quantitative equation is key to why the world, and especially Palestinians, should recognise that Israel needs and deserves to have the right to be a racist state. If the Palestinians, or anyone else, reject this, then they must be committed to the annihilation of the Jewish people physically and culturally, not to mention that they would be standing against the Judeo-Christian God.

Here is one of his straw man arguments. Do Jews deny the right for, say, Kurds or Armenians or any historically oppressed people to have their own state? His thesis of Jewish "exceptionalism" would imply that Jews want only an exclusive Jewish state and that no other people deserve one - a claim that is manifestly absurd.

To deny the right for Jews to have a state of their own, while (in this case, implicitly) allowing other peoples to have their own states, is simply a form of anti-semitism. One can argue that a Jewish state should not have been established in Palestine because of other issues - but this is not Massad's argument. He is the one who is suffering from exceptionalism, by denying only a single group of people the right to have a state where they suffer no discrimination.

If he argues just as strenuously against Saudi Arabia's discriminatory laws, or the fact that the Queen of England is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England or against the fact that many European flags have crosses - then he might not be guilty of the "racism" that he accuses Israel of. But as far as I can tell, his writings on the topic exclusively speak about the Jewish state, not any other group of people.

His answer to this is not an answer - it is simply the use of the word "racism" as a club in the way that he accuses Jews of using the term "anti-semitism:"

As for those among us who insist that no resolution will ever be possible before Israel revokes all its racist laws and does away with all its racist symbols, thus opening the way for a non-racist future for Palestinians and Jews in a decolonised bi-national state, Israel and its apologists have a ready-made response that has redefined the meaning of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is no longer the hatred of and discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group; in the age of Zionism, we are told, anti-Semitism has metamorphosed into something that is more insidious. Today, Israel and its Western defenders insist, genocidal anti-Semitism consists mainly of any attempt to take away and to refuse to uphold the absolute right of Israel to be a racist Jewish state.

His sleight of hand is in never defining "racism" in any meaningful way, and then affixing the reprehensible label exclusively on Jewish Zionists repeatedly. It is a classic example of Arab projection. Forgetting the fact that non-Jews in Israel have more rights than minorities in most nations do (and certainly in Israel's neighbors), ignoring the fact that Israeli Arabs have risen to unimaginable political heights - even without those arguments which he would probably dismiss as apologetics, the fundamental issue remains that Massad denies Jews the rights that he seems to allow all others.

And his repeated misuse of the word "racist" shows clearly that his argument is fundamentally an emotional one clothed in pseudo-rationalism, rather than based on any facts.

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More on Columbia professor's anti-Israel bias

Kudos the the New York Sun for bringing Massad's teachings to light outside his insular world where he can bully his students.

Bias of Massad Is Being Noted in His Classes
Crisis At Columbia

BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 7, 2005

Here's a quiz.

Israel is: a) a Jewish supremacist state, b) the worst human-rights abuser in the Middle East, c) a major factor preventing the democratization of the Arab region, or d) all of the above.

If you answered "d," you would fit right in at a core-curriculum course at Columbia University taught by an assistant professor of modern Arab politics, Joseph Massad, who is a rising star of the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Mr. Massad, author of the forthcoming book "The Persistence of the Palestinian Question," is best known as one of the Columbia scholars whose alleged mistreatment of Jewish students is at the center of a campus controversy that has attracted national attention from Jewish and academic leaders.

Though the dispute has focused on allegations of intimidation and harassment of students, the more common criticism brought up by students of Mr. Massad has to do not with the appropriateness of his conduct, but with the quality and content of his teaching.

Students of his say he is relentless in his condemnations of Israel and America, even in a course he taught in the fall called Topics in Asian Civilization, in which Israel, at least according to the syllabus, plays only a minor role.

Mr. Massad is not without his admirers. For some Columbia undergraduates, Mr. Massad's political convictions are his primary appeal.

"Many students take offense at the very quality that makes Massad such a brilliant academic and honest, effective teacher," one anonymous student posted on a Web site that collects reviews of Columbia professors and courses. "He neither claims nor supports purported academic 'objectivity.' He holds an intellectual conviction and offers rational, clear, and cogent arguments."

