Posted by David Bernstein:
Massad Defends Himself:
I've been reporting on the Professor Joseph Massad controversy at
Columbia, which you can follow via the links below. I've reproduced,
via [1]Juan Cole, Massad's statement in his own defense, which I will
mostly let speak for itself. My quick comments:
The difficulty with Massad seems less that he is anti-Israel, as such,
and I've seen no evidence that he is anti-Semitic, but that he is an
extreme left-wing ideologue who allows that ideology to interfere with
scholarly judgment and to make broad statements about matters on which
he is ignorant. Note that in statement reproduced below, while
strongly objecting to being accused of anti-Semitism, he smears tens
of millions of American Christians as anti-Semites, asserting that all
evangelical Christians (whom he mischaracterizes as all being
fundamentalists) (a) want to convert Jews, and (b) are therefore
anti-Semitic. In fact, not all evangelical factions want to convert
Jews; even fewer have active programs to do so (as opposed to seeking
converts equally from all groups, including other Christians); and, as
for the remaining groups who specifically target Jews for conversion,
it's pretty hard to see as "anti-Semites" those who are eager to
peacefully persuade Jews to join their religious community because
they think that God has special love for the Jewish people.
Moreover--and this is truly absurd--Massad claims that evangelical
Christians (and not, say, Islamic Jihadists) are the "most powerful
anti-Semitic group worldwide." Besides the nonsensical notion of
grouping all the disparate evangelical factions into one "group", the
obvious questions arise: How many Jewish children in France have been
beaten by evangelical Christians? How many evangelical ministers or
newspapers have referred to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys?
Beyond the tiny and definitely non-mainstream Christian Identity
movement, which fundamentalist or evangelical terrorist groups have
targeted Jews for violence? Which evangelical nations expropriated
Jewish property and expelled their Jewish populations? Does a Jew
wearing a yarmulke feel threatened walking through small-town
Oklahoma, or am I confusing that with Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, etc.?
Massad also states that in his class, "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
militarised masculinity." Again, this is an ideological construct with
tenuous roots in reality. My Israeli wife--who served in the Israeli
army and therefore heard plenty of discussions of weaponry--tells me
that the modern Hebrew word for "weapon" is "neshek," and that she has
absolutely never heard the word "zayin" used to mean weapon in modern
Hebrew. She does recall that there is a biblical Hebrew word that has
the same root as "zayin"--mizuyan--which means something like to be
armed or wear armor (she can't recall which, which is a sign that she
only encountered this in her Bible studies class, not in spoken modern
Hebrew). If the word "zayin" or any derivatives is not used in modern
Hebrew to mean weapon, how can this be an example of "Israeli
militarised masculinity?" This makes me very suspicious of whether
Prof. Massad, who styles himself an expert on Zionism and Israel,
actually speaks Hebrew.
Anyway, here is Prof. Massad's statement (Note that the most troubling
alleged incident involving Prof. Massad, is the one in which he
refused to speak to an Israeli student at Columbia until the student
revealed "how many Palestinians he had killed" while in the army;
Prof. Massad denies that this incident ever took place, or that he
ever met this student.):
The recent controversy elicited by the propaganda film Columbia
Unbecoming, a film funded and produced by a Boston-based pro-
Israel organisation, is the latest salvo in a campaign of
intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticise
Israel. This witch-hunt aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom,
and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to
ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical
support for the State of Israel.
Columbia University, the Department of Middle East and Asian
Languages and Cultures, and I personally, have been the target of
this intensified campaign for over three years. Pro-Israel groups
are pressuring the university to abandon proper academic procedure
in evaluating scholarship, and want to force the university to
silence all critical opinions. Such silencing, the university has
refused to do so far, despite mounting intimidation tactics by
these anti- democratic and anti-academic forces.
The major strategy that these pro-Israel groups use is one that
equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the claim that
criticism of Israel is an expression of anti-Semitism presupposes
that Israeli actions are "Jewish" actions and that all Jews,
whether Israelis or non-Israelis (and the majority of world Jews
are not Israelis), are responsible for all Israeli actions and that
they all have the same opinion of Israel.
