Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad

Jumping through Israel Advocacy Hoops

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On November 20, 2007, Richard Miniter, who is a fellow at the Neocon Hudson Institute, published an attack on Columbia Professor Joseph Massad in the New York Post.  The article's title is "Hate Monger U? Columbia May Tenure Extremist." (See HATEMONGER U?, which is appended below.) Miniter regurgitates material that individual and organizational Israel advocates like the David Project and StandWithUs have crafted as part of an organized campaign or conspiracy to drive critics of Zionism or of Israel out of US academia.

 

Israel advocacy organizations have extensively used Jewish or Zionist media gatekeepers and facilitators in a coordinated effort to place articles and reports like Miniter's column in journals and news broadcasts for the purpose of defaming Arab and Muslim Americans. Jewish government officials like Abigail Thernstrom of the US Commission on Civil Rights have perverted their mandates in order to provide hate-mongers like David Project President Charles Jacobs with the highest political access in Washington. (See Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Civil Rights for Some Americans and the paragraph excerpted below from Forward 50.)

 

Other academics targeted for similar slander and libel have included Professors Rashid Khalidi, Georges Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, Nadia Abu el Haj, and Wadie Said. Zionist and Jewish extremists like Daniel Pipes, who heads CampusWatch and who frequently collaborates with the David Project and StandWithUS, have also targeted primary and secondary school personnel like Debby al-Montaser through organizations like the Stop-the-Madrassa "Community Coalition," of whose national advisory board Daniel Pipes is a member.

 

A cabal consisting of Stop-the-Madrassa, NY media corporations, NY city politicians, and various Zionist or Jewish-dominated organizations like the United Federation of Teachers used lies, incitement and intimidation to drive al-Montaser from her position as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in a probable violation of US Code 18.241 "Conspiracy Against Rights" (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/241.html).

 

In his NY Post article, Miniter follows a similar script in making the following false or misleading accusations, which mostly come from David Project literature and from that organization's film entitled Columbia Unbecoming.

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."

In addition, Miniter parrots the following anti-Massad talking points.

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?

The State of Israel prevented the UN from investigating Israeli Defense Force actions at Jenin. 

 

Israeli Mossad agents attempted to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in 1997. Because there is no particular reason to believe that the Israeli government would have any qualms about poisoning any Palestinian or non-Jewish leader under circumstances that would benefit the State of Israel, Professor Massad was hardly unreasonable when he suggested in Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Israel's right to be racist that Israeli operatives might have poisoned Arafat.

 

Professor Massad wrote the following in Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

Numerous mainstream histories of Zionism and the Zionist colony in British Mandatory Palestine outline precisely the same facts even if they might offer alternative interpretations. Here is the Wikipedia description of Jewish Special Night Squads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Night_Squads) of the 1930s.

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]

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.

 

At the webpage MEALAC | Joseph Massad posts a long reply to the calumnies of the David Project and other Israel advocates.  Massad's response contains the following statement.

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.

Massad's unwillingness either to identify Zionism as a member of the same class of extremist politicized ethnic fundamentalisms as German Nazism and the Polish Endeks or to describe the clear and obvious similarities of Zionist Israel and Nazi Germany before the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union can only result from Zionist intimidation or from lack of expertise in modern Central and Eastern European Jewish and non-Jewish history. 

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.

In contrast, the Palestinian family that considers itself well-integrated into Zionist Israeli society is extremely rare and probably non-existent while a "Party of Palestinian Youth" as an adjunct of a Zionist political party is practically inconceivable. 

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.

 

One could wish that Professor Massad had a better command of German and Jewish history, but in an American political environment characterized by a relentless effort to enforce a false consensus on the equivalence of Israeli and US interests by means of scare-mongering, courageous academics like Professor Massad and the late French Jewish scholar Maxine Rodinson, who provide alternative interpretations of the conflict over Palestine, are the last hope for democracy.

 

In his book, Rodinson was making a point that would have been obvious if Zionists had not so poisoned American discourse over Palestine. Believing that German Jews and Eastern European Jews have the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of the etymological relationship between "Jew" and "Judea" is so extreme that it is psychotic.  The idea is logically equivalent to believing that the Irish, who are mostly Roman Catholic, would have the right to steal and ethnically cleanse the city of Rome because of the morphological connection between "Roman" and "Rome."

 

Miniter's last accusation against Professor Massad appears to come from the David Project film Columbia Unbecoming (at least according to Solomonia, http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2007/11/professor-massads-penis-lecture-at-colum/).

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.

 

 
watch video

In his defense against this accusation, Professor Massad writes the following.

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."

