Columbia University has a lot to answer for, but Joseph Massad, whom we wrote about here last year, has to be near the top of the list. Born in Jordan, he earned his Ph.D. at that New York institution and now holds a tenure-track position there. Nothing has halted his rise, and nothing has brought him down – even though he routinely says staggeringly ugly things about Jews, Israel, and America, and paints pictures of Jewish and Palestinian attitudes, and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that are utterly unrecognizable to clear-eyed observers of the real world. For him, Jews and Israelis are always bigots and aggressors, America uniquely and almost exclusively imperialist, and Muslims and Arabs are consistently nothing more than innocent victims.

But that’s only the beginning. Massad is one of those loathsome creatures who claim that it’s the Palestinians, not today’s Jews, who are the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. While erasing from history well-documented acts of Arab violence against Jews, he invents acts of Jewish anti-Muslim brutality. He has routinely equated Israel with Nazi Germany, described America as a primitive and barbaric sinkhole of “violent racism,” and whitewashed Islamic mistreatment of women while depicting the West as Ground Zero for misogyny. Whereas in fact Arab and Muslim leaders were friendly with Hitler and admired the Final Solution, Massad erases this history and invents a new one in which Zionist Jews were allied with the Nazis. Even though he’s gay, moreover, Massad approves of the abuse of gay people by Muslim individuals and governments, defending it on the grounds that homosexuality is a Western social construct and that Islamic authorities have the right to punish it vigorously in order to protect their culture and its values from being polluted by this alien form of immorality.

Massad’s latest masterwork is an essay that appeared on the viciously anti-Israeli website The Electronic Intifada on August 24. Entitled “Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Colonialism,” it was yet another effort on his part to twist facts and torture logic. “Much of the ongoing acrimonious and toxic debate in Britain about allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party,” Massad wrote, “centers on expressions of opposition to Israeli laws, policies, ideologies, actions and declarations.” He might have added that much of it also involves the articulation by Jeremy Corbyn and other Labour politicians of explicitly anti-Semitic sentiments. “When Palestinians resist Israeli colonialism and racism,” Massad goes on to assert, “they are not resisting the ‘Jewish’ character of Israel but its racist and colonial nature.”

Here, as throughout much of his oeuvre, Massad deep-sixes the systematic inculcation of Jew-hatred in Palestinian chilidren and the routine broadcasting by Palestinian media of blood libels, faked footage of non-existent IDF atrocities, etc. No, to believe him, the poisonous and irrational hatred for Jews that can be found among many people in Gaza and on the West Bank, and especially among Palestinian “leaders,” is merely a principled rejection of Zionism on the grounds that it is nothing more or less than a form of Western colonialism.

Asked about Massad’s essay, Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center dismissed him as “a denier of reality.” True enough. A writer at the Elder of Zion website also noticed that Massad, in the essay, played fast and loose with a quote from Winston Churchill in an effort to paint him as an anti-Semite. But so what? Massad is so far out there – so shameless a salesman of wholesale historical distortions – that it hardly makes sense to get very worked up at yet another Big Lie from this vile enemy not only of the Jews but of basic decency and truth itself.