Columbia University professor Joseph Massad will teach a spring semester class on the history of Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination, despite celebrating the October 7 attack and denying a Jewish link to Israel.
Massad, who is a “Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies professor,” will teach a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” which was last offered 25 years ago. The day after the October 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas, he posted an article on the radical anti-Israel website “Electronic Intifada” in which he praised the attacks, describing them as “stunning” and as a “victory for the resistance,” hailing the “jubilation and awe” of the Arab world.
Massad also enjoyed the panic of fleeing Israelis, and indulged the fantasy of Israel’s destruction through terror, writing that he hoped that “the colonists’ flight from these settlements [sic] may prove to be a permanent exodus.”
More recently, Massad appeared on a Pakistani podcast and claimed that European Jews had simply invented their link to ancient Israel — despite millennia of Jewish tradition, and documented migration back and forth to Israel.
The Columbia Daily Spectator reported last month that Massad’s appointment to teach a class on Zionism had met with protests, including the resignation of another professor, who said that the class discredited the entire university.
Jewish groups have also protested. Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest pro-Israel group in the U.S., wrote a letter to Columbia’s interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong, saying:
We were horrified to learn that Columbia University has decided to allow Joseph Massad to continue teaching a course on Jewish history and Zionism, scheduled for the spring semester, even though Massad has advocated for Israel’s destruction, praised terrorism against Israeli Jews, blamed Jews for antisemitism, denied the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel, and praised the terrorist group Hamas’s massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. The university’s decision is indefensible, and we urge you to rescind it without further delay.
Columbia’s former president, Minouche Shafik, was forced to resign last year after failing to contain the anti-Israel and antisemitic protests that swept her campus after October 7, 2023. Several other university officials were also forced to resign.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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