The New York Times Supports Thought Control:
The Massad Case

Edward S. Herman, ZNet

The New York Times has never been a very courageous newspaper in times of
political hysteria and threats to civil liberties. When Bertrand Russell was
denied the right to fill his appointment at CCNY in 1940, following an ugly
campaign by a rightwing Catholic faction opposed to his positions on divorce
and marriage, the paper not only failed to defend him, its belated editorial
called the appointment "impolitic and unwise" and criticized him for not
withdrawing when the going got hot ("The Russell Case," April 20, 1940).
Russell pointed out in a published reply something the editors had missed:
that there was a serious matter of principle at stake; that a withdrawal
would have been "cowardly and selfish" and would have "tacitly assented to
the proposition that substantial groups should be allowed to drive out of
public office individuals whose opinions, race or nationality they find
repugnant" (April 26, 1940).

During the McCarthy era also the Times failed to stand by its ex-Communist
employees who were willing to tell all to the Times officials, but not turn
informers. They were fired, and in its news and editorials the paper failed
to oppose the witchhunt with vigor and on the basis of principle. Publisher
Arthur Hays Sulzberger himself wrote an editorial assailing the use of the
Fifth Amendment in appearances before the House Committee on UnAmerican
Activities (August 6, 1948).

We are in another period of escalating attacks on civil liberties, with the
Patriot Act, a lawless rightwing administration, open threats to retaliate
against judicial failures to follow rightwing dictates, and perpetual
aggression to create the justification for repressive policies at home. An
important additional factor is the steadily increasing aggressiveness of
pro-Zionist forces, both in the United States and elsewhere, who have fought
to contain criticism of Israeli policies by any means, including harassment,
intimidation, threats, boycotts, claims of "anti-semitism," occasional
resort to violence, and other forms of pressure. While sometimes allegedly
based on the need for fairness, balance and truthfulness, these campaigns
are completely one-sided and are invariably aimed at suppressing alternative
views and inconvenient facts.Attacks on critics of Israel are of long standing – individuals like Edward
Said and Noam Chomsky have been vilified and threatened for years, and both
frequently needed police protection at speech venues, at work or at home.
The situation has worsened in the Bush-2 era, in good part because of the
cultivated hysteria of the "war on terror" and congenial environment
provided by Bush, the strengthening of the rightwing media, and the demands
imposed by Israeli policies. On the latter point, it has long been noted
that increased Israeli violence and land seizure, which causes greater
international hostility to Israel, induces a new protective response by
"defenders of Israel." In recent years nobody who criticizes Israeli
policies has escaped attack — not attack by intellectual argument, but by ad
hominem assault, spam invasions, the use of stolen addresses to embarrass,
threats, and campaigns to discredit and silence. For these attackers the end
justifies any means, including, of course, lies (for one episode in the
extensive lying career of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, see the
letter exchange between him and Noam Chomsky, Boston Globe, May 17, May 25
and June 5, 1973).

The Bush-Sharon era has witnessed the emergence of McCarthyite institutions
like Campus Watch and the David Project, designed to police academic Middle
East studies for un-Israeli-patriotic thoughts, putting pressure on
academics and administrators to intellectually cleanse, and providing
targets for vigilantism. There are even current proposals to legislate for
"balance" and "fairness" in Middle East studies both at the state and
federal level. These vigilante efforts and attempts to politicize the
university pose serious threats to free speech, academic freedom, and the
independence of the university. They are also threats to integrity and
truth, with the main target criticism of Israeli policy and with the aim of
making the official Israeli version of history the sole legitimate
narrative.

It is in this context that we must evaluate the Joseph Massad case, Columbia
University's handling of that case, and the New York Times' editorial on
"Intimidation at Columbia" (April 7, 2005). Massad, who teaches courses in
Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, and is critical of Israeli policies in
Palestine, has been under assault from pro-Zionist forces, in class and
outside, for years, although running an open class, tolerating hostile and
often irrelevant questions, many times by outsiders and "auditors," and with
a record of having never thrown anybody out of class for harassment (for
documents by Massad and others bearing on this record, see the links
provided at the end of this article).

In a decent and honest environment, concern about "intimidation" would focus
on the intimidation of Joseph Massad, whose life has been been made very
stressful and whose freedom to teach and effectiveness as a teacher has been
threatened by this campaign of harassment – and Massad and his students are
not alone in victimization by this campaign for the hegemony of an official
truth.

But in the indecent and post-Orwellian world in which we live, Massad is the
intimidator, several students he allegedly treated harshly are the true
victims, and justice demands an inquiry on this alleged intimidation and a
possible disciplining or firing of this intimidator. Thus, Columbia
University's administration, responding to the hegemony campaign in the
Daily News, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and by other organized
groups and individuals, appointed a grievance committee to look into the
allegations of intimidation of students by Massad and a colleague who have
failed to follow the official narrative. But this committee had no
instruction to consider the intimidation of Massad et al., although both the
committee and New York Times acknowledge that he and others have had their
classes "infiltrated by hecklers and surreptitious monitors, and they
received hate mail and death threats" ("Intimidation at Columbia"). Put
otherwise, the admitted systematic intimidation of the faculty, clearly a
threat to academic freedom and the possibility of honest teaching and
research, is off the agenda for an inquiry into intimidation; claims by
several students that are disputed and clearly part of a larger campaign of
intimidation involving Campus Watch, David Horowitz and other
nationally-based intimidators, must be taken seriously.

