<br> I would appreciate your feedback on this article QUTB. I had previously left in the naughty boys room, so to speak ( fire pit) .<br><br> But in order to help others understand that which you appear 'incapable' of understanding <br><br> It lays bare the kind of deceptions that characterise the way this game is played.<br><br> Agree or disagree ?<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> During the same semester, in April 2002, I was attacked and misquoted<br>by the Spectator after attending an on-campus rally in support of<br>Palestinians under Israeli military attack in the West Bank and Gaza, and<br>an op-ed piece and letters were published in the Spectator accusing me<br>of “anti-Semitism” for a lecture I had given at the Middle East Institute in<br>February 2002.7 The op-ed piece by a junior at Barnard named<br>Daphna Berman, who was not my student, drew parallels between a<br>swastika found in a law school bathroom and my lecture and rebuked<br>the university for allowing me to speak out:<br><br>“I was struck by the University's willingness to publicly condemn blatant<br>expressions of anti-Semitism [such as the swastika incident] while<br>simultaneously condoning, and even sponsoring, more tacit and subtle<br>forms of that same evil. Massad's talk is lent a certain legitimacy by mere<br>virtue of the fact that his views exist within an academic framework. The<br>rhetoric is polished, the multisyllabic words characteristic of academia<br>are pleasing to the ear, and so Massad's message somehow becomes<br>more acceptable, more palatable. Yet fundamentally, the difference<br>between Massad's message and its more blatant and visually tangible<br>manifestation are only subtle.”8<br><br>As for the political rally, which took place on Wednesday April 17, 2002, I<br>was one of countless speakers. I spoke out and asserted the following:<br>“"Like white South Africans who felt threatened under apartheid and who<br>only felt safe when they gave up their commitment to white supremacy,<br>Israeli Jews will continue to feel threatened if they persist in supporting<br>Jewish supremacy. Israeli Jews will only feel safe in a democratic Israeli<br>state where all Jews and Arabs are treated equally. No state has the<br>right to be a racist state.” The Spectator misquoted me as saying that<br>Israel is “a Jewish supremacist and racist state,” and that “every racist<br>state should be threatened.”9 When I protested the misquotation, the<br>Spectator journalist who wrote the story, Xan Nowakowski, apologized<br>and informed me via E-mail that she did not even attend the rally and<br>got the quotes from another reporter. She assured me that the<br>newspaper would run a correction. After a back and forth for almost a<br>week on E-mail, the Spectator ran the correction on April 24, 2002.<br><br>However, two major pro-Israeli propagandists, namely Martin Kramer<br>and Daniel Pipes, would insist on reproducing the misquote in articles<br>that they wrote to newspapers and that they posted on their websites.<br>On June 20, 2002, Martin Kramer, an Israeli academic who teaches at<br>Tel Aviv university, posted an article on the Middle East Forum website<br>titled “Arab Panic,” in which he attacked a number of Columbia<br>professors, myself included. He argued that “Massad's views are not all<br>that unusual in Middle Eastern studies, and he has every right to<br>express them on Columbia's Low Plaza, in public lectures, and in print.<br>But should someone who is busy propagandizing against the existence<br>of Israel be employed by Columbia to teach the introductory course on<br>the Arab-Israeli conflict?… Suffice it to say that this column has received<br>a surfeit of student complaints about the course, suggesting that there is<br>no difference between what Massad teaches and what he preaches.” In<br>his article, Kramer reproduced the misquote from the Spectator. Prior to<br>Kramer’s column, a website for an organization called “The Columbia<br>Conservative Alumni Association” listed me among the six "worst faculty"<br>at Columbia, a list that also included Edward Said who was identified as<br>a “homosexual” who supports Hamas. Martin Kramer was only too<br>happy to quote from that website in his article, as would other columnists<br>writing for the New York Sun.<br><br>On June 25 2002, Daniel Pipes and one Jonathan Schanzer published<br>an article in the New York Post titled “Extremists on Campus,” in which<br>they listed me as one such extremist and complained that I use my class<br>as a “soapbox for anti-Israeli polemics.” The Wall Street Journal<br>published on September 18, 2002 an article about a pro-Israel website<br>calling itself CampusWatch being launched by Daniel Pipes, stating that<br>the website listed 8 professors (including me) with our own public<br>dossiers as enemies of America and Israel and called on our students to<br>monitor us in class. Following the launch of CampusWatch, my E-mail<br>was spammed for months with over 4000 E-mails daily, which I had to sift<br>through until finally Columbia was able to install an anti-spamming<br>program. Moreover, I was subjected to identity theft when thousands of<br>racist E-mails would be sent in my name to individuals and listservs,<br>including a few to the White House and Congressmen threatening them<br>with terrorist action. Moreover, thousands of other E-mails would be sent<br>to people with requests of notes of receipt being sent back to my E-mail<br>account which clogged it further with thousands of such E-mail receipts.