But this is utter anti-Semitic nonsense. Jews, whether in America,
Europe, Israel, Russia, or Argentina, are, like all other groups,
not uniform in their political or social opinions. There are many
Israeli Jews who are critical of Israel just as there are American
Jews who criticise Israeli policy. I have always made a distinction
between Jews, Israelis, and Zionists in my writings and my
lectures. It is those who want to claim that Jews, Israelis, and
Zionists are one group (and that they think exactly alike) who are
the anti-Semites. Israel in fact has no legal, moral, or political
basis to represent world Jews (ten million strong) who never
elected it to that position and who refuse to move to that country.
Unlike the pro-Israel groups, I do not think that Israeli actions
are "Jewish" actions or that they reflect the will of the Jewish
people worldwide! All those pro-Israeli propagandists who want to
reduce the Jewish people to the State of Israel are the
anti-Semites who want to eliminate the existing pluralism among
Jews. The majority of Israel's supporters in the United States are,
in fact, not Jews but Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites who
seek to convert Jews. They constitute a quarter of the American
electorate and are the most powerful anti-Semitic group worldwide.
The reason why the pro-Israel groups do not fight them is because
these anti-Semites are pro-Israel. Therefore, it is not
anti-Semitism that offends pro- Israel groups; what offends them is
anti-Israel criticism. In fact, Israel and the US groups supporting
it have long received financial and political support from numerous
anti-Semites.
This is not to say that some anti-Zionists may not also be
anti-Semitic. Some are, and I have denounced them in my writings
and lectures. But the test of their anti-Semitism is not whether
they like or hate Israel. The test of anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish
hatred, not anti-Israel criticism. In my forthcoming book, The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question, I link the Jewish Question
to the Palestinian Question and conclude that both questions
persist because anti-Semitism persists. To resolve the Palestinian
and the Jewish questions, our task is to fight anti-Semitism in any
guise, whether in its pro-Israel or anti-Israel guise, and not to
defend the reprehensible policies of the racist Israeli government.
I am now being targeted because of my public writings and
statements through the charge that I am allegedly intolerant in the
classroom, a charge based on statements made by people who were
never my students, except in one case which I will address
momentarily. Let me first state that I have intimidated no one. In
fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the Israeli soldier who appears in the film
and is cited by the New York Sun, has never been my student and has
never taken a class with me, as he himself informed The Jewish
Week. I have never met him.
As for Noah Liben, who appears in the film according to newspaper
accounts (I have not seen the film), he was indeed a student in my
Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies course in the spring
of 2001. Noah seems to have forgotten the incident he cites. During
a lecture about Israeli state racism against Asian and African
Jews, Noah defended these practices on the basis that Asian and
African Jews were underdeveloped and lacked Jewish culture, which
the Ashkenazi State operatives were teaching them. When I explained
to him that, as the assigned readings clarified, these were racist
policies, he insisted that these Jews needed to be modernised and
the Ashkenazim were helping them by civilising them.
Many students gasped. He asked me if I understood his point. I
informed him that I did not. Noah 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 militarised masculinity. Noah, seemingly not
having read the assigned material, mistook the pronunciation of
"zayin" as "Zion", pronounced in Hebrew "tziyon". As for his
spurious claim that I said that "Jews in Nazi Germany were not
physically abused or harassed until Kristallnacht in November
1938", Noah must not have been listening carefully.
During the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist
ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the
institutionalised 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.
I remember having a friendly rapport with Noah (as I do with all my
students). He would drop off newspaper articles in my mailbox, come
to my office hours, and greet me on the street often. He never
informed me or acted in a way that showed intimidation. Indeed, he
would write me e-mails, even after he stopped being my student, to
argue with me about Israel. I have kept our correspondence.
On 10 March, 2002, a year after he took a class with me, Noah wrote
me an e-mail chastising me for having invited an Israeli speaker to
class the year before when he was in attendance. It turned out that
Noah's memory failed him again, as he mistook the speaker I had
invited for another Israeli scholar. After a long diatribe, Noah
excoriated me: "How can you bring such a phony to speak to your
class??"
I am not sure if his misplaced reproach was indicative of an
intimidated student or one who felt comfortable enough to rebuke
his professor!
