Tag: Joseph Massad

The madness of Massad

On By Martin Kramer

James Panero, art critic and associate editor of The New Criterion, recently reviewed Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism. He now makes this comparison between Said and Columbia assistant professor Joseph Massad, who stands accused of browbeating his students. (Venue: Armavirumque, weblog of The New Criterion.)

The difference between Professor Massad and Edward Said is one of intelligence. Said was brilliant at constructing political causes out of “humanistic practice.” His personality was informed by a sort of demotic form of nineteenth-century Romanticism. He relied on the claims of “otherness” in order to slide over the shallowness of his arguments. Joseph Massad, however, is rather more dimwitted than all that, but he does an (unintentional) service in exposing the underlying thuggishness of Saidian logic. The meandering rhetoric–let alone madness–of Massad’s personal manifesto, published on Columbia’s computers, should be cause alone for questioning his employment at a top university. His arguments are not meant to foster debate but crush debate by abnegating a student’s rights to a fair discussion. How can you debate a madman, or at least mad arguments? Professor Massad has taken away not just the freedom of speech but the freedom of discussion from students, all the while claiming that he (a tenure-track professor) is the beleaguered agent facing down intimidation (from powerless students).

Saving Private Massad

On By Martin Kramer

Fiascos at Columbia University follow one another in a dizzying succession. This week’s episode opens tonight at the Law School, where four academics will solemnly consider a burning question. No, it’s not how to jump-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which is the present mission of armies of diplomats and statesmen. It’s this: “Is the two-state solution still the best hope for Palestinians and Israelis, or is time to begin working toward a one-state option?” On Morningside Heights, some people ponder this over their cornflakes.

The correct answer, in case you were wondering, is that the right time isn’t now or ever. The binational “one-state option” is a thin euphemism for the elimination of Israel and its total replacement by Palestine, which would invite “back” several million Palestinians eager to realize their “right of return.” Those few Israelis who have heard of the idea shrug it off as a joke, and no responsible Palestinian faction advocates it, because it defies common sense and popular will on both sides. It’s a bit of secular messianism, which if it were ever made operational would produce a few more generations of blood and fire. It properly belongs on the same shelf of “solutions” as the “transfer” of Palestinians across the Jordan River or the Hamas vision of a Jew-free Islamic state. It’s crackpot.

So the idea would consign millions of people to endless bloodshed. Is that a reason for intellectuals not to champion it? In Edward Said’s declining years, when he took on the aura of a prophet, he veered toward the “one-state solution.” Unfortunately, he never really thought through its implications for the Jews. “The Jews are a minority everywhere,” he told an Israeli interviewer. “They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.” When the interviewer asked him whether a Jewish minority would be treated fairly, given the region’s past history, Said offered this bit of rigorous thought:

I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe, but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.

It worried him? He wondered what would happen? How many Israeli Jews would sign on to that? Said never managed to persuade even his one Israeli soulmate, Daniel Barenboim, that his messianic fantasy was workable.

But academe has never lacked for people willing to follow Edward Said off a cliff, and assorted acolytes have since cogitated, speculated, and elaborated upon his half-baked idea. Palestinian intellectuals living abroad have flocked to it because it makes their impassioned hope for the demolition of Israel look fashionably progressive: The Israeli Jews don’t have to leave, they can live comfortably as a minority among us. (I have the uneasy feeling that they don’t worry as much as Said did about whether that would really work.) A handful of Jewish and Israeli intellectuals have also taken up the idea, because… well, go figure. It gets them written up in the Haaretz Friday supplement, for a weekend of fame.

The mission of this cult is to establish that the “one-state option” wasn’t simply the hallucination of the Morningside messiah, but that it’s a genuine program (unlike, say, “transfer” or an Islamic republic), deserving of inclusion on any panel devoted to “alternative proposals for Middle East peace.” That’s the sub-title of tonight’s Columbia panel, and to judge from its co-sponsors, the cult members have achieved their initial goal. The prime mover behind the panel is Qanun, a group of Arab students at the Law School, but co-sponsors include the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA; Lisa Anderson, dean), the Middle East Institute (Rashid Khalidi, director), and the office of the chaplain. That’s the backing of social science and God right there.