<br>I also received tens of racist E-mails and phone messages including<br>death threats directed at me. In the meantime, Pipes’s website called on<br>our own students to spy on us in the classroom and report to him, and<br>Kramer called for my dismissal from Columbia University.10 In interviews<br>that I gave to the press, I spoke about the misquotation which Pipes and<br>Kramer continued to propagate, and about my experience in my Spring<br>2002 class, with regards to the petition to get me fired and the secret<br>meeting at the Medical school which my student had told me about.11<br><br>As I was on sabbatical in London that year, I was relatively shielded<br>from the campaign, even though my E-mail account continued to be<br>disrupted. I did come to Columbia to deliver a lecture on Palestinian<br>cinema in January 2003. My lecture, titled “The Weapon of Culture,”<br>discussed how Palestinian cinema was a weapon of resistance and an<br>act of culture in reference to Amilcar Cabral’s famous essay “the<br>Weapon of Theory.” Kramer immediately attacked my paper based on<br>reports in the press.12<br><br>In late January 2003, I began to write a column to the Egyptian Weekly<br>Al-Ahram which deals mostly with Palestinian-Israeli affairs and with the<br>Arab World more generally. Every time I published an article, Kramer<br>and Pipes would write about it, as would new student recruits that they<br>had on campuses. One such ideological recruit was a first year student<br>in General Studies whom I had never met called Ariel Beery. Beery<br>would become one of the main people defending the claims of the David<br>Project in whose film he appeared and called me “one of the most<br>dangerous intellectuals… on campus.” Beery has never taken a class<br>with me and never met me. Beery, who claims to have served in the<br>Israeli army in Lebanon, had his own Spectator column and a personal<br>blog. Beery arrived on the Columbia campus when I was on sabbatical,<br>yet, surprisingly, he chose to write about me in his column. After<br>criticizing my Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies course, which<br>he never took, Beery asserted:<br>One would think that we need a teacher in the classroom, not a<br>critic…The problem lies not in what Massad believes, but in his openly<br>biased presentation in the classroom. The statements he issues are<br>anywhere from questionable to fundamentally wrong.<br><br>Basing his arguments on of one my newspaper columns, Beery added<br>the following:<br><br>“If anything, Massad's claim [in his column] that there is no anti-Semitism<br>in the Arab world should disqualify him from setting foot in a Columbia<br>University classroom as a professor of Modern Arab Politics. Just as you<br>would not trust a surgeon with shaky knowledge of the human anatomy,<br>Columbia should not trust the minds of its charges to a professor with a<br>limited knowledge of the body politic of the region he supposedly is an<br>expert in. [Massad also] says that the claim that Israel is democratic is<br>no more than a ‘propagandistic image.’… th[is]…charge on Israel should<br>again disqualify Massad from teaching at Columbia.”13<br><br>In a second column, Beery again railed against me and lamented that<br><br><br>“Our educations are bound in intellectual Egypt, enslaved by the post-<br>colonialist slant that has permeated our social sciences, while our<br>institution is trapped by its old-fashioned bylaws into protecting the<br>employment of those who espouse hateful and violent rhetoric… Will<br>President Bollinger and future Provost Alan Brinkley be our gate and our<br>key to a new and better University? Only time will tell. Let's just hope that<br>our time in the wilderness will be short and that next year we will enjoy a<br>rebuilt Columbia.”14<br><br>This is in addition to myriad log entries on me on his website.<br><br>In April 2003, I decided to respond to Kramer and Pipes in an article<br>titled “Policing the Academy,” in which I fleshed out their agenda and<br>their plans. I concluded by stating that<br><br>“Kramer, Pipes, and co. are angry that the academy still allows<br>democratic procedure in the expression of political views and has an<br>institutionalised meritocratic system of judgment…to evaluate its<br>members. Their goal is to destroy any semblance of either in favour of<br>subjecting democracy and academic life to an incendiary jingoism and to<br>the exigencies of the national security state with the express aim of<br>imploding freedom. Their larger success, however, has been in<br>discrediting themselves and in reminding all of us that we should never<br>take the freedoms that we have for granted, as the likes of Kramer and<br>Pipes are working to take them away.”15<br><br>I attach the text of my article at the end of this statement.