Defend Columbia Professor Joseph Massad!

Down With Zionist Witchhunt on Campus!

Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 837, 26 November 2004.

We reprint below a corrected version of a New York Spartacus Youth Club leaflet issued on November 22. The original version incorrectly asserted that we would not sign the petition in defense of Professor Massad.

Columbia University is today ground zero in a right-wing witchhunt designed to intimidate and drive out any professor who does not toe the line of support to the state of Israel. The latest escalation was triggered by a squalid little film by the David Project, Columbia Unbecoming. It slanderously accuses Professor Joseph Massad, along with other professors in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) department, of "academic intimidation" of pro-Israel Zionist students. The New York City gutter press Daily News and the New York Sun have embarked on a vicious campaign against Massad and several other professors. The Sun, along with New York City Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, has explicitly called for Massad's firing.

With the screaming front-page headline "Poison Ivy: Climate of Hate Rocks Columbia University," the Daily News (21 November) featured a sinister "special report." In it, respected professors such as Massad, Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, George Saliba and Nicholas De Genova are denounced as "Columbia's firebrands," the "faculty with the most strongly anti-Israel views." The article is replete with alleged quotes from the professors described as "venom disguised as classroom instruction."

In response to the film, the Columbia administration has launched a formal investigation into the film's accusations and promised to "take whatever steps are necessary." Not content with this, the Democrat-dominated New York City Council has announced they will demand an outside investigation if the university investigation "comes up dry" (New York Sun, 12 November). Down with the Zionist witchhunt! Hands off Joseph Massad and the other professors!

The attacks on Massad and other professors are nothing less than a campaign to silence and drive out those who speak against the crimes of U.S. imperialism and its allies. Well before Columbia Unbecoming, Professor Massad, a contributing writer for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, had long been reviled by Zionists. In 2002 a Zionist think tank, the Middle East Forum, set up the Campus Watch Web site in an attempt to blacklist pro-Palestinian academics, whom it labels "apologists to terrorism." Professors such as Massad, Dabashi and Khalidi were listed on this site.

A regular recipient of death threats, Massad declared in his statement responding to the charges in the film: "With this campaign against me going into its fourth year, I chose under the duress of coercion and intimidation not to teach my course this year. It is my academic freedom that has been circumscribed. But not only mine." An e-mail to Massad by a professor of medicine, Moshe Rubin, expressed the real sentiments of the forces behind this campaign: "Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned. Get the hell out of America. You are a disgrace and a pathetic typical Arab liar" (Columbia Spectator, 27 October).

In the context of U.S. imperialism's bloody colonial occupation of Iraq and the post-September 11 bipartisan "war on terror," the forces of the far right are pushing to roll things back to the McCarthyite 1950s when Communists, leftists and even liberals were driven off the campuses while black students were excluded altogether. It was precisely the exclusion of black students that the racist anti-affirmative action "bake sale" sponsored by the Columbia College Conservative Club last semester was all about (see "Campus Right-Wingers Target Black Students," WV No. 821, 5 March).

Indeed, the principal instigators of these assaults on campus dissent, such as Campus Watch's Daniel Pipes, are closely linked to the Bush administration. Pipes is part of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which has included Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his lieutenant Paul Wolfowitz. The main force behind the right wing's bogus "academic freedom" campaign is racist ideologue David Horowitz. Horowitz carried out his own witchhunting tour of campuses in 2001, apologizing for slavery and attacking the gains of black struggle. He is involved in the highest councils of the Republican Party and is behind the grossly misnamed "Academic Bill of Rights." Horowitz touts the myth that conservatives are persecuted in American universities. The "Academic Bill of Rights" is in reality an attempt to provide the basis for a purge of the left from campuses, with demands for "duly authorized authorities" to snoop into tenure and hiring decisions. This bill was passed by the Georgia State Senate.

Disguising their witchhunt as a campaign for "academic freedom," this cabal of Zionist neocons, yellow journalists and government officials is in fact trampling the free speech rights of defenders of the Palestinian people, as well as any voice of dissent against racist U.S. imperialism. This includes leftists, radicals, black and minority students. Columbia Unbecoming specifically singles out the International Socialist Organization and attacks the campus left more generally.

Over 2,800 people have signed an Internet petition denouncing the attacks on Professor Massad. It is good that Massad's case has garnered support. The Spartacus Youth Club is signing this petition as an elementary act of solidarity with Massad, but we warn that the wording is based on a false conception that Columbia University is an ivory tower that exists to protect academic freedom. The petition states: "We call on President Bollinger to rise to the occasion and issue a categorical statement in defense of Professor Massad and against this campaign of defamation," and that these attacks "threaten the very ideal of a university as a place of open and vigorous intellectual exchanges." In fact, the "ideals" of elite universities like Columbia are to train the intelligentsia necessary for the maintenance of the capitalist system. This includes the next generation of cadre for the CIA and State Department, researchers for the "military-industrial complex" and union-busting lawyers. The campus administration exists to carry out this mission.