But there’s another goal, more immediate in the Columbia context, and I think it’s this: to save the besieged Joseph Massad, assistant professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and the prime target of Columbia’s investigation into faculty abuse of students over Israel.

Since coming to Columbia, Massad has modeled himself on Said. But the result has been a crude parody of Said: Massad’s extremism is unmitigated by finesse or nuance. He once denounced Israel as racist twenty-two times in a single mind-numbing op-ed. His forthcoming book, for which he hopes to get tenure, is an attempt to redefine Zionism as “an anti-Semitic project.” He has compared Ariel Sharon to Goebbels. He has written that Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israel are “the most powerful anti-Semitic group worldwide.” (All references here.) The student charges against him are plausible precisely because he reads like a man who has lost all control of his rage.

When Said was around, he could shelter Massad and see to his needs under one roof—a Columbia doctorate, publication by the university press, and a first appointment in a Columbia department. Were Said still around, he would have quashed the present controversy with one sharply-worded essay in the Ahram Weekly, sending everyone at Columbia scurrying back into their burrows. But Said is gone, the students and some faculty have gotten their courage back, and it’s now a level played field. So how is Massad to be saved?

By including him, as the announcement of tonight’s panel does, among a group of “eminent” scholars in an event co-sponsored by reasonable people. By framing the event in a way that seems to locate Israel’s elimination within the field of mainstream debate. By positioning him alongside an Israeli of comparable extremism (Haifa University’s Ilan Pappe, en route to participate in “Israel Apartheid Week” in Toronto). And by putting him up there with Rashid Khalidi, who will say that Massad’s vision could become the only option if Israel doesn’t concede, concede, concede. (The Princeton medievalist Mark Cohen also appears on the panel. He’s window-dressing.)

So SIPA and the Middle East Institute have affixed their names to an exercise in quasi-academic extremism, which legitimizes the case for dismantling Israel and throws a lifeline to the professor who champions it. There’s no surprise in any of this: it’s Columbia. What did surprise me was the news that Columbia wants to raise millions of dollars for a chair and a visiting professorship in Israel studies.

My question to Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is this: do you mean the two-state-solution Israel, or the one-state-solution Israel/Palestine? And if it’s the latter, or something in between, are you going to use that money to sponsor events like this evening’s timely discussion? Or bring over more Israelis in Maestro Barenboim’s wake, to pay tribute to “my dear Edward” in the Said Memorial Lecture? Or bring Joseph Massad and Ilan Pappe together to co-teach Massad’s course on “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society”? (You know, the one with the blunt disclaimer: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.”) Or develop new trendy courses like the one being offered this semester by another Said acolyte (an Israeli Arab) on “Cultures of Colonialism: Palestine/Israel”?

Sorry to ask all these pesky questions, but like Edward Said, I tend worry a great deal about the Jews.

Morning-after update: Here’s a report on the panel proceedings from the Columbia Spectator. Only one of the four panelists (Cohen) is reported to have supported a two-state solution, and he spoke off-topic. The Spectator: “Khalidi and Massad agreed with Pappe’s assessment that a two-state solution is a ‘utopian vision’.” A two-state solution is utopian! If the report is true, then Khalidi has abandoned his past position in favor of Said’s folly. Otherwise, everyone was perfectly true to form: “The panelists attacked Israeli racism as the root of conflict.” Of course. It’s Columbia.

Further update: Mark Cohen corrects the Spectator: “I in no way and in no words associated myself with that view [‘the reality is defined by Israeli racism’], which was most vociferously presented by Professor Massad.” Glad to learn it.

Edward Said and Twelve Disciples at Post-Orientalist Passover

On By Martin Kramer

Today, Columbia University marks twenty-five years to the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism, with a day of lectures at the Casa Italiana. Twelve panelists and discussants will consider the book and its author, who will offer his own concluding remarks this evening.

