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Al-Jazeera runs then deletes anti-Semitic screed by Columbia Univ. Prof. Joseph Massad

Al-Jazeera runs then deletes anti-Semitic screed by Columbia Univ. Prof. Joseph Massad

Massad is just the tip of the anti-Israel academic iceberg

Joseph Massad is an anti-Israeli Columbia University Professor.

Massad recently wrote a post at Al-Jazeera, which we wrote about at College Insurrection, Columbia Professor’s ‘Anti-Jewish Screed’ Draws Fire.

The post was The Last of the Semites:

Twitter - @AJEnglish - Last of the Semites

The core allegations are that Zionists cooperated with the Nazis, that the result of the Holocaust was that only Zionist Jews survived while non-Zionist Jews were exterminated, and that the West seeking to compel the Arabs to accept Israel is the fulfillment of this Nazis-Zionist collusion:

…  It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.

After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism’s genocidal programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust. In fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would support the United Nations  Partition Plan of November 1947  to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.

The creation of Israel, Massad continued, not only was a fulfillment of the Nazi-Zionist common goals, but also required the elevation of Jews to “white” in order to promote an inherently racist agenda:

After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians. This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible….

It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of “white” people, and what came to be called “Judeo-Christian” civilisation [sic].

Massad also sees West Germany’s assistance to Israel not as some sort of amends, but as a continuation of the Nazi-Zionist collusion:

West Germany’s alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s.

Since Massad portrays Israel as inherently anti-Semitic, Massad casts Palestinians who want to destroy Israel as fighting anti-Semitism:

The  Jewish holocaust killed off  the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining “Semites” who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people.

Massad’s view of Israel is hardly alone. It is a view which infests much of the Arab media and Islamist groups.  The concept of Zionism as racist by design gave rise to the now-defunct “Zionism is Racism” U.N. resolution.

The article came under intense criticism, for obvious reasons.

Jeffrey Goldberg sent out a tweet which pretty accurately summarized the import of Massad’s argument:

TWitter - @jeffreygoldberg - last of the semites

Even Mondoweiss, yes Mondoweiss, the harshest of websites when it comes to Israel, had trouble stomaching Massad’s arguments:

Well, with Massad we’ve come a long inverted way.  He sees the Jewishness that most Jews celebrate as colonial and – criminal.

Massad stops short – I think – of a Euro-American Jewish Zionist conspiracy to dominate the world.

Understanding Jewishness at war with the world and with Jewishness itself.  It’s a tough sell.

Now the Massad article is gone from Al-Jazeera (h/t @GlennGreenwald).  Spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was not too much for Al-Jazeera initially, but perhaps the attention called to the screed was too much.  I’d be curious if the article ran in non-English versions of Al-Jazeera and if it has been removed there.

Needless to say, the “Zionists” are blamed by anti-Israeli websites like Electronic Intifada, which adheres to Massad’s theories:

In an unprecedented act of political censorship Al Jazeera English has deleted an article by noted Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad after coming under intense criticism from Zionists in recent days.

Massad told The Electronic Intifada that he had “received confirmation” from his editor at Al Jazeera English that “management pulled the article.” The Electronic Intifada was able to independently confirm that the article was pulled….

The backlash has been so intense precisely because Massad goes to the core of Israel’s claim to represent Jews and to cast its critics as anti-Semites by showing that indeed it is Israel and Zionism that partake of the same anti-Semitism that targeted European Jews.

In doing so, Massad pulls the rug from under Zionists and Israel lobbyists by demonstrating that they are the anti-Semites and taking away the most formidable weapon they wield against critics of Israel: the accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

By neutralizing this ideological weapon that Israel has used so effectively in the Western media to cover up its colonization of Palestine, Massad’s pro-Jewish position and strenuous attack on Zionist anti-Semitism is clearly understood by Israel lobby figures such as Goldberg as a complete obliteration of their ideological arsenal.

