What university would allow an American neo-Nazi like David Duke to teach a course on Jewish history?
What university would hire a Ku Klux Klan bigot to deliver a lecture on the African American experience in the United States?
None, it is safe to say.
Yet disappointingly enough, Columbia University has deviated from that sacred principle.
This respected Ivy League institution in New York City has breached the boundary of fairness by allowing a rabidly anti-Israel professor to continue teaching an undergraduate course dealing with Zionism, the movement dedicated to achieving Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
Joseph Masssad, a Palestinian Christian who lauded Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, has been teaching “History of the Jewish Enlightenment in 19th Century Europe and the Development of Zionism” since 2016. His class draws 30 to 60 students each semester.
A person as inherently hostile to Zionism as Massad should not be teaching this course. One can only imagine how he has twisted and distorted the Zionist narrative. No surprise here. A professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, he regards Zionism as a racist creed and Israel as a racist state.
His hostile attitude to Israel manifested itself clearly a day after Hamas’ mass casualty atrocity, the worst single attack against Jews since the Holocaust. As Massad wrote, “Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”
He added, “The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers.
“No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.”
The October 7 attack, he noted, has “both shaken Israeli society and struck Palestinians and Arabs as incredible.”
Apart from hailing it as an heroic operation, he has assiduously promoted the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, whose chief objective is Israel’s dismantlement as a Jewish state grounded in Zionist principles.
During congressional hearings last year regarding the emergence of Palestinian encampments at American universities and the outbursts of antisemitism there, the then-president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, said that Massad was “under investigation” following his outspoken support for the October 7 attack.
It would appear that nothing came of this investigation. Massad has said he has not even been reprimanded.
Massad’s immunity has irked and angered a considerable number of students and professors, who correctly think he is unsuitable to deliver fair and balanced lectures about Zionism, which he wholeheartedly despises and denigrates.
This issue prompted Lawrence Rosenblatt, a Colombia University professor of international and public affairs, to resign a few days ago.
Until 2023, Rosenblatt did not contemplate leaving Columbia, thinking he would be more effective by staying on as a countervailing force to Massad and his supporters. But after Massad’s praise of Hamas’ October 7 attack, he changed his mind.
As he put it in his resignation letter, “While Massad has a right to think what he thinks, and speak what he believes, Columbia has a responsibility to teach objectively and fairly. At best perhaps one could tolerate a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict co-taught from the many diverse Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, though not by someone who advocates for the eradication of a group of people. But that is not what is happening here. Columbia has lost not only its moral compass, but its intellectual one.”
Rosenblatt’s argument is compelling.
Permitting a zealot like Massad to teach a course like this is akin to allowing a white nationalist to instruct students on the U.S. civil rights movement.
The controversy over Massad raises an important question. Universities should uphold the sanctity of free expression and diverse viewpoints. But when a highly opinionated and biased academic like Massad is permitted to hold forth on Zionism in a classroom, these hallowed principles are violated.
That Colombia has tolerated or turned a blind eye to Massad is nothing less than insulting, and a stain on the university’s image. At a time when antisemitism in the United States is on the rise, particularly on university campuses, Massad has no business teaching a course of this kind. It is, in a word, inappropriate.
Columbia, at the very least, should assign it to someone who can and will present Zionism in a fair and unbiased light.