Don’t expect a critical appreciation of Orientalism and its influence. These are Said’s academic admirers and acolytes, who have come to adore him. It’s a familiar ritual. The Daily Star in Beirut (March 27) reported his most recent appearance at the American University with a sense for atmosphere. “The wired crowd, the dough-faced groupies, the misunderstood artist, the ritual riffs of emotion, moments of clarity—it was all there, and in stereo.” During Said’s speech, “the young and the not-so-young nodded hypnotically to his five-syllable words.” He carried himself “like the star who keeps a seductive, almost annoyed distance from the devotions of his congregants.” I’ve seen this performance in person on a couple of occasions, and the description rings true. No doubt there will be more of the same this evening.

Five years ago, the Middle East Studies Association held a plenary session in honor of the book, and Said said one interesting thing about it. He conceded that at the end of the day, he was also a philologist, and that Orientalism, like orientalism, was a philological exercise in textual exegesis. Orientalism is usually regarded as a revolution against the preeminence of philology—an abandonment of dry texts and a reengagement with the living Middle East. The problem is, the book is focused rather narrowly on the interpretation of texts, most of them works of Western literary imagination without documentary pretensions.

It is this preoccupation with how we see them—one that now pervades fields like Middle Eastern studies—that has opened a chasm between the East as it is studied, and the East as it is lived. Middle Eastern studies have become self-obsessed and self-reflective to the point of distraction. And at that point, they no longer have anything to say to anyone outside Western academe. Said excepted, the post-Orientalists have a negligible presence in the American public arena.

Nor do they have much stature over there. Whatever one might think of the old orientalists, Arabs and Muslims could and did read them. By contrast, the published translation of Orientalism into Arabic is so obtuse that even Said has felt the need to apologize for it. Post-orientalism feeds many mouths in Western academe, for which the participants in today’s meeting are suitably grateful. Whether it has done anything for enhanced understanding between East and West over the last quarter-century is a question.

So philology replaces philology, bias replaces bias, professors replace professors, and the wheel turns. After twenty-five years, the Saidians are the greying establishment in a range of fields. I predict that within ten years, they will be turned out of my field, Middle Eastern studies, by a new generation for whom Orientalism already reads like a cuneiform inscription. The gap between its third-worldist premises and verifiable reality has become so wide that another approach is bound to unseat it.

In honor of the “Silver Jubilee” of Orientalism I offer my on-line readers, for the first time, the full text of “Said’s Splash,” which is chapter two of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. It’s devoted to the influence of Orientalism upon Middle Eastern studies. Click, read, ‘n weep.

ASIDE: One of the things I did learn from Orientalism was that the most effective way to damn someone is to quote him. Said, in his walk through the valley of orientalist texts, left no quote unturned. I recently deployed this technique in dealing with one of today’s discussants, Columbia’s Joseph Massad, who wrote an anti-Israel article in the Ahram Weekly full of self-incriminating hyperbole. All I had to do was quote him.

Now Massad has replied, also in the Ahram Weekly, in an article loaded with sweeping assertions. According to Massad, I am “keen to defend Israel’s prerogative to kill and bomb anyone who stands in its way.” I seek to “extend Israeli violence to the U.S. academic arena.” I have “not yet eliminated anyone physically,” but I and my “young dupes” have the “express aim of imploding freedom.” I am guilty of “virulent anti-Arab racism.” And so on.

What disappoints me about this rambling text of 2,300 words is that Massad does not quote me even once. Of course, nowhere have I written that Israel has the “prerogative to kill and bomb anyone,” but surely I must have written something worth quoting, even out of context, which would damn me. Massad, alas, has failed to master the ingenious technique of Orientalism, despite reading and rereading it. (He’s also failed to learn from Said that you lie low until you have tenure, but that’s another matter.)

It’s just another reminder that the unique and irreplaceable Edward Said will have no successors. The Daily Star likened Said’s recent Beirut lecture to “an American rock concert for the learned and the not-so.” An apt comparison—and when Said is gone, we’ll be left with the Edward impersonators.