Popular columnist Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted sarcastically: “Congratulations, al Jazeera: You've just posted one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent memory.”
While a lot of people
agreed with Goldberg and either retweeted him or posted similar tweets,
it is debatable if Massad’s latest Al Jazeera column was really
so much worse than the many others that reflect his obsession with
Israel. As I have documented only recently, Massad’s writings on Israel
can easily be confused with material from the neo-Nazi “White Pride
World Wide” hate site Stormfront – and at least in one case, he actually
did write a passage that closely resembles a Stormfront post that is
taken from David Duke’s notorious “minor league Mein Kampf.”
It was therefore arguably long overdue that people finally noticed that Massad was using his Al Jazeera
columns to spread his vicious views on Israel and Zionism. In his
latest lengthy and rather incoherent screed, Massad tries once again to
resurrect the “Zionism is racism”-equation with the added twist of
insisting that Zionism is really Nazi-like racism. This brings Massad to
the utterly ridiculous conclusion that
“Israel and the Western
powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to an international principle
around which they seek to establish full consensus. They insist that for
there to be peace in the Middle East, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims
must become, like the West, anti-Semites by espousing Zionism and
recognising Israel’s anti-Semitic claims [i.e. Israel’s right to exist
as a Jewish state].”
Furthermore, according to Massad,
“the Palestinian people
and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews […] are […] the heirs of the
pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against anti-Semitism and its
Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their resistance that stands in
the way of a complete victory for European anti-Semitism in the Middle
East and the world at large.”
It is almost amusing that
Massad insists that “the Palestinian Authority and its cronies” are not
part of this oh-so-noble tradition of opposing the kind of antisemitic
Zionism that is the product of his fevered imagination. But of course,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Columbia University professor
Joseph Massad clearly share a fondness for the “historical narishkayt” that there was some sort of cozy “relationship between Zionism and Nazism before World War II.”
Indeed, Massad – who works at Columbia University as an expert on “modern Arab politics and intellectual history” – faithfully reflects the antisemitic demonization of Israel that is so commonplace in the Arab media and that keeps poisoning Arab politics.
In reaction to Massad’s
latest screed, many on Twitter dismissed his vicious views as proof of
his ignorance, and a widely recommended post by Liam Hoare
opened with the verdict that “Joseph Massad’s op-ed, ‘The Last of the
Semites’, demonstrates above all that the Columbia professor knows very
little about not a lot.”
But while Hoare does a
good job demonstrating that Massad’s views amount to “a total perversion
of Jewish history and what Herzl actually thought and wrote,” it’s safe
to assume that Professor Massad thinks of himself as a foremost expert
on Zionism and Israel. Indeed, his Al Jazeera columns on these
subjects usually include a reference to his book on “The Persistence of
the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians,” and
it turns out that this spring semester, Massad is also teaching a course that covers some of the very subjects he knows so “very little about.”
Unfortunately, it’s hard
to avoid the conclusion that Massad’s students are likely to learn how
to present Zionism as “a total perversion of Jewish history and what
Herzl actually thought and wrote.”
Whether the resulting ideas are articulated in a Columbia University classroom or on Al Jazeera
or Stormfront makes little difference as far as their substance is
concerned. I tried to illustrate this point in my recent post on Massad
with some quotes (I have added here two more) that are either from
Massad or from Stormfront – see if you can tell them apart:
1) “Nazism was a boon to Zionism throughout the 1930s.”
2) “For all intents and purposes, the National Socialist government was the best thing to happen to Zionism in its history.”
3) “In Germany, the average Jews were victims of the Zionist elite who worked hand in hand with the Nazis.”
4) “Hitler could have
just confiscated all the Jewish wealth. Instead he used the ‘Haavara
Program’ to help establish the State of Israel.”
5) “Between 1933 and
1939, 60 percent of all capital invested in Jewish Palestine came from
German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement.”
6) “In fact, contra all
other German Jews (and everyone else inside and outside Germany) who
recognised Nazism as the Jews’ bitterest enemy, Zionism saw an
opportunity to strengthen its colonisation of Palestine.”
7) “Zionists welcomed the
Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. Like the Nazis, they believed in
race-based national character and destiny. Like the Nazis, they believed
Jews had no future in Germany."
8) “the Zionist
Federation of Germany […] supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they
agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable
races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological
similitude."
9) “Zionism […] developed
the idea of the first racially separatist planned community for the
exclusive use of Ashkenazi Jews, namely the Kibbutz.”
10) “The Zionists were afraid that the ‘Jewish race’ was disappearing through assimilation.”
Needless to say, Massad and his admirers who enthusiastically endorsed his recent column – among them Max Blumenthal of Mondoweiss, Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, and the “Angry Arab” Professor As’ad AbuKhalil – would all insist, just as Massad claims in his Al Jazeera
piece, that their staunch anti-Zionism means quasi by definition that
they can’t be antisemitic, even if they propagate the same perverted
tropes that are popular on Stormfront.