I am dedicated to all my students, many of whom are Jewish. Neither
Columbia University nor I have ever received a complaint from any
student claiming intimidation or any such nonsense. Students at
Columbia have many venues of lodging complaints, whether with the
student deans and assistant deans, school deans and assistant
deans, department chairmen, departmental directors of undergraduate
studies, the ombudsman's office, the provost, the president, and
the professors themselves. No such complaint was ever filed.
Many of my Jewish and non-Jewish students (including my Arab
students) differ with me in all sorts of ways, whether on politics
or on philosophy or theory. This is exactly what teaching and
learning are about, how to articulate differences and understand
other perspectives while acquiring knowledge, how to analyse one's
own perspective and those of others, how to interrogate the basis
of an opinion.
Columbia University is home to the most prestigious centre for
Israel and Jewish studies in the country. Columbia has six endowed
chairs in Jewish studies (ranging from religion to Yiddish to
Hebrew literature, among others). In addition, a seventh chair in
Israel studies is now being established after pro-Israel groups
launched a vicious campaign against the only chair in modern Arab
studies that Columbia established two years ago, demanding
"balance"!
Columbia does not have a centre for Arab studies, let alone a
centre for Palestine studies. The Department of Middle East and
Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) encompasses the study of over
one billion South Asians, over 300 million Arabs, tens of millions
of Turks, of Iranians, of Kurds, of Armenians, and of six million
Israelis, five million of whom are Jewish.
To study these varied populations and cultures, MEALAC has three
full time professors who cover Israel and Hebrew, four full time
professors to cover the Arab World, and two full-time professors
who cover South Asia. One need not do complicated mathematics to
see who is overrepresented and who is not, if the question is
indeed a demographic one.
Moreover, the class that this propaganda machine is targeting, my
"Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies" course, is one of
a number of courses offered at Columbia that cover the
Palestinian/Israel conflict. All the others have an Israel-friendly
perspective, including Naomi Weinberger's "Conflict Resolution in
the Middle East", Michael Stanislawski's "History of the State of
Israel, 1948-Present" and a course offered in my own department by
my colleague Dan Miron, "Zionism: A Cultural Perspective".
My course, which is critical of Zionism and Palestinian
nationalism, is in fact an elective course which no student is
forced to take.
Let us briefly review these claims of intimidation. Not only have
the students (all but Noah have not even taken my courses) not used
a single university venue to articulate their alleged grievances,
they are now sponsored by a private political organisation with
huge funds that produced and funded a film about them, screened it
to the major US media and to the top brass of the Columbia
administration.
Last Wednesday, the film was screened in Israel to a government
minister and to participants at a conference on anti- Semitism. The
film has still not been released to the public here and is used as
a sort of secret evidence in a military trial.
The film has also been used to trump up a national campaign with
the aid of a New York congressman to get me fired. All this power
of intimidation is being exercised not by a professor against
students, but by political organisations who use students against a
junior non-tenured faculty member. A senior departmental colleague
of mine, Dan Miron, who votes on my promotion and tenure, has
recently expressed open support for this campaign of intimidation
based on hearsay.
Indeed with this campaign against me going into its fourth year, I
chose under the duress of coercion and intimidation not to teach my
course this year. It is my academic freedom that has been
circumscribed. But not only mine. The Columbia courses that remain
are all taught from an Israel-friendly angle.
The aim of the David Project propaganda film is to undermine our
academic freedom, our freedom of speech, and Columbia's tradition
of openness and pluralism.
It is in reaction to this witch-hunt that 718 international
scholars and students signed a letter defending me against
intimidation and sent it to President Bollinger, with hundreds more
sending separate letters, while over 1,300 people from all walks of
life are signing an online petition supporting me and academic
freedom. Academics and students from around the world recognise
that the message of this propaganda film is to suppress pluralism
at Columbia and at all American universities so that one and only
one opinion be allowed on campuses, the opinion of defending Israel
uncritically.
I need not remind anyone that this is a slippery slope, for the
same pressures could be applied to faculty who have been critical
of US foreign policy, in Iraq for example, on the grounds that such
critiques are unpatriotic.
Surely we all agree that while the university can hardly defend any
one political position on any current question, it must defend the
need for debate and critical consideration of all such questions,
whether in public fora or in the classroom. Anything less would be
the beginning of the death of academic freedom."
References
1. http://www.juancole.com/
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