According to http://www.spiroark.org/advocatingforisrae/4517978001, "David Olesker was born in Britain in 1957. He studied at Sunderland Polytechnic College and, after Aliya in 1982, at Yeshivah Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem." A yeshivah is a Jewish seminary. Ohr Somayach is a yeshivah for baalei teshuvah (returnees to Jewish religion -- hozrim bitshuvah is probably a better term).  Noah Weinberg, Mendel Weinbach and Nota Schiller founded Ohr Somayach. Noah Weinberg left to create the Aish haTorah Yeshivah while Weinbach and Schiller continued to run Ohr Somayach.  Aish haTorah is the Jewish face of HonestReporting. 

 

In terms of politics, the principals associated with these organizations tend to identify less with the religious nationalist (mizrahi) Zionism of the Israeli Mafdal party and more with the occult nationalist Zionism of HaRav Avraham Yitzhak Kook and his son or with an extreme antigoyism (anti-Gentilism) that enables the members of the organizations to support a racist Jewish colony in Palestine without contamination by secular Zionist ideas.

 

Although occult nationalist or Kookian Zionists like Jack Abramoff or Michael Medved disdain secular Zionism even in the Jabotinskian form that characterizes Neocons, Kookians (or Kooks as Noam Chomsky prefers to call them) concede that secular Zionists fulfill important religious commandments despite themselves. Extremist antigoyish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists like the Lubovitcher Hasidim, who perceive the State of Israel as an opportunity to bring more Jews back to Judaism, abominate secular Zionism even as they profess to love secular Zionists as Jews.

 

In the early 1980s, a pun popular among American hozrim bitshuvah in Kookian or extremist antigoyist educational programs used the identical pronunciations of the American Yeshivish word zayin (penis) with an un-Israeli accent on first syllable and the standard English noun Zion from which the term Zionist is derived to suggest that secular Zionism was Penisism and that secular Zionists were degenerate immoral sexually obsessed Penisists.

 

While the pun is inadvertently reminiscent of the obsession of Zionist thinkers like Herzl and Nordau with proving Jewish masculinity in the face of common European Jewish and non-Jewish assumptions of Jewish effeminacy (see Smart Jews by Sander Gilman, pp. 103-143), I doubt that any of the Yeshivah students, who made the joke, were actually aware of the fin de siècle Jewish sexual inferiority complex that played such an important role in early Zionist thinking.

 

I heard the pun the New Haven, CT, Monsey, NY, and Chicago, IL, where Ohr Somayach often ran recruitment programs. This play on words almost certainly traveled to the Ohr Somayach Yeshivah in Jerusalem, where David Olesker would have heard it.

 

Charles Jacobs, David Project Director Ralph Avi Goldwasser and other Israel advocates associated with producing Columbia Unbecoming probably got a good laugh by making Columbia faculty and administrators like President Lee Bollinger, whom they almost certainly viewed as a goyisher kop (stupid non-Jew), jump through hoops over an old yeshivah joke.

 

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HATEMONGER U? COLUMBIA MAY TENURE EXTREMIST By RICHARD MINITER November 20, 2007 -- COLUMBIA University is about to give tenure to an anti-Israel extremist. Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, has a history of shouting down his students. He compares Jews to Nazis and bizarrely accuses Israel of "anti-Semitism" for its treatment of the Palestinians. (Massad is a Palestinian.) In a course description, he describes his class on Israeli-Arab relations as "not balanced." 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. 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. 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. 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." And, yes, he is critical of Palestinians who criticize Hamas. 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." 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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From http://www.forward.com/forward-50/

 

Charles Jacobs and Roz Rothstein

 

When it comes to defending Israel in the media, on campus and in the streets, America's long-established Jewish groups no longer have a monopoly. Increasingly, the agenda is set by scrappy startups like Boston's The David Project and the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs ― often dragging the rest of the community along behind them. StandWithUs was founded in 2001 by a group of activists assembled by Roz Rothstein, a family therapist driven by what she saw as the larger community's anemic response to growing anti-Israel activism. The David Project was launched the following year by Charles Jacobs, co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which targeted slavery in Sudan. Neither Rothstein, 55, nor Jacobs, 63, shies from confrontation. The David Project captured headlines in 2003 with a documentary alleging faculty intimidation of pro-Israel students at Columbia University. More recently, it waged a high-profile legal and media battle with the Islamic Society of Boston over its controversial associates and its plans for a new mosque. This summer, StandWithUs took the lead in responding to a planned pro-Palestinian rally in Washington. While the D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council opted to ignore the demonstration (which was a dud in the end), StandWithUs organized a counter-protest and answered pro-Palestinian ads on Washington's subway system with ads of its own. Both groups have focused on campus activism, multimedia projects, leadership training and curriculum development. The courses Rothstein and Jacobs charted have proven popular with action-hungry donors: Their two startups already boast multimillion-dollar budgets and sizable staffs.

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