For other students, like sophomore Bari Weiss, taking one of his courses can be "suffocating."

In the fall semester, she was a student in Topics in Asian Civilization. Mr. Massad taught the second half and was responsible for covering a history of the Middle East from the beginnings of Islam to 20th-century Arab nationalism.

"The course was supposed to be all about the Middle East," Ms. Weiss said. "The amount of time he spent talking about Zionism or the Jewish nation or Jewish culture was inappropriate."

In previous semesters, Mr. Massad taught a seminar course on the Middle East conflict, but "under the duress of coercion and intimidation" he chose not to teach it this academic year, he wrote on his university Web site. One student who took the course in 2002, Deena Shanker, said Mr. Massad told her to leave the class if she persisted in denying that Israel committed atrocities against Palestinians. Mr. Massad, who refuses to speak to The New York Sun, has denied mistreating any students and has accused his critics of trying to censor his political views.

According to three students' course notes from Topics in Asian Civilization, including ones Ms. Weiss took, Mr. Massad in his lectures repeatedly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa, dismissed its legitimacy as a Jewish state, and almost never addressed human rights abuses in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The other two students whose notes were obtained by the Sun did not want their names to be used in this article.

"I was shocked knowing what was going on in the Middle East and the egregious human-rights violations that the professor either glossed over them or ignored them completely," Ms. Weiss, 20, said. She is one of the students who have pressed Columbia to investigate the conduct of professors in the Middle East studies department.

"In nearly all of his lectures, professor Massad found a way to denounce Israel and the West," Ms. Weiss, who received an "A" for the course, said.

"We were not presented with any material that argued that Zionism is not racist," she said.

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Anti-Israel and Anti-American Hate from Columbia University Professors

Hate 101

Climate of hate rocks Columbia University

Special Report

By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Many students say Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi, a department chairman, has bullied and threatened them for defending Israel.
Students Ariel Beery (speaking) and Noah Liben (r.) at press conference after showing of the film 'Columbia Unbecoming.'
In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."

The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."

It's a capital of "thuggery" - a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" - and it "must be dismantled."

A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.

Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high.

In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.

In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.

And the university itself is holding investigations into the alleged intimidation.

Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia's core curriculum.

The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be held accountable for "war crimes" for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001. He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin Laden in the attacks.

Dabashi did not return calls.

In September in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, he wrote, "What they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their soul."

After the showing of a student-made documentary about faculty bias and bullying that targets Jewish students, six or seven swastikas were found carved in a Butler Library bathroom last month.

Then after a screening of the film, "Columbia Unbecoming," produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel group in Boston, one student denounced another as a "Zionist fascist scum," witnesses said.

On Oct. 27, Columbia announced it would probe alleged intimidation and improve procedures for students to file grievances.

"Is the climate hostile to free expression?" asked Alan Brinkley, the university provost. "I don't believe it is, but we're investigating to find out."

But one student on College Walk described the campus as a "republic of fear." Another branded the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department the "department of dishonesty."

A third described how she was once "humiliated in front of an entire class."

Deena Shanker, a Mideast and Asian studies major, remains an admirer of the department. But she says she will never forget the day she asked Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, if Israel gives warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee.

"Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded," she said. "He told me if I was going to 'deny the atrocities' committed against the Palestinians, I could get out of his class."

"Professorial power is being abused," said Ariel Beery, a senior who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he's speaking only for himself.

"Students are being bullied because of their identities, ideologies, religions and national origins," Beery said.

Added Noah Liben, another senior, "Debate is being stifled. Students are being silenced in their own classrooms."

Said Brinkley: If a professor taught the "Earth was flat or there was no Holocaust," Columbia might intervene in the classroom. "But we don't tell faculty they can't express strong, or even offensive opinions."

Yet even some faculty members say they fear social ostracism and career consequences if they're viewed as too pro-Israel, and that many have been cowed or shamed into silence.

One apparently unafraid is Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew literature and holder of a prestigious endowed chair.

He said scores of Jewish students - about one a week - have trooped into his office to complain about bias in the classroom.

"Students tell me they've been browbeaten, humiliated and treated disrespectfully for daring to challenge the idea that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish nation," he said.

