COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Palestinian professor who praised Hamas massacre in Israel to teach course on Zionism

Columbia University will offer a course on “Zionism” in spring 2025 taught by a professor who described terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel as “awesome.” The course…directly creates an environment of hate and bigotry against Jewish students.

The College Fix The professor assigned to teach the course is Joseph Massad, who also instructs Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia. Massad is known for writing an article for The Electronic Intifada the day after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, in which he described the event as “astounding,” “incredible,” and a “stunning victory.”

“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,” he wrote.

Yaakov Menken, director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, said, “Joseph Massad does not belong on the faculty of any serious academic institution.” “He believes that rape, beheading of babies, kidnapping, and mass murder are all legitimate ‘resistance’ to ‘Israeli settler-colonialism’— in other words because the victims are primarily Jews,” Menken said.

He also criticized Columbia for allowing Massad to teach the course because it is focused on a revisionist history in which a European “colonialist moniker, ‘Palestinian,’ applies uniquely to a subset of Arabs and excludes Jews.”

 

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George Mason University law Professor Adam Mossoff also condemned the course in a post on X, stating, “This means @Columbia university will now hire members of the Nazi party to teach the history of World War II and KKK members to teach post-Civil War history.”

In response, many have rallied behind an online petition that condemns Massad’s comments in his The Electronic Intifada article and demands his removal from the university.

The petition has garnered nearly 80,000 signatures and claims that many students “feel unsafe in the presence of a professor who supports the horrific murders of civilians.” “We call on Columbia University to hold Massad responsible for his comments and immediately remove him from the Columbia faculty,” the petition reads.

MEMRI Columbia University Professor of History Joseph Massad stated that “the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the Ancient Hebrews is, of course, a bogus claim.” He added that while some Jews may have had a religious or spiritual connection to the Ancient Hebrews, European Christians began suggesting in the 17th and 18th centuries that Jews originated from Asia in order to “estrange them from Europe.”

He further claimed that “it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak about Jews genetically” and that talk of a genetic connection between Jews and the Ancient Hebrews or Ancient Israel “became fashionable” only in the 19th century with the rise of biological sciences. He also stated that “Israeli propaganda” claims Palestinians are descendants of Arab colonizers, but asserted this cannot be true, as the Arab-Islamic conquest of the Levant and North Africa was not a settler colonialist project. Massad dismissed archaeological records as a “colonial venture.” He added that Palestinians are the only group in the region not allowed to claim the Ancient Hebrews as their ancestors because “some strange European group” is claiming them for themselves.

At the same time, Columbia temporarily banned an Israeli-born Jewish professor, who speaks out against the virulent anti-Semitism on the Columbia campus.