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Israel lobby renews its assault on Columbia’s Joseph Massad with lies and fabrications

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30 December 2024

Ever since he obtained his doctorate in 1998, Joseph Massad has been a target of the Israel lobby inside and outside Columbia University. Earlier this year, the then president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, sought to save her own skin by fabricating claims against Massad in testimony before a deeply prejudiced Congressional Committee. The emptiness of the charges against him were exposed and the excellence of his academic contributions enabled him to carry on. But the lobby does not give up easily, and as this report in Mondoweiss describes, facts never seem to get in the way of its fabricated claims. It is at least some consolation that members of the Columbia Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine have responded vigorously to the mealy-mouthed and distorted statement on Massad issued by the University management.

Bogus Columbia “resignation” reignites Zionist smears against Joseph Massad

Ali Abunimah Lobby Watch 20 December 2024

Portrait of Joseph Massad standing in front of neoclassical building
Joseph Massad DIWAN5: A Forum for the Arts

Leading Israel lobbyists and at least one of their client politicians in Washington are mounting a renewed assault on Columbia University’s Professor Joseph Massad.

The pretext for the revived defamation campaign is the apparently bogus resignation of a Jewish adjunct faculty member supposedly outraged that Massad will be teaching a course on Zionism.

In fact, Massad has taught the course, titled “Palestinian and Israeli politics and societies,” since the year 2000.

“I hereby resign my position as a member of the Columbia University faculty, effective immediately,” Lawrence “Muzzy” Rosenblatt, wrote in a letter to university administrators that he posted on the social media site LinkedIn.

He added that he did so after learning that “a course on Zionism and the state of Israel will be taught this coming semester by Joseph A. Massad, who has advocated for the destruction of the state of Israel and celebrated the 7 October attacks.”

Rosenblatt claimed, “Over the past 15 months I stayed to teach because I believe the institution was not aligned with the hateful and destructive values of some who teach and study here,” and that by teaching he would not be “ceding the academy to those who spew evil.”

He asserted that “the institution of Columbia, in officially sanctioning this class and this professor, has harmed the academy it once was.”

Rosenblatt added that he would be “open to returning” if Columbia would “correct this travesty.”

“Resignation” from what exactly?

But there is far less to this supposed resignation than meets the eye.

Rosenblatt is a former New York City official who now heads a scandal-plagued government-funded housing charity.

Since 2022, Rosenblatt has also been an adjunct – temporary, part-time instructor – at Columbia.

Columbia’s official guide shows that Rosenblatt taught a course on nonprofit financial management in the fall 2024 semester.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Rosenblatt was not scheduled to teach any course in the upcoming spring semester.

Columbia’s faculty handbook states, “Adjunct faculty are appointed only for the period during which the officer is teaching or fulfilling responsibilities connected to their appointment.”

Rosenblatt did not respond to a request for comment from The Electronic Intifada asking him to explain what exactly he “resigned” from, given that he was not even scheduled to teach – and therefore would have had no position from which to resign.

He also chose to forgo the opportunity to explain why he had agreed to teach at Columbia in the first place when Massad had been teaching the same course for nearly a quarter century.

Rosenblatt beset by controversy

Given its reputation as one of the world’s leading universities, Rosenblatt is an odd choice to teach about the sound management of nonprofit organizations.

In 2021, the Bowery Residents Committee (BRC), the charity Rosenblatt has headed since 2000, came under fierce criticism from official auditors over its squandering of public money meant to provide services for homeless persons on perks for its own staff.

In 2019, the Office of the Inspector General of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority conducted an examination of how Rosenblatt’s organization was using a multimillion dollar government grant aimed at assisting unhoused people in New York City.

The inspector general observed that “BRC appears to be providing, at best, minimal outreach services – often turning away those apparently seeking assistance and, at worst, seemingly ignoring homeless persons seeking assistance.”

“I personally spent several hours inspecting Penn Station and saw individuals seeking food in garbage cans steps away from BRC’s office and homeless individuals lying on the ground directly outside BRC’s office – the door to which is poorly marked with no signage clearly stating that homeless outreach services are provided within,” Carolyn Pokorny, then the inspector general, wrote.

A full investigation published the following year concluded that the BRC program was “very expensive and its effectiveness minimal.”

And in 2021, the New York State Comptroller published a damning report recommending that New York City’s homeless services department recover more than $1.4 million in public funds that had been misspent by BRC or which could not be properly documented.

BRC disputed some of these findings while conceding that it needed to improve.

But given the persistent criticisms of his agency, perhaps a more appropriate course title should Rosenblatt ever return to Columbia would be “How not to manage a nonprofit organization.”

Israeli embassy joins smear campaign

Hollow though it was, Rosenblatt’s “resignation” publicity stunt has nonetheless produced numerous sympathetic headlines in pro-Israel publications, as well as outraged social media posts from Israel supporters lamenting Rosenblatt’s supposed resignation and decrying Columbia for not aggressively suppressing Massad’s academic freedom.

“It’s sad to see good people like [Muzzy Rosenblatt] leave Columbia because the university embraces radical anti-Zionists and Hamas apologists like Joseph Massad,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a major Israel lobby group, posted on Twitter/X on Monday.

