Talk:Joseph Massad

One of the reasons there was a petition calling for Massad's removal was the fact that he praised the October 7 terror attacks on Israel as "awesome", "astounding" and "incredible" and that they were a "stunning victory." This should be added to this wikipedia.. Apndrew (talk) 13:17, 19 June 2024 (UTC) ^[1]

I agree. Will be done. Vegan416 (talk) 14:30, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

He did not "praise" the attacks and has explicitly stated that he did not (see his response quoted in this article: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/joseph-massad-responds-fabrications-and-lies-about-him-congress). His original article was a descriptive account which stated that the videos were "stunning", that Israelis and Palestinians both found events to be "astounding", and that Palestinians and Arabs viewed the events as "incredible". This article has largely been misconstrued by people who have not read the article or do not understand the dictionary definitions of words like "incredible". It is problematic that his response to accusations he has claimed are defamatory is not included in this page, but instead the allegedly defamatory statement that he "praised" the attack is repeated here. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 21:40, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

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The statement: "There, his views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and surrounding topics caused controversy" in the biography section is uncited and doesn't seem to add anything to the article. Further, having an uncited source there to make Joseph Massad to seem like a controversial figure seems like a political statement. This sentence should be removed or cited. Is it really controversy if a bad faith actor attempts to stir the pot and make a controversy? 2607:F2C0:E042:9A0:1D1F:EBA8:896B:34CD (talk) 01:07, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

Not done. If you check the whole article, in the section Columbia Unbecoming it says: "Massad was the center of the Columbia Unbecoming controversy." We have an article about this controversy, and there are enough sources. Also the section is sourced. I wikilinked controversy though in the sentence that you wanted to be removed. Friendly, Lova Falk (talk) 15:12, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

Is it common that say "X blieves that" for saying "X says that" or "asserts" or "states". Seems strange to me an a wiki article. (On Israel and Zionism. Massad believes that) 2A02:8109:B6A2:5500:B47B:93F:648B:A4C1 (talk) 07:04, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Not sure whether it is common given that there are 7 million articles, but there are more than 10,000 articles that include statements of the form "X believes that" (search max is 10,000). I had a look at this article, and it looks like there's a bit of a "use every synonym for said" festival going on to avoid repetition. I can change them to 'has described', 'has written' if you like but I'm not sure it really matters much. I'm probably not seeing what you see. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:50, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

I have replaced two "believes". Lova Falk (talk) 12:46, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

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Description of suggested change: After "In a hearing before The House Committee on Education and the Workforce in April 2024, the president of Columbia University said that Massad was "spoken to" regarding this essay but that he was not disciplined" add the following:

Massad has responded that his article was deliberately misrepresented and that he has never supported terrorism, further adding that then-Columbia President Shafik "misconstrued what happened" when saying he had been "spoken to", implying he had been "reprimanded". He noted that his chair who had spoken to him, Professor Gil Hochberg, whom he noted is "incidentally" Jewish and Israeli, had in fact told him that in view of the campaign "distorting" his article, he had read it and "found it descriptive and did not contain praise for the 7 October attack".^[1]

Diff:

Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 01:37, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Not done Hi Mingusmingusmingus67 A blog in The Electronic Intifada (EI) that we have redlisted as a generally unreliable source can not be the source for information in this article. Please feel free to make a new edit request in case you find a reliable source for the changes you would like to make. Friendly, Lova Falk (talk) 10:16, 23 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. If you would prefer a secondary source, see this summary of his very same statement from the Bwog: https://bwog.com/2024/04/columbia-president-minouche-shafik-testifies-before-congress-in-antisemitism-hearing/. In addition, see this partial summary from the NYT: Stephanie Saul, "Who Are the Columbia Professors Mentioned in the House Hearing?", New York Times, 17 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/nyregion/jospeh-massad-katherine-franke-mohamed-abdou-columbia-university.html.

I must say, however, that articles published by Mr. Massad in the EI are already referenced in this very same Wiki page (footnotes 30 and 33), so it is a bit bizarre and inconsistent to draw the line when it comes to an official statement by Mr. Massad which is published in the same outfit and corrects what are quite clear (from reading the original article) factual mistakes in the summary of the article contained in this Wiki. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 02:56, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

I should also add that if the (rather farfetched) insinuation in not wanting to reference his full statement published in the EI is that the EI might have entirely made this up, the same logic would likewise apply to his original article in the EI, in which case it should not be mentioned at all in this Wiki page. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 03:01, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

And here is another source on Mr. Massad's statement: Ryan Quinn, "Columbia President Accused of Dishonest Testimony, Throwing Professors 'Under the Bus'", 19 April 2024, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/04/19/columbia-president-accused-throwing-profs-under-bus Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 03:12, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

I must say, however, that articles published by Mr. Massad in the EI are already referenced in this very same Wiki page (footnotes 30 and 33), so it is a bit bizarre and inconsistent When asked to do an edit on behalf of an editor who cannot make this edit, I judge both the requested edit and the source, and only if I think both are good, I will make this edit. In this process I do not scrutinise the whole article and check all the sources that are used there.

