Hamas Loyalist Professor: Joseph Massad at Columbia University October 7th was “awesome,” “astonishing,” “astounding,” and “incredible.” by Sara Dogan
https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-joseph-massad-at-columbia-university/
#5: Joseph Massad, Columbia University
During the more than two decades that he has been teaching students at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, a professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, has accumulated a reputation as a notorious Jew-hater and an ardent supporter of the terrorist group Hamas. Yet it was an essay describing Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of innocent Israelis as “awesome,” “astonishing,” “astounding,” and “incredible” that finally forced the university to launch a half-hearted “investigation” into his behavior.
Massad’s long record of anti-Semitism is hardly up for debate. He denies the Jewish people’s historical connection to Israel, claiming absurdly that the very establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland was anti-Semitic because it differentiated Jews from other “white Europeans.” He has maliciously slandered Israel as a “racist settler colony” and has compared the Jews to Hitler’s Nazi party. In a speech given at Oxford University in 2002, Massad denied that Israel had a right to exist, claiming “The Jews are not a nation… The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.” This is the language of Nazism.
Massad’s comments on the October 7th terror attacks should not have come as a shock to the Columbia administration as he has repeatedly indicated his support for Palestinian terrorism against Israel, stating in a 2002 lecture that Israel is “a Jewish supremacist and racist state” and adding that “[e]very racist state should be destroyed.”
“It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up,” Massad said in another address, a clear endorsement of terrorism. The professor has also declared that the “resistance of Palestinians”—“resistance” is a well-known euphemism for terrorism among the pro-Hamas set— must extend to Israel’s “civil institutions” and he has referred to Palestinian terrorists as “anti-colonial resisters.”
In a 2006 article titled “Pinochet in Palestine,” Massad described the terrorist organization Hamas as the only group prepared to “defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation.”
Massad also has a record of promoting and acting on his anti-Semitism in the classroom. He was one of several Columbia professor profiled in the 2004 film Columbia Unbecoming which was produced by the David Project. The film exposed Massad’s anti-Semitic commentary in the classroom and his intimidation of pro-Israel students. According to witnesses interviewed in the film, Massad asked a Jewish student who had formerly served in the Israeli Defense Forces, “How many Palestinians have you killed?” and he ordered a female student to leave his class because she asserted the indisputable fact that – unlike Palestinian terrorists – Israel warns Palestinian civilians before launching attacks. In 2011, another Jewish student reported that she was discouraged by a Barnard Professor from enrolling in Massad’s class because it might be “uncomfortable” for her—an indication that the professor’s Jew-hatred extends to the students in his classroom.
Massad’s extensive catalogue of written work provides ample evidence of his Jew hatred and his sympathy for Islamic terrorism directed against the Jewish state. In a May 2013 editorial for Al Jazeera titled “The Last of the Semites,” Massad falsely declared that Jewish claims to Israel as their homeland originated only during the Protestant Reformation and argued that Zionism itself is anti-Semitic and a policy promoted by the Nazis.
In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians, Massad published an article calling the events of October 7th—events that included the rape and mutilation of women and the gruesome slaughter of children in front of their parents—“awesome” and “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” against “cruel colonizers.”
”The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding,” Massad wrote. In a section subtitled “Jubilation and Awe,” he added, “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.”
Former Columbia President Minouche Shafik—who stepped down from her post in August after widespread criticism of her failure to confront pro-Hamas riots and encampments on campus—testified before Congress in April that Massad was “under investigation” and that she was personally “appalled” by his comments.
Yet when asked why Massad was still permitted to teach students after praising Hamas’s massacre, Shafik responded, “In his case, he has not repeated anything like that ever since,” leading Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to respond, “Does he need to repeat stating that the massacre of Israeli citizens was awesome?”
Previous Articles in the Series:
#6: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Samer Alatout at UW-Madison.
#7: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Steven Thrasher at Northwestern University.
#8: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Noura Erakat at Rutgers University.
#9: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Jairo Fúnez-Flores at Texas Tech University.
#10: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Jeffrey McCully at Moraine Valley Community College.
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