By Salomon Benzimra
“There are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them” (George Orwell)
Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad is blind to reality. His virulent anti-Zionist streak leads him to the most laughable constructs: In “The last of the Semites,” Massad wants us to believe that the Zionist effort to remove the Jews from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (to save them from imminent extermination) is undistinguishable from Nazi anti-Semitism!
Two parties can be ferociously opposed to each other’s ideologies and yet unite temporarily to pursue a common strategic objective. If Massad is not aware of this reality, he should revisit WWII and extend his ludicrous parallels between the Zionists and the Nazis to the British-American Allies who pursued the same military objective as the Soviets, while they despised Stalin’s ideology. Is this too hard for Massad to comprehend?
It is clear that the sole purpose of Massad’s article is to delegitimize Israel. This tiresome propaganda – driven primarily by envy, and buttressed by bankrupt Marxist dogmas and their unholy alliance with radical Islam – has been peddled over and over again to little or no effect. Now, Massad tries a new thread, plucked out of ludicrous fantasies, without the slightest corroborating facts and with omissions galore not to disturb his narrative.
And so we read one enormity after another in Massad 4,000-word article:
- The ancestral connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel was concocted by the Protestant Reformation;
- Most Jews were opposed to Zionism, up to the 1940s;
- Lord Balfour was an anti-Semite;
- The Nazis and the Zionists showed “ideological similitude”;
- The totalitarianism inherent in Nazism and Communism was mere U.S. propaganda;
- The (derisively called) “Judeo-Christian civilisation” was the product of European and American white supremacy, now turned against Arabs and Muslims;
- The current relations between Germany and Israel are a continuation of past Nazi policies;
- Israel and Zionism were not the victims of Nazis because “[the Nazis] killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism”;
- The Palestinians are the only remaining “Semites” and the last remaining bastion against anti-Semitism;
- The Jews “have nothing to do with Palestine”;
- The Zionist project is aggressive, colonialist, imperialist and tainted by “racial discrimination”;
- The Jews had their “nations” in Europe before they “forcibly settled the land of another people”;
- Israel’s claim of being the land of the Jewish people is “the most anti-Semitic claim of all.”
And what is the main voice that Massad quotes to support his narrative? Yasser Arafat, in his speech at the UN in November 1974! In the wake of multiple plane hijackings, the massacre at the Munich Olympics and the murder of school children in Ma’alot – acts of terror committed by the PLO and its affiliates – Arafat delivered his infamous speech at the UN. This was the first time a terrorist leader was welcomed and applauded at the General Assembly. He rehashed all the Marxist buzzwords (aggression, imperialism, colonialism, racism, etc.) that he diligently learned from his KGB handlers to attack Israelis and Zionists, which he branded “terrorists [and] war criminals”. This is the kind of inversion of reality that Massad embraces in his fantasy world of historical revisionism.
Furthermore, in his desperate attempt to deny the Jewish people their national aspirations in their ancestral land, Massad declares that “the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine.” Quite an authoritative source! This blatant theft of identity from the Jewish people, which is still condoned with impunity in many quarters, is specifically hailed as an undisputed truth in Article 20 of the PLO National Charter (1968).
It must be hard for anyone to be proven wrong after a lifetime spent in defending a losing cause. The burning envy generated by Israel’s survival, progress and astonishing accomplishments against all odds in just a few decades must reduce its detractors to resort to claims of victimhood and self-righteousness, no matter how baseless. Massad does not hesitate to escalate the accusations directed against Zionism to ever more ridiculous levels: Now, the Zionists are the real Nazis and the Palestinians are the last remaining fighters against anti-Semitism! Considering the growing anti-Jewish indoctrination of Palestinian school children and the hateful admonitions contained in the Hamas Charter, Massad’s ludicrous claims are nothing but a thinly veiled burst of Freudian projection.
The unusual insistence on race-related notions in Massad’s article (no less than 18 instances) betrays an obsession dear to the anti-Israel crowd. Launched at the UN General Assembly in 1975 (Resolution 3379), the slanderous accusation equating Zionism – the legitimate national movement of the Jewish people – to racism is a reflection of the speech Arafat delivered at the UN a year earlier, and is now raised again by Massad (“European Jews … became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination”), even though this infamous resolution was rescinded in 1991. But anti-Jewish hatred never seems to go away. The “Zionism = racism” slander was revived at the Durban Conference in 2001, to give Massad and his fellow travelers a new lease on a life of hatred.
Massad cannot admit that the Jews have returned to their ancestral land and that the reconstitution of the Jewish State was enshrined in international law in 1920. This incontrovertible truth would blow his narrative to pieces and would deprive him of his raging outbursts against Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people.
