(The Lion) — A professor at New York’s Columbia University has resigned after the school announced a class on Zionism will be taught by someone who supported the Hamas terror attacks on Israel.
Adjunct professor Lawrence Rosenblatt resigned upon learning that Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, will be teaching the controversial course.
“Columbia has lost not only its moral compass but its intellectual one,” Rosenblatt said in his resignation about the Massad course, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Zionism is the movement that eventually created the state of Israel. It was given impetus by antisemitism that led Jews to seek their own nation state.
Massad called the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on innocent Israeli civilians “astounding,” “awesome” and “incredible,” reports the Post.
“I believe Israel is sincere when it says it indeed abides by Western liberal values,” said Joseph Massad via Electronic Intifada. “One of which is genocide, one of which is settler-colonialism, one of which is utter racism and racial contempt for its racial inferiors.”
Massad also railed against the principle of “self-determination,” the bedrock of voting in democratic republics.
Rosenblatt said he could see Columbia having a class that fairly teaches about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he draws the line at including someone who advocates for the genocide of the Jewish people.
“At best, perhaps one could tolerate a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict co-taught from the many diverse Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, though not by someone who advocates for the eradication of a group of people,” added Rosenblatt.
U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-New York, sarcastically asked what’s next for Columbia.
“David Duke teaching a course on antiracism,” said Torres on X, invoking the name of the country’s most widely-known and detested Neo-Nazi.
“Why should US taxpayers subsidize ideological indoctrination that glorifies the mass murder, maiming, mutilation, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis?” Torres asked.
His students don’t seem uniformly impressed by his teaching either.
“This was possibly the most offended I’ve ever been,” said one student at Campus Watch, at the Middle East Forum. “Massad does not even pretend to give the entire picture: he states that on the first day. Besides being offensive, is it really worth it to take a class that doesn’t tell you both sides of a controversy?”
Other students said he’s anti-U.S. and “openly engages in conspiracy theories.
“You’ll spend most classes wondering how an apoplectic rant about U.S. Foreign Policy that relates only vaguely to Plato or Aristotle is supposed to represent the ‘core’ of your Columbia education,” said another student.
In April, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, now President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the U.N., had a caustic exchange with Columbia’s president, Nemat Talaat Shafik, about Massad.
Stefanik complained that Massad was still on Columbia’s academic review board, even after the school’s president promised the professor was removed from those oversight duties.
“Her lack of action to combat antisemitism is exactly what has fostered Jewish hate on campus,” said Stefanik of Columbia’s president.
Columbia released a statement claiming the school “consistently condemned any celebration or promotion of violence or terror,” but in the interest of free speech they think it’s a good idea for Massad to teach his antisemitic class, which the school notes is an elective.