<br><br>Upon returning to Columbia in the Fall of 2003, I was scheduled to<br>give a lecture on the 2nd of October at the Society of Fellows at the<br>Heyman Center. The lecture was attended by a large number of people<br>including many faculty members, Professor Nicholas Dirks, who had not<br>yet become vice-president, was among them. After the lecture I was<br>asked a number of hostile questions from young students and from one<br>Rabbi Charles Sheer, about whom I had heard the previous year when<br>he railed against MEALAC professors in the context of the pro-<br>Palestinian rally that took place on campus in April 2002. I had never<br>met him before. I answered all the questions put before me. Several<br>professors came to me afterwards, including Brinkley Messick of the<br>Department of Anthropology and my departmental colleague Janaki<br>Bakhle, among others, wondering how I managed to remain calm in the<br>face of rude and hostile questions of the caliber I had been asked.<br>Rabbi Sheer’s secretary called me and left a message asking for the text<br>of the lecture. I never responded. The lecture has been published in the<br>scholarly journal Cultural Critique and has recently been the topic of a<br>newspaper article in the New York Sun, and I believe also in the Daily<br>News.16 On 6 January 2004, Rabbi Sheer posted a letter on the Hillel<br>website addressed to Columbia and Barnard students, in which he<br>discussed my lecture and made a startling announcement. In his letter,<br>Sheer shared an article he had written called “The Treatment of the<br>Middle East Studies at Columbia University.”17 Sheer declared that “the<br>principal anti-Israel voices [on Columbia’s campus] are not pro-<br>Palestinian student leaders and groups, but Columbia faculty and<br>academic departments.” He added that “On the one hand, there are<br>many fine courses taught by CU faculty on Hebrew language and<br>literature, the history of Israel and Zionism, Arab culture, languages and<br>nationalism, etc. These courses, offered in various departments, are<br>taught with the usual CU standard of careful scholarship and<br>balance…On the other hand, some faculty members whose teaching<br>style is called ‘advocacy education’ espouse a consistent anti-Israel and<br>pro-Palestinian bias. Their personal politics pervade the classroom and<br>academic forums. The record is public: search under ‘Columbia<br>University’ at websites such as
www.campus-watch.org and
www. Be prepared; it is not a pleasant read.”18<br><br>Sheer proceeded to mention that he had attended my lecture at the<br>Heyman Center and then summarized it by making outrageous claims<br>that were never made in the lecture:<br><br>“Professor Massad has reversed the roles of all the players and<br>redefined many of the historic events: the Zionists are the new Nazis; the<br>Palestinians are oppressed victims and therefore the new Jews... From a<br>distance, this diatribe may sound ludicrous. However, its impact on<br>campus is serious. MEALAC should enable our students to explore<br>issues vital to their understanding of the modern Middle East in a<br>balanced way…”<br><br>We will see how the false claim attributed to me by Rabbi Sheer that I<br>said that “the Zionists are the new Nazis,” a claim I never made, would<br>find its way to Ariel Beery who would make the same claim in the video<br>“Columbia Unbecoming,”19 as would Noah Liben in his description of my<br>course --a false claim that would be repeated ad absurdum in the media.<br>Sheer concluded with two interesting claims, one which effectively called<br>on students not to take my class, and another announcing the filming of<br>Columbia Unbecoming:<br><br>“Of course, academic freedom is a cornerstone of our University.<br>However, students are understandably reluctant to take courses from<br>faculty who impose their biases in their teaching. A student group is<br>currently working on a video that records how intimidated students feel<br>by advocacy teaching, and how some are discouraged from taking<br>MEALAC courses or majoring in Middle East studies.”<br><br>Sheer further called on Columbia University to “share my passion for<br>unbiased scholarship and the establishment of a proper learning<br>environment so our students – Jews and non-Jews - can learn about<br>complex issues with honesty and integrity.” 20<br><br>Suffice it to say that my class had over fifty students for the Spring<br>2004 and students did not heed the call made by Sheer. The class did<br>however include a number of auditors (I found out they were<br>unregistered during the last week of class) who would consistently<br>harass me with hostile ideological questions that ignored all the<br>readings. Students complained about the disruption this caused the<br>class. I tried to emphasize to the auditors that their questions must be<br>relevant to the subject at hand and that they must do the readings. They<br>never did and I continued to answer their questions until the end of the<br>semester to avoid creating a tense atmosphere in the classroom.