I know it’s next to impossible to have a diehard propagandist acknowledge factual evidence, but can one still hope that a professor of Intellectual History at Columbia University is not totally impervious to established historical and legal facts? In his latest article, Massad offers only a crude sophistry that may be welcomed as profound insight by many among the biased Middle East academics who are, often wilfully, disconnected from factual reality.
Salomon Benzimra, P.Eng. May 18, 2013
Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights – CILR
@ Paul:
I wonder if Avraham would have passed the tests…
Keelie Said:
They have left Mexico now, Bangladesh is cheaper, and if the worked are killed who cares.
Anyone whose imagination is excited by this article ought to have a look at this article and the discussions about it here at the Jerusalem Post:
Israel, Zionism and the Diaspora: Who is a Jew” and the Conversion Problem
David Turner suggests that it is Israel’s obligation to allow anyone who is persecuted as a Jew to immigrate to Israel as a Jew. He seems to reject religious standards and the examination of religious belief as a standard of who is Jewish for purposes of immigration. Further, he seems to reject a religious basis for the existence of modern Israel at all. See the comments.
@ Honey Bee:
I’m in Canada. Try buying a Canadian-made snow jacket…
What bothers me most is that not only have we lost our manufacturing industries but we have lost the entire structure of expertise that supports all manner of manufacturing operations; from the buyers to the people on the shop floor. Among other companies, I once worked as an engineer for American-Standard, here in Toronto. Few people have any idea how breathtaking such a manufacturing operation is; the amount, level, and variety of expertise was staggering. I say “was staggering” because American-Standard no longer manufactures in Toronto; they manufacture and export to us from Mexico.
This is the only reason I question what Yamit says. No matter how many wonderful tradesmen one trains, such tradesmen are useful only if they are employed. Then, of course, if manufacturing is relatively minimal in North America, where will wannabe tradesmen get the apprenticeship they require?
Keelie Said:
Keelie Said:
I was a Liberal Arts Major,I love learning all sorts of things, grades mean nothing to me, I am a garbage dump of useless facts. I tell every young person I meet, LEARN SOOMETHING USEFUL!!!!!!!
The only way professors of liberal arts can keep their useless jobs ,in today’s economic environment, is to express something so outrageous they can’t be fired. Then some liberal Jewish Lawyer will defend the professor’s constitution rights. That way everybody eats.
@ yamit82:
Moving along…
Having “workforce skills” requires that there are jobs available for people who have such skills. Most (but not all) of such jobs are based within manufacturing industries. Need I go on?…
@ yamit82:
This is highly relevant. Why on earth do parents send their offspring to study Liberal arts at any university? More to the point; why on earth are young people of dubious intellectual capacity allowed entrance into so-called “institutions of higher education”? I think we know the answer to this question…
Extrapolating from the above:
If the objective is to fill minds that have few, if any, powers of mental discrimination (see above), it works!!! We now have hordes of people with useless “degrees” who are committed to a virulent anti-Israel attitude, and no matter how insane the basis for this attitude, it will not be broken using rational argument or thought… because it didn’t get into these minds using rational argument or thought. Add to this, the fundamental employment problems which these folks will have to contend with, as Yamit says, and we have a real problem.
@ Salomon Benzimra:
53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed
Are degrees worth the debt?
Example: Master’s in public health from University of South Carolina; Bachelor’s in biology from Clemson University Debt-$72,800
Employment after graduation $ 7.20 per hour.
2 years ago McDonald’s advertised nationwide for 68000 workers, over 1.2 million applied.
There are skills in demand, paying high wages like welders,electricians, plumbers and auto mechanics… Traditional craft skills.
If a student majors in any of the Liberal Arts, he can use his degree to wrap fish in it.
Yet Columbia and too many other institutions of higher education keep employing the most unqualified. They in turn teach useless subjects of no economic value to the student, the University and colleges yes but not the student grad.
I think Germany has the answer in teaching needed workforce skills through a program of on the job training.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Unfortunately yes, CuriousAmerican. He was granted tenure four years ago.
It tells you something about the sorry state of Ivy League Universities in their Humanities departments.
Sheer idiocy. Some of the Reformers, such as Luther, were notorious anti-Semites
Not opposed as much as unconcerned. Jabotinsky begged them to leave Poland while they could. They would not listen.
That may be true. I have seen that from many sources. I do not know how valid it is.
No! Stern tried to negotiate with them, though. But most Zionists were leftists.
This is an insane charge. Nazism and Communism were inherently totalitarian.
Insane.
Insane.
I know where he gets this. He assumes most of the Haredit of Poland were of a Satmyr anti-Zionist streak. That is insane.
Idiocy. What about the Saudis?
Idiocy!
Since it is a return, it can’t be colonialist; though Jabotinsky said colonialist techniques might have to be used.
Outright lie.
Lie!
Does this man have tenure?!
Why is he teaching at Columbia at all.
It is not “academic stupidy”. It is faux academics.