In class and in public, Massad has argued that Israel massacred Palestinians at Jenin in 2002. A UN investigation found no evidence of a massacre at Jenin. Writing in the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram, he suggested that Israel poisoned Yasser Arafat. He cited no evidence. In reality, Israel provided for Arafat's medical evacuation to France. Massad claims "Jewish colonists [in Israel] were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews." Note the false equivalency between British police and Jewish residents and the Nazis. ...His published work suggests that his heart lies with the terrorists of Hamas. In March, he mourned the "economic choking and starvation" caused by the "international isolation" of Hamas. Last November, he wrote that Hamas "can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it." ...The only book on Israel that he assigned in his introductory class was "Israel, a Colonial Settler State?" by a French Marxist scholar, Maxime Rodinson. It concludes, "Jews have as much right to Israel as Arabs have to Spain."
Three students recently came forward to say that Massad "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."Massad regularly told his students that "Zionism got its name from the Hebrew slang for penis, Zayin." While this is plainly untrue, is this the language of a Columbia professor?
While suspending the status of European Jews as holocaust survivors, these European intellectuals fail to see that much of Zionist colonialism began half a century before the holocaust and that Jewish colonists were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews. 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.
Massad is somewhat terminologically sloppy when he describes Zionist anti-Diasporatism as anti-Semitic, but the attitudes of anti-Semites and anti-Diasporatists were for the most part completely congruent and indistinguishable.The Special Night Squads (SNS) were a joint British-Jewish force consisting of British soldiers and Jewish Settlement Police, established by Charles Orde Wingate in Palestine in 1936, during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt.
Wingate hand-picked his men, among them Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, from the ranks of the Notrim and trained them to form mobile ambushes. As practical support from the British was minimal Wingate collaborated illegally with the Haganah, reinforcing his unit with FOSH regulars.
The force was highly successful in bringing attacks by Arab guerillas on the pipeline of the Iraqi Petroleum Company to a halt. However, the squads were known for their ruthless efficiency and brutal methods. According to Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld their training included "... how to kill without compunction, how to interrogate prisoners by shooting every tenth man to make the rest talk; and how to deter future terrorists by pushing the heads of captured ones into pools of oil and then freeing them to tell the story".[1]
Yoram Kaniuk writes:
The operations came more frequently and became more ruthless. The Arabs complained to the British about Wingate's brutality and harsh punitive methods. Even members of the field squads complained... that during the raids on Bedouin encampments Wingate would behave with extreme viciousness and fire mercilessly. Wingate believed in the principle of surprise in punishment, which was designed to confine the gangs to their villages. More than once he had lined rioters up in a row and shot them in cold blood. Wingate did not try to justify himself; weapons and war cannot be pure.[2]
The British viewed Wingate as a security risk and the SNS were disbanded in 1938. Wingate was posted out of the country and his passport was stamped "NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER PALESTINE".[3]
Field Marshall Montgomery, who as commander of northern Palestine had authorised the SNS, told Dayan in 1966 that he considered Wingate to have "been mentally unbalanced and that the best thing he ever did was to get killed in a plane crash in 1944".[4]
The Special Night Squads came to be viewed as the British army's first special forces and the forerunners of the Special Air Service regiments.[5]
During the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which preceded the extermination of European Jews. This information was also available to Noah in his readings, had he chosen to consult them. Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.
Americans often confuse the historical German Nazis with the Hollywood depiction of German Nazis as absolute evil. Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling point out some of the complexity of the phenomenon of German Nazism in The Nazi Impact on a German Village (p 135).
Until 1938 Jewish families in Lahr county [Germany] believed themselves to be well-integrated into their communities. In Lahr city they received permission to form an NSDAP "Party of Jewish Youth" in 1935, and in Offenburg Jewish founded their own group of patriotic War Veterans.
Since the 1960s, when Georges Tamarin documented the effect of Israeli Bible education on the attitudes of Israeli Jewish 4th through 8th graders, sociological studies have demonstrated that an ever increasing percentage of Israeli Jewish citizens would commit genocide against non-Jews. If anything, the social-political system that the State of Israel has created is worse than Apartheid as Desmond Tutu and other victims of Apartheid have occasionally noted.
Below is a videoclip in which Jerusalem Center for Communications and Advocacy Training (JCCAT) founder and director David Olesker, who appears to have a fondness for phallus-related puns, comments on the "Penis" Lecture, which Professor Massad is alleged to have given as part of one of his Columbia courses.
Noah [Liben] seems not to have done his reading during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew the word "zayin" means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli militarized masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned material, mistook the pronunciation of "zayin" as "Zion," pronounced in Hebrew "tziyon."
