June 28, 2004

Education...Indoctrination, PoTAYto...PoTAHto

If this is what passes for higher education, then I'm a little ashamed to call myself a teacher.
Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism, according to Mr. Massad. He blames anti-Semitism on what he calls, "complicity between Zionism and anti-Semitism."

....Mr. Massad makes clear that the "resistance of Palestinians" should not be restricted to military targets but should also include "civil institutions." In keeping with this analysis, he hails terrorists who target Israeli civilians within Israel's 1967 borders as "anti-colonial resistors."

....Israel is racist, in Mr. Massad's view. This is Mr. Massad's conclusion from its not supporting an unqualified "right of return" of Palestinians to Israel. Mr. Massad rejects out of hand Israel's fears of being overrun demographically by an unfettered Palestinian right to immigrate, portraying this as another extension of "Jewish supremacy."

....In April 2002, Mr. Massad delivered a public lecture at a Columbia sit-in. During the lecture, he denigrated Israel as "a Jewish supremacist and racist state" and declared, "Every racist state should be destroyed."

....He gave a similar talk at Oxford University in March 2002, where he proclaimed, "the Jews are not a nation" and a "Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist."

You'd think the students would be up in arms at someone so obviously biased in the classroom. Well, a quick look at the Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability website shows that some do. Frighteningly, though, some don't.
Many students take offense at the very quality that makes Massad such a brilliant academic and honest, effective teacher: he neither claims nor supports purported academic 'objectivity.'

That just blows my mind. Now, you're probably a little concerned about it, but unless you're in the system, you can't understand how completely offensive that statement is. Never mind that the student apparently confuses education with indoctrination, can you imagine the outrage if this was going on about any other historical conflict? Take, for example, a white supremacist professor who "proves" to his students that blacks are an inferior race buy using "factual" material like slave diaries. "You see," he would say, "these miserable creatures could barely string sentences together. Look at that spelling! That grammar! Why, they're barely more intelligent than a good horse." Although the claim and the content differ, I find little difference between the methodology of the two arguments. And both arguments are vulgar, and professionally unethical.

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