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Allowing Massad to teach a course on Zionism would be offensive at any time, but after his post-10/7 comments, it’s incomprehensible and indefensible,” Greenblatt added.

Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, a notorious foe of Palestinian rights, chimed in with his own attack on Massad, claiming that, an “anti-Zionist teaching about Zionism is a little like a racist teaching about anti-racism.”

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-Even the Israeli embassy has gotten involved, only the latest example of Israeli foreign interference in American higher education with the goal of censoring free speech and critical thinking.

“The only course offered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Columbia was one taught by a professor who celebrated the events of October 7th,” Tel Aviv’s Washington embassy claimed in a post on Twitter/X.

It also includes a video featuring Israeli American professor Shai Davidai, containing misquotes and outright lies about an article Massad wrote for The Electronic Intifada analyzing the 7 October 2023 operation by Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza.

In the video, a woman interviewed by Davidai claims that “what he [Massad] wrote was that the scenes of, you know, corpses and burnt bodies and raped and mutilated women were awesome and made him feel jubilant.”

This is a lie.

Massad wrote no such words, but similar outrageous fabrications about his analytical piece have become a staple of right-wing and Zionist attacks on him and on Columbia University.

In the video, Davidai backs these completely fabricated claims which also reassert Israeli government atrocity propaganda and fabrications about mass rapes on 7 October.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-Davidai, who teaches business, was recently suspended by Columbia and banned from its campus for intimidation, harassment and other threatening behavior.

Students accuse Davidai of waging a harassment campaign targeting supporters of Palestinian rights and vulnerable students from marginalized racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Columbia slanders Massad, appeases Zionists

Joseph Massad has been one of the primary targets of the Israel lobby’s campaign against academic freedom and free expression in US universities for almost as long as he has been teaching at Columbia.

The relentless smears included a failed effort to block his tenure. This hate campaign orchestrated by leading Israel lobby groups has only intensified during Israel’s genocide in Gaza resulting in numerous death threats against the professor.

Minouche Shafik, the Columbia president who resigned in disgrace after ordering the New York police to attack her own students for protesting the Israeli genocide, also participated in the Zionist campaign against Massad.

Testifying before the US Congress in the spring, at a hearing replete with fabrications and slander from elected officials, Shafik and two Columbia trustees echoed Zionist lies about Massad and other Columbia faculty.

This was a futile attempt to appease anti-Palestinian inquisitors and Zionist donors.

Despite Shafik’s departure, the new Columbia administration is continuing her policy of appeasement towards pro-genocide organizations.

On Tuesday, Columbia released a statement claiming that “Massad’s statements following the terrorist attack on October 7th created pain for many in our community and contributed to the deep controversy on our campus.”

Nonetheless, the university asserted, “We remain committed to principles of free expression and the open exchange of viewpoints and perspectives.”

It noted that in addition to Massad’s longstanding course there are two other courses “on the subject of Zionism and the history of Israel,” which are “offered through Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.”

Some educators are pushing back.

The group Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is accusing Columbia leadership of “repeated oversights and double standards when dealing with both on- and off–campus anti-Palestine agitators who have blatantly misrepresented, slandered, harassed and doxxed scores of faculty and staff for their own ideological and political purposes.”

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In a letter to administrators published Thursday FSJP slams the Columbia University statement, noting that it “misrepresents Professor Massad’s course title and content” by “eliminating ‘Palestinian’ from the title and misrepresenting it as ‘one of three courses… on Zionism and the history of Israel.’”

FSJP also charges that the university “repeats the slanderous error that former President Shafik made” at the April congressional hearing, “chastising Massad not for what he had written but for what he was accused of writing.”

“By doubling down on the distortions of Professor Massad’s words, the university both violates Massad’s rights and undermines the historical record,” Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine adds.

Amy E. Hungerford, Columbia’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, did not respond to a request for comment about the university’s refusal to vigorously defend Massad’s academic freedom.

Two decades of Zionist attacks against Massad

The efforts to smear Massad, a leading intellectual historian and public intellectual, rely on gross distortions and fabrications.

In 1998, Massad obtained his doctorate with distinction from Columbia. His scholarship includes dozens of scholarly articles and four books, which are often credited by academic peers with redefining the subjects they study in multiple fields.

That global respect for his scholarship is manifested by the dozens of scholarly lectures Massad has given at universities around the world, from East Asia to South Asia and the Middle East to North Africa, across Europe and North and South America.

Massad is currently working on a new major book, a history of settler-colonialism around the world since the 17th century.

It is almost certainly the intellectual and academic stature enjoyed by Massad, an outspoken Palestinian American who refuses to be silenced, that galls pro-Israel campaigners.

The fact that he writes for a general audience, including a regular column in Middle East Eye, also makes him dangerous in the eyes of Zionists – especially since his articles are regularly translated into multiple languages.

Unable to challenge his scholarship, supporters of Israel’s genocide resort to promoting cheap stunts like Rosenblatt’s hollow “resignation” in the hope of generating tabloid headlines and outrage.

Despite their latest failure to prevent Massad from carrying out his academic duties and exercising his academic freedom, Israel’s warriors against free speech are unlikely to relent in their assault.

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