This is a professor who maligns Israel and has a fondness for Hamas, and yet Columbia University is about to give him tenure. I can hardly believe it.

There is a petition online to DISMISS PROFESSOR MASSAD, directed at President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University. Massad teaches Palestinian terrorism in the classroom. From the petition:

Professor Joseph Massad’s dismissal from his position as modern Arab politics professor at Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, (MEALAC) should be made an imperative at Columbia University. Massad could obtain a tenured position and in light of these facts, this is simply reprehensible:

Professor Massad is one of the school’s harshest critics of Israel, which he frequently describes as a racist and Jewish supremacist state.

He is often cited as the prime example by critics of Middle Eastern studies in America, who say the field has an anti-Israeli bent.

Thoroughly discussed in the documentary “Columbia Unbecoming” and in national media reports, Professor Massad has been quoted as comparing Israelis to Nazis and Prime Minister Sharon’s cultural views to those of Joseph Goebbels. He has reportedly refused to allow students to dispute his allegations of Israeli atrocities in class.

A student of Professor Massad, told the Jerusalem Post (12/31/04) that Massad shouted at her: “If you’re going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people then you can get out of my classroom!”

At a lecture at Oxford University, Massad declared: “The Jews are not a nation. The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist.” Perhaps the most notorious allegation against Massad involves a claim that (at an off-campus event) he refused to answer a question from an Israeli student unless that student told Massad how many Palestinians he had killed.

Richard Miniter on Joseph Massad at Pajamas Media and The New York Post.

* In class and in public, Massad has argued that Israel massacred Palestinians at Jenin in 2002. A UN investigation found no evidence of a massacre at Jenin.

* Writing in the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram, he suggested that Israel poisoned Yasser Arafat. He cited no evidence. In reality, Israel provided for Arafat’s medical evacuation to France.

* Massad claims “Jewish colonists [in Israel] were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews.” Note the false equivalency between British police and Jewish residents and the Nazis.

And, of course, there is no evidence of organized Jewish involvement. Indeed, the British also took armed action against the Jews.

Mistreating students: Over the last few years, a number of students have come forward to talk about how Massad treated them in the classroom.

The movie Columbia Unbecoming is about how Massad treates people who don’t have the terrorist viewpoint in his classroom; kids who have a different-than-Palestinian view of the Middle East.

Lovers of sharia law seem to run rampant among the halls of academe today…it is a shame that a one-sided, even terrorist view of the world is given not only a voice, but a soapbox at an Ivy League School, through the eyes of a Palestinian, soon-to-be-tenured professor.