But it’s still available at Yahoo.  I also uploaded it to DocStoc, but that upload was removed (trying to find out why):

Removal of Last of the Semites from Doc Stoc

I don’t think Al-Jazeera should have removed the article, because it serves as a classic example of the widespread pathology behind the anti-Israel movement.  We just rarely get to see that pathology in English.

There are several lessons here.  One of which is that anti-Semitism infests much of the intellectual foundation of the arguments against Israel, and there is a direct line between anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the justification behind the call to destroy Israel.  You cannot separate the two, whether it’s Islamists referring to Jews as the descendants of monkeys and pigs, or Columbia University professors calling Israel the fulfillment of the Nazi dream.

Another lesson is how infested academia is with anti-Israel agitators, even if they do not espouse blatantly anti-Semitic screeds like Massad.  We previously have pointed out the “anti-PinkWashing” conferences and George Bisharat.

While not going as far as Massad, the concept of Israel as uniquely imperialist and colonial in nature also was fundamental to the vote by the Association of Asian American Studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions, a boycott which was rejected by the American Association of University Professors (h/t Jonathan Marks).

Massad is just the tip of the anti-Israeli academic iceberg.  The deletion of Massad’s column by Al-Jazeera changes nothing, the iceberg still is there.

Update: A good post from Elder of Ziyon, Joseph Massad tries to equate anti-semitism with Zionism:

Massad is not your typical neanderthal Israel-hater. He is smart enough to hide his agenda and sprinkle his lies so subtly that it requires a word-by-word analysis to see where they are.

In this case, nearly all of this paragraph is slanted but accurate – except for five words.

“The only solution was for the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country.”

Nineteenth century anti-semites did not espouse Jews having their own country. They simply wanted to persecute and marginalize the Jews in their countries!

Modern Zionism did not work in concert with 19th century “scientific” anti-semitism, it was a response to it….

If the anti-semites wanted a state in Palestine for the Jews, where is the literature demanding this? Why were they restricting Jews to live in certain districts instead of encouraging their emigration?

It is somewhat besides the point, because people like Massad have a bigger agenda, the complete delegitimization of Israel. The “facts” are found selectively and usually out of context to support the preexisting agenda; the agenda is not the result of research into the facts.

Update 5-22-2013 — Al Jazeera has reinstated the post, Editor’s Blog: In the Massad case, we should have done better .

Also, MJ Rosenberg, who like Mondoweiss is hostile to Israeli policies, calls it correctly on Massad’s anti-Semitism:

https://twitter.com/MJayRosenberg/status/337233599680102400

https://twitter.com/MJayRosenberg/status/337235674010886145

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Comments

Wholly nuthatch, Batman…!!!

Had he not written it, I would have said such madness as Massad’s was parody.

I wasn’t too surprised by this development; not after Al Qaeda rejected Prof. Massad’s submission to its online magazine Inspire, on the ground that the article contained too much violent imagery.

Other than coming up with a far-fetched theory that fits his predisposed prejudice why doesn’t Professor Massad provide any documentation. The Nazi’s were great record keepers so there would be documents to back up his wild assertions. What kind of a professer makes racist comments without anything to back him up beyond his own demented mind.

Completely fair to go after Israel, those of sound mind in our OWN nation, just ask Barry, Soros AND the IRS.

Say something derogatory about islam, no-no-no. Just ask Barry.

And Columbia University’s excuse for hiring and maintaining a purveyor of hate speech on it’s teaching staff is?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/12/19/speech-codes-the-biggest-scandal-on-college-campuses-today/

Seriously. If colleges are going to have speech codes, the colleges must then assume the burden of applying them even-handedly.

LukeHandCool | May 19, 2013 at 2:11 pm

Professor is to Massad as Reverend is to Sharpton.

I think I can speak for that Jew Rube Goldberg when I say,

“Oh, Dude. Too complicated and too many moving parts to be workable. It’s just crazy.”

Zionist Jews: “So, don’t forget … this whole contraption we’ve devised suddenly stops when you get to us.”

Himmler: “Yes, yes, you have my word.”

The anti-Israel activists have a selective recall of history. For that matter, they have a selective interest in the present. Their desire for selective accountability undermines any credibility they may otherwise enjoy.