"They say they've been told Israeli soldiers routinely rape Palestinian women and commit other atrocities, and that Zionism is racism and the root of all evil."

One yardstick of the anti-Israel sentiment among professors, critics say, is the 106 faculty signatures on a petition last year that called for Columbia to sell its holdings in all firms that conduct business with Israel's military.

Noting that the divestment campaign compared Israel to South Africa during the apartheid era, Columbia President Lee Bollinger termed it "grotesque and offensive."

That didn't stop 12 Mideast and Asian studies professors - almost half the department - and 21 anthropology teachers from signing on, a review of the petition shows.

To identify the Columbia faculty with the most strongly anti-Israel views, The News spoke to numerous teachers and students, including some who took their courses; reviewed interviews and published works, and examined Web sites that report their public speeches and statements, including the online archives of the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper.

Their views could be dismissed as academic fodder if they weren't so incendiary.

Columbia's firebrands

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."

The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."

# Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him "the most hated professor in America."

At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a "million Mogadishus," referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993.

"U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," he added.

De Genova has also said, "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. ... Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust."

De Genova didn't return calls.

# Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and comparative literature.

In a speech backing divestment, he said, "The Israeli government has no right to the sufferings of the Holocaust."

Elaborating, Robbins told The News he believes Israel has a right to exist, but he thinks the country has "betrayed the memory of the Holocaust."

# Joseph Massad, who is a tenure-track professor of Arab politics. Students and faculty interviewed by The News consistently claimed that the Jordanian-born Palestinian is the most controversial, and vitriolic, professor on campus.

"How many Palestinians have you killed?" he allegedly asked one student, Tomy Schoenfeld, an Israeli military veteran, and then refused to answer his questions.

To Massad, CNN star Wolf Blitzer is "Ze'ev Blitzer," which is the byline Blitzer used in the 1980s, when he wrote for Hebrew papers but hasn't used since.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can be likened to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, he once declared.

"The Jews are not a nation," he said in one speech. "The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist."

Massad didn't return several calls. On his Web site, he says he's a victim of a "witch hunt" by "pro-Israel groups" and their "propaganda machine."

# George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science. His classroom rants against the West are legendary, students have claimed.

One student says his "Islam & Western Science" class could be called "Why the West is Evil." Another writes that his "Intro to Islamic Civilization" often serves as a forum to "rail against evil America."

A recent graduate, Lindsay Shrier, said Saliba told her, "You have no claim to the land of Israel ... no voice in this debate. You have green eyes, you're not a true Semite. I have brown eyes, I'm a true Semite."

Saliba did not return calls.

# Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies. He's the academic heir to the late Said, a professor who famously threw a stone from Lebanon at an Israeli guard booth.

Columbia initially refused to say how the chair was funded. But The United Arab Emirates, which denies the Holocaust on state TV channels, is reported to have provided $200,000.

When Palestinians in a Ramallah police station lynched two Israeli reservists in 2000 - throwing one body out a window and proudly displaying bloodstained hands - the professor attacked the media, not the killers.

He complained about "inflammatory headlines" in a Chicago Sun-Times story and called the paper's then-owner, Conrad Black, who also owned the Jerusalem Post, "the most extreme Zionist in public life."

Reached at Columbia, Khalidi declined to comment on specifics.

"As somebody who has a body of work, written six books and won many awards, the only fair thing to do is look at the entire body of work, not take quotes out of context," he said.

# Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of anthropology, romanticizes Birzeit University in the West Bank as a "liberal arts college dedicated to teaching and research in the same spirit as U.S. colleges."

But it is well-established that Birzeit also is the campus where Hamas openly recruits suicide bombers, stone-throwers and gunmen.

As in her published works, Abu-Lughod gave a carefully nuanced response when reached Friday by The News:

"The CIA has historically recruited at Columbia, but that's not the mission of Columbia. The mission of Birzeit is to educate students, and they're working under very difficult circumstances to do that."

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Columbia Abuzz Over Underground Film Showing Academic Bias Against Israel

BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 20, 2004

At a history class, a professor mockingly tells a female Jewish student she cannot possibly have ancestral ties to Israel because her eyes are green.

