Anti-Israel Professor Given Tenure at Columbia

Columbia gives tenure to controversial Professor, Joseph Massad


Today’s New York Post had this disquieting revelation by columnist Jacob Gershman: Columbia University has granted tenure to notorious Israel and gay bashing, Professor Joseph Massad. Massad was a central figure in the David project documentary, “Columbia Unbecoming” that roiled the Morningside Heights campus in 2005 and 2006. The film portrayed allegations by Columbia students about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel statements by faculty in the Middle East Arts Language and Culture (MEALAC) program . In the film a former IDF soldier and Columbia Student relates how he was rebuked by Massad and questioned, “ how many Palestinians did he kill.?”

Massad’s appointment is not the first Columbia University tenure controversy. Last year we had another event, the tenure of Nadia Abu el Haj of the anthropology faculty at Barnard College. Abu El Haj had published a controversial book denying the ancient Jewish heritage and provenance of Israel. That was preceded by the appointment in 2005 of Rashid Khalidi to the Edward Said Chair of Middle East History endowed with significant Saudi money. Khalidi was a colleague of President Obama in his days as a junior Illinois Senator, when they were both on the faculty at the University of Chicago.

Massad, as the Gershman New York Post column points out, has bizarre views on Israel and gays:

Columbia's process for reviewing tenure candidates is as rigorous as any Ivy League school's. Ordinarily, an academic of Massad's caliber would be bounced from Morningside Heights. And in fact, the system did work -- it denied Massad tenure two years ago.

But now the school's academic standards have succumbed to ideological tensions and campus politics -- in what appears to be a remarkable manipulation of the tenure process and a breach of fiduciary trust.

First, a little background on Massad.

A Christian secularist of Palestinian-Arab descent, Massad has dedicated his academic career primarily to encouraging the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Criticism of Israel is far from unusual in his field, but Massad goes much further, taking arguments to bizarre ends. "The ultimate achievement of Israel," he writes, is "the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew." In a book, he rails against the "Zionist theft of Palestinian Arab food (e.g., hummus, falafel)."

In a recent work, "Desiring Arabs," Massad claimed to expose yet another plot against the Muslim world -- the "Gay International." He describes how a vast conspiracy of gay activists descended on Arab countries and endangered the lives of "practitioners of same-sex contact" by transforming them into "subjects who identify as 'homosexual' and 'gay.' "

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Interestingly such homophobic proclamations would ordinarily make one a pariah amongst leftist academia. But because Massad is an Arab who promotes the destuction of Israel, his anti-gay beliefs are just fine with them or to be ignored.