The Columbia grievance committee displayed bias by its willingness to accept
a one-sided assignment in which only student intimidation was at issue.
Their bias was also evident in their handling of the student complaints. The
two complaints about Massad were declared "credible" although made belatedly
and contested by Massad. The committee does not state explicitly that
Massad's denial in the classroom case was "incredible" and that Massad (and
his three student witnesses) lied, so "credible," undefined, appears to mean
not disproved and theoretically possible, and the committee's finding is
therefore not only asinine and damaging to Massad, it opens a Pandora's box
to future accusations of intimidation.

The "most serious" student accusation, which dates back to the Spring of
2002, was that Massad said to a student "If you are going to deny the
atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my
classroom." This statement was confirmed by one student and an outsider
allegedly present but unnoticed by others. Massad denied the accusation and
was supported by three students. The committee noted that the accusing
student didn't leave the classroom, and expulsion was contrary to Massad's
policy (with no such case ever reported). The student failed to complain in
2002 and did not mention the incident in her evaluation sheet for the
course. The other student accusation was not in a classroom, the time and
place were vague, and the alleged statement by Massad, while harsh was
conceivable in the heat of a private argument; but the student and incident
were not recollected by Massad. These incidents might have happened, but
they might not, and actual incidents might have been rewritten to serve a
political agenda. The grievance committee doesn't even mention these
possibilities, nor does it place them in the context of continuous
harassment and intimidation from the side of the purported victims that
might be considered to reduce their "credibility."

A third demonstration of the grievance committee's bias is its suggestion
that the failure of the student victims to complain earlier resulted from a
deficient grievance procedure at Columbia. The committee said that it was
only a "result of these failures that outside advocacy groups devoted to
purposes tangential to those of the University were able to intervene to
take up complaints expressed by some students." But not only is this a
fallacy in that there were several routes to complaint at the time these
incidents occurred, which the students failed to tap, the committee fails to
note the possibility that the absence of earlier complaints might be because
the incident or incidents didn't happen or were later inflated in
seriousness, constructed or made serious only as part of the escalating
attacks on Massad and other dissidents from the official line. The committee
premises the truthfulness of the complainants and ignores their possible
role in a larger campaign of suppression — that is, they fail to recognize
that the belated complaints may be part of the process by which "advocacy
groups devoted to purposes tangential to those of the university" have been
able to accomplish their ends.

Turning to the New York Times editorial, although noting in the penultimate
paragraph that the accused faculty members had had their classes
infiltrated, disrupted, and monitored by outsiders, and had been recipients
of hate mail and death threats, the editors do not criticize Columbia for
failing to act to prevent these numerous abuses threatening academic
freedom, nor do they even hint that any remedy was called for. This was
apparently acceptable intimidation, coincidentally carried out against
individuals challenging the official narrative that the New York Times
itself has adhered to closely (see my article on the media's treatment of
Israel's approved ethnic cleansing:
here). The editors focus on Massad,
allegedly "clearly guilty" of ill temper on two occasions, although under
continuous provocation over several years. The editors misrepresent the
facts even here – the grievance committee called the charges "credible," but
didn't explicitly deny the credibility of Massad and his witnesses. Neither
the committee nor editors had the integrity to note that the student charges
were old and that they might have been constructed as part of an organized
campaign of derogation; or that the methods employed in this campaign have
not been scrupulous, and that the incidents might have been edited or
entirely fabricated.

In its last paragraph the Times editors contend that the grievance
committee's mandate should have extended to the question of "anti-Israel
bias" and that Columbia should hire and fire "with more determination and
care." In short, the Newspaper of Record tells its readers that universities
should police thought to keep out unwarranted bias, which seems to pose a
threat in only one direction – the editors have never mentioned the
possibility of unwarranted pro-Israeli bias, which for the editors may be
inconceivable.

Joseph Massad is in good company. The editors of the New York Times found
Bertrand Russell unworthy of an appointment to CCNY based on his politics
and a bandwagon of hostile attacks. Sixty four years later they implicitly
call for the removal of Joseph Massad based on his politics and an organized
campaign of derogation. As Russell pointed out to the editors back in 1940,
it is contrary to the fundamental principles of a free society to drive out
of their position "individuals whose opinions, race or nationality they find
repugnant." This point remains valid even where done under the cover of
alleged "intimidation" by the victim being driven out.

USEFUL LINKS:

“New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt," Juan Cole, Informed
Comment, April 8, 2005

Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report
and Mark Mazower, Columbia University (28 March 2005)

"Columbia
Unbecoming" in the clear light of day, Monique Dols (5 November 2004)

"http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3282.shtml">Joseph Massad
responds to the intimidation of Columbia University, Joseph Massad (3
November 2004)

Columbia Considers
Limits on Political Expression at University, Jacob Gershman, The New York
Sun (19 April 2004)

Curriculum reform
should start in the U.S. and Israel, Joseph Massad (18 August 2003)

Policing the academy,
Joseph Massad (14 April 2003)

Can a
'Patriotic' Mob Take Over the Universities?" Baruch Kimmerling, Dissident
Voice

Columbia Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report.