<br><br>During this period, the New York Sun and Kramer and Pipes continued<br>to attack me in their columns and on their websites. In an article on<br>December 30, 2003, the Sun had again attacked one of my newspaper<br>columns misquoting me. In my column, I stated that "While Israel has no<br>legitimacy and is not recognized by any international body as a<br>‘representative’ of the Jewish people worldwide but rather as the state of<br>the Israeli people who are citizens of it...," the Sun quoted me as saying<br>that “Israel has no legitimacy.” I asked for a correction from the reporter<br>Jacob Gershman. He agreed and the newspaper ran it the next day.21<br>This however was just a brief lull. On May 4, 2004, the Sun ran another<br>article about me by one Jonathan Calt Harris, identified as an associate<br>of Daniel Pipes at Campus Watch, titled “Tenured Extremism.” After a<br>litany of misquotes, half quotes, and outright fabrications, Calt Harris,<br>who referred to my views as akin to those of “Nazis,” concluded by<br>stating: “Mr. Massad is soon up for tenure review. Should this once<br>distinguished university stoop to provide a permanent forum for his<br>views, it would signify a truly stunning oversight…He knows no<br>distinction between a classroom lecture and advocacy at a public<br>demonstration.”22<br><br>Based on this repeated call to deny me tenure at Columbia, which had<br>already been expressed by Martin Kramer, I set up an appointment with<br>Provost Brinkley and met with him. I sought his help and the help of the<br>university’s legal services to fight this defamation of character. The<br>latest article in the New York Sun included such blatant and insidious<br>misrepresentations that I seriously considered suing them for<br>defamation. I provided copies of my written work for the Provost and told<br>him of the campaigns to which I had been subjected in the previous<br>years. While the provost seemed mildly supportive, he did not think that<br>suing would be practical. I asked him if he could arrange for me to meet<br>with legal services to which he reluctantly agreed. I had to remind him by<br>E-mail to set up a meeting for me. After he put me in touch with legal<br>services, my E-mails to them went unanswered. I asked the provost to<br>intervene which he did. His intervention produced a response from their<br>office asking me about my available times to set up an appointment. I<br>sent it to them and never heard back. I dropped the matter after I left in<br>mid summer for vacation abroad.<br><br>In the meantime however, I received a letter from Joel J. Levy, director<br>of the<br>New York chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, copies of which had<br>been sent to President Bollinger and Provost Brinkley. The letter was<br>significantly dated on May 6, 2004, two days after Calt Harris published<br>his article in the Sun. The letter complained to me that, according to one<br>report it received from one student who attended a lecture that I had<br>given at the University of Pennsylvania on March 24, 2004 (which<br>incidentally was the same lecture I gave at Columbia’s Society of Fellows<br>the previous October), ideas expressed in my lecture are “anti-Semitic.”<br>The letter made false claims about what my lecture said and asked that I<br>retract them and issue an apology for my allegedly anti-Semitic remarks.<br>I wrote Mr. Levy back and copied President Bollinger and Provost<br>Brinkley. I stated in my letter that:<br><br>“My principled stance against anti-Semitism and all kinds of racism is a<br>matter of public record and cannot be assailed by defamatory ‘reports’<br>or by letters from the ADL that consider them credible sources. Indeed I<br>have condemned anti-Semitism in my Arabic and English writings,<br>regardless of whether the person expressing it was pro-Israel or anti-<br>Israel, an Arab, an American Christian, or an Israeli Jew… I therefore<br>expect a prompt correction of the errors contained in your letter and<br>demand an immediate apology, a copy of which should be sent to<br>President Bollinger.”23<br><br>I never heard back from the ADL, or from the provost.<br><br>It was with this as background that news about the David Project film<br>“Columbia Unbecoming,” surfaced on October 20, 2004 in a New York<br>Sun article.24<br><br>The Aftermath of Columbia Unbecoming<br><br>I was horrified by the media campaign against me and the calls for my<br>dismissal from Columbia that were issued by Congressman Weiner and<br>by the editors of the Daily News and the New York Sun, as well as calls<br>by Jewish members of the New York City Council to investigate the<br>matter. These calls were issued as declarations about the controversy<br>by the national head of the ADL and Mayor Bloomberg were also made<br>to the press and the film was suddenly being shown in Israel before a<br>government minister at an anti-Semitism conference. I had requested a<br>meeting with Provost Brinkley who did not contact me once during the<br>early days of the controversy during which President Bollinger was<br>making all kinds of statements to the press. My request to meet with the<br>Provost was made through the chair of my department, Marc van de<br>Mieroop, who attended our meeting in the Provost’s office on the 27th of<br>October. I inquired of the provost as to why he would sit down