HATEMONGER U? COLUMBIA MAY TENURE EXTREMISTBy RICHARD MINITER
Why does this ivory-tower controversy matter? After 9/11, we simply can't leave Middle East studies to partisans. We need genuine scholars to train future diplomats, analysts and officers. The government and the press rely on professors to explain events in the Arab world. Of course, Columbia has long been home to anti-Israel scholars. Edward Said, who taught there until his death in 2003, spent more time worrying about "US imperialism" and "Zionism" than on injustices such as terrorism and the oppression of women and religious minorities in Arab societies. Most recently, Columbia's sister school, Barnard, tenured Nadia Abu El-Haj, who called the ancient Jewish kingdoms of David and Solomon "a modern nation's [ongoing] myth . . . " Why add one more? Some Internet rumors claim Massad was denied tenure, but Columbia sources say that the process is ongoing; a spokesman insists the details are "confidential." The final decision is due soon. Why shouldn't Massad get tenure - lifelong job security? His critics cite three broad flaws that, taken together, could undermine Columbia's reputation: Misstatement of facts: These are not simple errors; when they've been called to his attention, he has brushed them aside or unconvincingly denied making the statement.
And, of course, there is no evidence of organized Jewish involvement. Indeed, the British also took armed action against the Jews. Mistreating students: Over the last few years, a number of students have come forward to talk about how Massad treated them in the classroom. One is Deena Shanker, who attended Massad's course in 2002. She said that Massad shouted her down and ordered her to leave his class if she kept denying that Israel committed atrocities. Massad denied her account and said a faculty panel exonerated him. In fact, the panel's published report found him guilty. The relevant passage: "Upon extensive deliberation, the committee finds it credible that Professor Massad became angered at a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved, and that he responded heatedly. While we have no reason to believe that Professor Massad intended to expel Ms. Shanker from the classroom [she did not, in fact, leave the class], his rhetorical response to her query exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism. "Angry criticism directed at a student in class because she disagrees, or appears to disagree, with a faculty member on a matter of substance is not consistent with the obligation 'to show respect for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from their own,' to exercise 'responsible self-discipline' and 'to demonstrate appropriate restraint.' " Why grant tenure to a professor who has an adversarial relationship with his students? A non-scholarly temperament: Massad often seems far more a propagandist than an impartial analyst.
And, yes, he is critical of Palestinians who criticize Hamas.
To students, Massad often seems less like a scholar than a prosecutor presenting his case. Three students recently came forward to say that Massad "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." Massad regularly told his students that "Zionism got its name from the Hebrew slang for penis, Zayin." While this is plainly untrue, is this the language of a Columbia professor? If he's awarded tenure, Massad will be at Columbia for life. He will have no incentive to become dispassionate - and every incentive to become even more of an activist. Can't Columbia do better? Richard Miniter is a bestselling author and fellow at the Hudson Institute. |
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6 comments:
Minter’s article said
“Why does this ivory-tower controversy matter? After 9/11, we simply can't leave Middle East studies to partisans.”
Oh, sure! As if it is not already in the hands of partisans. As if the information Americans have had shoved down their throats about the Middle East for the last fifty years by the American media, including since 9/11, hasn’t been partisan to the max.
Just one of many examples, during the many years when it was America’s policy that we could not even talk to the PLO because they were “terrorists”, I don’t think I ever once heard or read in the mass media that Israel was founded by terrorists, and that many still in high office in Israel at that time had themselves committed terrorists acts. I guess it is exactly that sort of censorship of highly relevant information that the Zionists call non-partisan.
God, these Zionist hypocrites have chutzpah!
If only we could have equality between gentiles and Jews, then Zionism would be recognized for what it is -- an ideology of discrimination – of discrimination against people based on whether or not they are Jewish – a type of discrimination we gentiles are told is a crime against humanity.
I must confess I find it hard to feel all that much sympathy for Massad. He was quick to succumb to Jewish power when he denounced Holocaust revisionists as effectively being Zionists. Now he feels the lash of that same power. It was the same with Finkelstein
I have some of the same issues with him, for I have debated him on issues of Jewish history and with regard to the Israel Lobby.
Rashid Khalidi has similar problems as well, for he denies that Zionism is racist despite clear statements of primary Zionist ideologists and many similar affirmations from later Zionist writers.
Few Palestinian, Arab or Muslim scholars have been willing to learn much about Central and Eastern European history and culture.
I suspect fear that they might be forced to sympathize with Zionism or that they might be indoctrinated with false propaganda.
They would be far more effective and less susceptible to serving Zionist interests if they made the effort and just maintained the sort of skepticism with which they might read Zionist-POV analysis of Middle East politics and history.
I give Nadia Abu el Haj a great deal of credit for actually putting in the effort to try to understand European Jewish history and culture.
I take a simpler view. Any Palestinian who wants to make it in the west (especially in academia) is obliged, pretty much by definition, to go along with the Jewish discourse. One who managed to somehow go along with things but still maintain his integrity was Edward Said. I suspect he did it more by what he didn't say than what he did.
Perhaps he did not have the time to learn Russian, but Said's thesis on Orientalism would have been far stronger if he had had familiarity with Russian Orientalist scholarship.
Possibly because of his target audience, Said uses a strongly Western secular framework for his discussion of Orientalism and the question of Palestine, but I have the impression that he personally did not have much sympathy for Islam. This implicit attitude may have rendered him more acceptable to Western academia.
I'm planning to go to the Joseph Massad talk at Harvard today (at 4 in the Taubman building).
Joachim, thanks for sending out so much of your writing lately. I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it. I will try to read more of your stuff this week and comment on it.
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