On the status of the academy:

Massad's Theory: The Zionists Are The Anti-Semites
Crisis At Columbia

BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 22, 2005 The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/article/9516

"The Palestinian intifada against Israel may have been a blessing in
disguise for Jews, according to a Columbia University assistant
professor, Joseph Massad."


The excerpt above is a small portion of the terrific article that can be found at the link provided. For the record, the Palestinian intifada refers to the 4 year campaign of terror waged by Palestinian radicals (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the splinter Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, et al) against Israel, including attacks on civilians, some of which have been innocent children.

There is a tremendous problem in the academy today: radicalism and extremism masquerading as scholarship. There are many examples, Joseph Massad being perhaps one of the more glarring examples. Another example is that of University of Colorado tenured professor Ward Churchill who, in an essay published soon after September 11, 2001, likened the victims of the attacks to Adolf Eichman, the man widely considered to be the ultimate architect of Nazi Germany's genocide.

In the New york Sun article, Massad is explained to espouse the theory that Israel, the Jewish State that welcomed many refugees from Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust, is a state rooted in Nazi ideology and technique. Massad, the article explains, further contends that the Palestinians, whose claim-to-fame of recent memory has been the advent of a campaign of sustained suicide bombings against civilians including children, have assumed the role of the Jews circa 1940. That is, Massad contends that the Palestinians fill the role of helpless victims being slaughtered by the millions at the hands of Israel, who he contends has taken the role of the Nazis (slaughterer of millions based on ideas of racial superiority).

I do not wish to engage in a discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict here, but would prefer to discuss how this sort of concept, based largely on the paranoid theory and virulent anti-semitism of radical Islamic terrorism, has been passed off as an academic opnion rooted in sounds scholarship.

I would be curious to see the sources on which Joseph Massad based his outlandish remarks, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the majority of his footnotes would read "author's opinions".

My point is this: if America wishes to maintain its reputation for excellent institutions of higher education, we as a society must reexamine the ideas being spoused by our academics. It is one thing to allow leniency and bend over backwards, so to speak, to protect academic freedom and the Right to free speech, but there comes a time when Universities such as Columbia and the University of Colorado, Boulder must look at themselves in the mirror and ask "how much of what Joseph Massad and Ward Churchill are saying truly reflects the standards of academic integrity we expect from our Professors (or tenured professors as is the case of Mr. Churchill)?" Furthermore they must ask "at what point do we cease to allow radical individuals to use their positions as members of our distinguished faculties to espouse hate-filled and irrational ideologies from which no good scholarship can come?"

For more information on radical academics on U.S. Campuses, I recommend Campus Watch, a web site dedicated to monitoring radical professors in the United States and Canada.

Please stay tuned for a later discussion of the silencing effects such hostile and radical rhetoric can have on student populations in a discussion of when Free Speech may be curtailed in the name of Free Speech.