Salacious and Phallacious: An Artifact of Columbia’s Worst Terrorist Professor
Flashback: one anti-Semitic Arab professor’s propaganda went well below the belt
In 2004, we set out to document harrowing accounts of Jewish students being harassed by Arab professors at Columbia. The result was Columbia Unbecoming, the first documentary to expose institutional anti-Semitism at an Ivy League university.
Today, 21 years later, Columbia is the epicenter of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and their various proxies’ takeover of American higher education.
One Columbia professor who made no secret of his support for Hamas after October 7 was Joseph Massad, who has taught as Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies since 1999. On October 8, 2023, he published a feverish rant in which he expressed “jubilation and awe” at the previous day’s genocidal events. Two decades earlier, he had written in Al-Ahram, Egypt’s partially government-owned equivalent of The New York Times, that Israel’s greatest achievement has been the “transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew.”
Less well known, however, is a sordid and (for Massad) embarrassing incident recounted in our film, in which then-student Noah Liben recalled a particularly vile and absurd assertion Massad made during a class.
According to Liben, Professor Massad once attempted to make a “linguistic” point about Zionism by saying that, in Hebrew, the word ziyon (which does not exist) supposedly means “penis” (which it does not). This was apparently meant to denigrate Zionism as but a middle school boys’ bathroom joke, but Liben and his friends pointed out that “Zionism” actually comes from the (real) word Tziyon (צִיּוֹן), referring to the Hill of Zion.
As pro-Israel advocate David Olesker sums up Massad’s penile pontifications, perhaps Massad was just “guilty of a phallucy.”
Boorish to be sure, but this is quite polite for an ideologue who has not only praised the October 7 massacre but claimed that the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century were actually the ones who first “link[ed] modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine” and that “[t]he Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts.” As the film demonstrates, he also has a long history of bullying outspoken Jewish and Israeli students who dare to question his honesty and professionalism.
Most importantly, Massad is among the most prominent heirs to the legacy of PLO propagandist (and certified fake Palestinian) Edward Said — friend of the young Barack Obama, arguably the founder of “post-colonial studies,” and mainstay of Columbia’s Middle East Studies scene from 1963 until his death in 2003.
Said’s pro-terrorist advocacy and hatred of both America and Israel long ago became foundational beliefs at Columbia, with his intellectual disciples like Massad due a great share of guilt for nearly 18 months of unrelenting campus jihad.
In other words, one could say that, through Massad and others, the late Said has been Columbia’s de facto president for decades.
Perhaps, though, given the Trump administration’s recent threats, “President” Said’s posthumous salary may endure a well-deserved circumcision.