What is urgently necessary is for students and all those in the cross hairs of the witchhunt to mobilize in united-front protest in defense of the victimized professors and against the campus thought police.

Zionist Lies and Smears

The statement of Eric Posner, a former Israeli army medic and student of Massad's, demolishes the scurrilous charges in Columbia Unbecoming:

"I am a Jew, an Israeli, a Jerusalemite, and an American. As opposed to the interviewees in the film, ‘Unbecoming Columbia,' [sic] I am also a MEALAC major. Last year, I was approached by Ariel Be'ery [General Studies student body president and a Zionist activist involved in the film]. He wanted to hear my opinion about MEALAC and Massad, whose class I was enrolled in at the time. When I expressed my profound appreciation for Massad's critical approach and the multiplicity of perspectives that he offers in his classroom, Be'ery told me that he wouldn't be calling me back for a taped interview." [emphasis in original]

As an article in Jewish Week (29 October) based on interviews with more than two dozen other mostly Israeli and American Jewish MEALAC students stated: "Most of the complaints on campus appear to be from pro-Israel activist students not in the MEALAC program." According to Professor Massad's statement, only one of the students in the film even took his course.

The classic tool of the trade for the Zionists is the slander that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Massad's statement eloquently repudiated this claim:

"Unlike the pro-Israel groups, I do not think that Israeli actions are ‘Jewish' actions or that they reflect the will of the Jewish people worldwide! All those pro-Israeli propagandists who want to reduce the Jewish people to the State of Israel are the anti-Semites who want to eliminate the existing pluralism among Jews. The majority of Israel's supporters in the United States are, in fact, not Jews but Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites who seek to convert Jews.... Therefore, it is not anti-Semitism that offends pro-Israel groups; what offends them is anti-Israel criticism."

In fact the Zionists have always reserved special venom for Jewish historians who defend Palestinian rights, like Joel Beinin and Norman Finkelstein.

The current wave of attacks on Columbia professors is part of an ominous mobilization going back years, which escalated after September 11. In 1985 the campus office of globally renowned Columbia professor and prominent Palestinian activist, the late Edward Said, was firebombed. In 2000, after Said tossed a stone into Israel from across the Lebanese border, in a symbolic act of celebration of the end of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, the campus Zionists and the right-wing press, along with the Columbia Spectator, viciously attacked him (see "Columbia Spectator Witchhunts Edward Said," WV No. 743, 6 October 2000). Also the victim of a vicious witchhunt by the same reactionary forces was Professor Nicholas De Genova, for honorably speaking in favor of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Iraq at a 2003 campus antiwar teach-in.

Now there is the International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003, or House Resolution (H.R.) 3077, which was passed unanimously by the House and awaits a vote in the Senate. Several Zionist organizations are behind this piece of legislation, including the Anti-Defamation League and American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It would, if passed, among other things, lead to the establishment of a government "advisory board" including representatives of national security agencies to oversee federally funded university programs, especially Middle East studies. Professor Rashid Khalidi warned: "If implemented as its proponents intend, it would impose the pseudo-sciences of terrorology and the demonization of Islam and Muslims as integral parts of teaching and research about the Middle East" (In These Times Web site, 11 December 2003). Down with H.R. 3077!

Defend the Palestinians!

Key to defeating the witchhunt against Columbia professors and MEALAC is forthrightly taking up the defense of the Palestinian people. While the recent Zionist attacks have been spearheaded by forces of the far right, the Democrats are no less staunch supporters of Zionism and Israel than the Republicans. The Spartacus Youth Clubs have been active in protests around the country in opposition to the Zionist attacks on professors and student groups, from the banning of the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley to attempts to shut down conferences of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (see "Defend Pro-Palestinian Protesters!" WV No. 792, 29 November 2002).

The SYC intransigently defends the Palestinian people against Zionist state terror. At the same time, we defend the right of the Hebrew-speaking population as well to self-determination. Against all variants of nationalism, we counterpose a program of proletarian revolutionary internationalism. As we wrote in "Zionist Butchers Strike Gaza" (WV No. 834, 15 October): "The Palestinian nationalists have tried nearly everything to beat back the Israeli garrison state: from fighting to negotiating to appealing to the UN and Western imperialists, to now pathetically begging to simply be allowed to exist—and it has all been and will all be futile. So long as the national axis is emphasized, the situation will always be bleak and hopeless. But if the class axis is emphasized, there is at least a realistic chance at an equitable resolution."

The road to the social and national liberation of the Palestinian people lies through common class struggle by the Hebrew-speaking and Arab workers against both the Israeli and Arab ruling classes, who likewise are oppressors of the Palestinians. Only within a socialist federation of the Near East can the right to national self-determination for both the Palestinian and Hebrew-speaking peoples be equitably realized. The struggle to defend the Palestinian people must be linked to a fight against the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq. For a socialist federation of the Near East! Down with the U.S. colonial occupation of Iraq! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! Down with the Zionist witchhunt on campus!