During a lecture, a professor of Arab politics refuses to answer a question from an Israeli student and military veteran but instead asks the student, "How many Palestinians have you killed?"

At a student meeting on the topic of divestment from Israel, a Jewish student is singled out as responsible for death of Palestinian Arabs.

Those scenes are described by current and former students interviewed for an underground documentary that is causing a frisson of concern to ripple through the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, where the incidents took place.

The film, about anti-Israel sentiment at the school, has not yet been released to the public, but it has been screened for a number of top officials of Columbia, and talk of its impact is spreading rapidly on a campus where some students have complained of anti-Israel bias among faculty members.

"The movie is shocking," one Columbia senior, Ariel Beery, said.

"It is shocking to see blatant use of racial stereotypes by professors and intimidation tactics by professors in order to push a distinct ideological line on the curriculum," Mr. Beery, who was interviewed for the film, said.

The film is the creation of the David Project, a 2-year-old group based in Boston that advocates for Israel and is led by the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, Charles Jacobs. The David Project, which is refusing to make the film public, has screened it for Barnard College's president, Judith Shapiro, and Columbia's provost, Alan Brinkley, according to sources.

Neither Ms. Shapiro nor Mr. Brinkley would return calls seeking comment about the film, though at a meeting in Washington this week with women active in Jewish charitable work the Barnard president is said to have spoken of how emotionally affected she was by the film.

With versions at 11 minutes and 25 minutes in playing time, the film consists of interviews with several students who contend that they have felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point of view in classrooms.

One of the scholars discussed most in the film, according to a person who has seen the film, is Joseph Massad, a non-tenured professor of modern Arab politics, who is teaching a course about Middle East nationalism this fall. Mr. Massad, a professor at Columbia's department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures, has likened Israel to Nazi Germany and has said Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish state.

In the film, a former Columbia undergraduate, Tomy Schoenfeld, recalls attending a lecture about the Middle East conflict given by Mr. Massad in spring 2001. At the end of the lecture, Mr. Schoenfeld prefaced a question to the professor by informing Mr. Massad that he was Israeli, Mr. Schoenfeld told The New York Sun. "Before I could continue, he stopped me and said, 'Did you serve in the military?'" Mr. Schoenfeld, who served in the Israeli Air Force between 1996 and 1999, recalled. He said that he told Mr. Massad he had served in the military and that Mr. Massad asked him how many Palestinians he had killed. When Mr. Schoenfeld refused to answer, Mr. Massad said he wouldn't allow him to ask his question.

Mr. Massad did not return phone calls for comment yesterday. Mr. Schoenfeld told the Sun that his encounter with Mr. Massad was not representative of his dealings with Columbia professors and that the Middle East-Asian department is "usually balanced."

Mr. Beery, the senior at the school, told the Sun that anti-Israel bias is prevalent in the department and said the documentary film demonstrates how many students at Columbia have been affected by it.

"You would be surprised," Mr. Beery said, "to find the number of students who were willing to stand up and be counted as members of the student body who oppose the intimidation of students in the classroom, especially on topics related to the Middle East."

In 2003, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, convened a committee of six Columbia professors to investigate the possibility of the school's declaring stricter boundaries between academic expression and political activism. But the credibility of the investigation came into doubt among those following the issue seriously when Mr. Bollinger told the New York Daily News that the committee found no claims or evidence of bias or intimidation in the classroom.

Mr. Beery said the committee did not look hard enough for bias and said Jewish students at Columbia have no avenue for pressing complaints about anti-Israel prejudice among faculty members.

"Because Jews are seen as this overrepresented ethnic group and not prone to protests, they sweep it under the rug," he said.

Columbia is looking to raise money for an endowed professorship in Israeli studies to make up for what Mr. Bollinger has said is lack of contemporary Israel scholarship at the school.

That effort comes at a time when the university is under a cloud for having accepted money from the United Arab Emirates, one of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East and a country hostile to Jews and Israel, to help finance a chair named for the late professor Edward Said, who was a writer and anti-Israel Palestinian activist. Harvard University returned money from the UAE after complaints were raised about the propriety of taking money from that source.

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