secretly to<br>watch a propaganda film produced by a lobbying group and why he<br>would remain silent about it after he had seen it. The provost apologized<br>and admitted that these were mistakes but that now we needed to<br>contain the problem. He assured me that he had received countless<br>letters in my support and few against me. When I spoke with Vice-<br>President Dirks later, he also informed me that he had received<br>“hundreds” of letters in my support and “three or four” against me. I trust<br>that the President, the Provost, and the Vice-President, have shared<br>with you these letters. While the provost and I corresponded briefly on E-<br>mail, mainly about my concerns regarding statements made by<br>President Bollinger, which the Provost would challenge and represent as<br>the media’s inaccurate rendering, soon there would be no further<br>communication with him. President Bollinger to this day has not<br>contacted me.<br><br>The Columbia Spectator ran an editorial asking me to respond to the<br>allegations. They wrote me and called me asking that I issue a<br>statement. I agreed with their editorial page editor, Rachael<br>Scarborough King, on the number of words and sent it to them. They<br>refused to publish it unless I cut it to 1600 words, 400 words below what<br>they had agreed to. I cut down my statement and resent it. They still<br>refused to publish it. The editorial page editor, Ms. King sent me an<br>apology about her sense of shame that the editor in chief “overruled”<br>her and refused to run it. I have kept our E-mail correspondence. I opted<br>to post my response to the allegations on my Columbia Webpage on<br>November 3, 2005, against the advice of the Provost, who counseled<br>that my silence was of more benefit to me. The Spectator would later<br>publish Charles Jacobs, the director of the David Project’s response to<br>my statement.25<br><br>Let me begin by responding to the claims put forward in “Columbia<br>Unbecoming,” both based on press reports and on the recent transcript<br>of the film made available on the web. I still have not seen the film. Let<br>me reiterate what I said in my statement regarding the claims put by the<br>students in the film:<br><br>I am now being targeted because of my public writings and statements<br>through the charge that I am allegedly intolerant in the classroom, a<br>charge based on statements made by people who were never my<br>students, except in one case, which I will address momentarily. Let me<br>first state that I have intimidated no one. In fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the<br>Israeli soldier who appears in the film and is cited by the New York Sun,<br>has never been my student and has never taken a class with me, as he<br>himself informed The Jewish Week. I have never met him. As for Noah<br>Liben, who appears in the film according to newspaper accounts (I have<br>not seen the film), he was indeed a student in my Palestinian and Israeli<br>Politics and Societies course in the spring of 2001. Noah seems to have<br>forgotten the incident he cites. During a lecture about Israeli state<br>racism against Asian and African Jews, Noah defended these practices<br>on the basis that Asian and African Jews were underdeveloped and<br>lacked Jewish culture, which the Ashkenazi State operatives were<br>teaching them. When I explained to him that, as the assigned readings<br>clarified, these were racist policies, he insisted that these Jews needed<br>to be modernized and the Ashkenazim were helping them by civilizing<br>them.[/b] Many students gasped. He asked me if I understood his point. I<br>informed him that I did not. Noah seems not to have done his reading<br>during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the assigned readings<br>by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew<br>the word “zayin” means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli<br>militarized masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned<br>material, mistook the pronunciation of “zayin” as “Zion,” pronounced in<br>Hebrew “tziyon.” As for his spurious claim that I said that “Jews in Nazi<br>Germany were not physically abused or harassed until Kristallnacht in<br>November 1938,” Noah must not have been listening carefully. During<br>the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of<br>Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized<br>racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which<br>preceded the extermination of European Jews. This information was also<br>available to Noah in his readings, had he chosen to consult them.<br>Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate<br>Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a<br>reprehensible equation.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br> There is much much more, but I think you get the general idea ?<br><br> Link; <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://censoringthought.org">censoringthought.org</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>/massadstatementtocommittee.html<br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=slimmouse@rigorousintuition>slimmouse</A> at: 2/28/06 11:46 am<br></i>