How typical of Islamo-fascists to falsely accuse Jews of doing what Muslims actually did.

docstoc removed the one I uploaded too. but they can’t remove it off my own server so…

    Prof if you get an answer from docstoc would you please let us know?
    they are content scanning, even a title not at all related to article gets deleted.

      William A. Jacobson in reply to dmacleo. | May 19, 2013 at 6:27 pm

      I emailed the, if I hear back I’ll let people know.

        I stripped metadata from last one (used acrobat x full) and last upload been up there for an hour with no issue.
        no we’ll know in a bit if its the metadata they were scanning for.

        as a test I sanitized a document using the org name The last of the Semites.pdf and uploaded it.
        if it stays then we will know a quick for this and I will let you know.
        sorry to spam the thread, but figured this is somewhat important.

        and if needed I can always provide access to my invisionpower downloads center for you to store documents or setup a file manager on a subdomain on the dedicated like ajaxplorer) for you, anything I can do to help the cause 🙂

          so initial upload deleted in 20 minutes.
          renamed upload deleted in 20 minutes.
          stripping the data and uploading a renamed AND an original name have both been ok for hours.

        sanitizing the pdf works.
        my stuff is still there since doing that.

Anyone get screen shots?

The same argument (that Zionists worked hand-in-hand with the Nazis to create the State of Israel, establishing a Jewish presence where there had never been one before by co-opting land that had been owned and farmed for centuries by pastoral, peace-loving arabs) appears in a widely used high school textbook published by Chelsea House (New York), called “The Palestinian Authority (Creation of the Modern Middle East)”, 2003. It’s no surprise that this Columbia prof is spouting the same anti-Semitic line – our country’s high schools are filled with similar textbooks with similar anti-Israel and pro-muslim ideology.

Save it as a Word doc.

If Columbia wished to squander their endowment on such racist barbarians, it would be their business – of which citizens and potential students and potential benefactors should be fully aware, but still their business.

But they are being subsidized by tax dollars, and that infuriates me. There is no excuse for it.

We need to “divest” the federal government completely from education at all levels. The entire system has been hijacked by the radical left.

BannedbytheGuardian | May 19, 2013 at 9:35 pm

This is all very confusing .

Once upon a time I was reading so many mixed messages about Judaism & or Israel & or Zionism that I avoided all pieces by anyone with a Germanic name for 3 months. Then I avoided all the Eastern European names for 3 months .

I am sure a few sneaked by with other names but it was quite liberating.

This is the most twisted piece of reasoning I have ever seen.

The thing is, many of the specific facts he alleges are not completely false. There is a kernel of truth hiding in many of the details — for instance, read Perfidy, by Ben Hecht, or Min Hameitzar, by Rabbi Michoel-Ber Weissmandel — but the greater narrative he spins from these facts is false and pernicious.

The thing you have to understand about religious anti-zionism is that it does not in any way support the “Palestinians”‘ claim. Antizionists, even more than zionists, assert that the Land belongs to the Jewish nation, and that nobody has the right to cede any of it, even in return for international recognition of the Jewish claim on the remainder. In that sense they’re more zionist than the zionists! But they also believe that the Jews are in exile by God’s decree, and may not leave without His permission.

Imagine a convict who is sentenced to a term of imprisonment, and squatters move in to his empty house. Just because he’s in prison doesn’t make his title to his house invalid, and the squatters have no right to be there. They do not gain adverse possession, because his failure to evict them is due entirely to his inability to do so, since he’s locked up; so long as he makes it clear from prison that he still owns the house, it remains his. But at the same time, he has no right to break out of prison and return home. Suppose he does return home and evicts the squatters; he has committed a crime, not against them but against the court that sentenced him to prison. The squatters have no right not to be evicted, and if they put up a violent resistance he has every right to defend himself.

This sort of anti-zionism is no help at all to the “Palestinian” cause.

And of course if the squatters take up arms and try to murder the escaped prisoner and his family, and reoccupy the house by force, they are nothing but foul murderers.