I should also add that if the (rather farfetched) insinuation in not wanting to reference his full statement published in the EI is that the EI might have entirely made this up, I did not insinuate anything, I just try to avoid making edits confirmed by unreliable sources.

Anyway, I’ve hit a bit of a wall with this request, so any other e-c editor who comes along, please consider this request. I have changed the request back to unanswered. Lova Falk (talk) 09:02, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

There is, in my mind, a fundamental difference between citing an original statement by Mr. Massad, published in the EI and citing the EI as a news source. Directly referencing his statement which was reproduced in full there is no different than pointing to opinion pieces which he published there (as this Wiki does elsewhere). Anyway, if you prefer to add secondary sources as citations, I will make a separate suggested edit request below. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 21:57, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

The following are more fulsome edit with additional sources added. Note that I have retained EI cites where this is to Massad's own words published in the EI (as an opinion piece or his official statement, which is fundamentally different than citing it as a news source) but have also added additional secondary sources.

This sentence currently in the Wiki page "In October 2023, Massad wrote an essay in Electronic Intifada on the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel in which he praised the attacks as "awesome", "astounding", and "incredible" and that they were a "stunning victory"" should be changed to:

In October 2023, Massad wrote an essay in Electronic Intifada on the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel". In this essay, he described the scenes of Palestinian gliders as "awesome", described the sight of Palestinian fighters storming checkpoints as "astounding" to Israelis and Palestinians, wrote that the takeover of Israeli military sites had "both shaken Israeli society and struck Palestinians and Arabs as incredible", and stated that "the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance over the Israeli military on the first day of fighting is a historic event both for Israel, as Netanyahu admitted, and for the Palestinians" [Cite to Joseph Massad, "Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?", Electronic Intifada, 8 October 2023]. Some commentators and US Senators interpreted this article as praise for the attack, while Massad has maintained that he never praised the attack, that his article was descriptive in nature, and that he has never supported terrorism [Cite to Stephanie Saul, "Who Are the Columbia Professors Mentioned in the House Hearing?", New York Times, 17 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/nyregion/jospeh-massad-katherine-franke-mohamed-abdou-columbia-university.html; Madeline Douglas, "Columbia President Minouche Shafik Testifies Before Congress In Antisemitism Hearing", BWOG Columbia Student News, 17 April 2024, https://bwog.com/2024/04/columbia-president-minouche-shafik-testifies-before-congress-in-antisemitism-hearing/; Ali Abunimah, "Joseph Massad responds to fabrications and lies about him in Congress", Electronic Intifada, 17 April 2024, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/joseph-massad-responds-fabrications-and-lies-about-him-congress].

Then after the current sentence in the Wiki page which reads "In a hearing before The House Committee on Education and the Workforce in April 2024, the president of Columbia University said that Massad was "spoken to" regarding this essay but that he was not disciplined" I suggest adding the following:

Massad has responded by alleging that his article was deliberately misrepresented during the hearing and further added that then-Columbia President Shafik had "misconstrued what happened" when saying he had been "spoken to", a statement he indicated implied he had been "reprimanded". [Cite: Ryan Quinn, "Columbia President Accused of Dishonest Testimony, Throwing Professors 'Under the Bus'", 19 April 2024, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/04/19/columbia-president-accused-throwing-profs-under-bus] He stated that neither his executive vice president nor his chair had reprimanded him about his article nor had they accused him of praising the attack. [Cite: Ryan Quinn, "Columbia President Accused of Dishonest Testimony, Throwing Professors 'Under the Bus'", 19 April 2024, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/04/19/columbia-president-accused-throwing-profs-under-bus; Ali Abunimah, "Joseph Massad responds to fabrications and lies about him in Congress", Electronic Intifada, 17 April 2024, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/joseph-massad-responds-fabrications-and-lies-about-him-congress]. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 22:28, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: Please note the following points:

• The proposed edit still lacks a reliable source. A student news website does not constitute a reliable source either. It is effectively a self-published source. And the NYTimes article alone does not fully reference the edit you have requested. The InsideHigherEd source you provided does not support the proposed text either, it just states what the EI has published. Adding a layer of separation does not make the original source any less unreliable.

• It may be that EI has previously been inappropriately referenced in the article. If you object to that content, please feel free to raise a new edit request to request its deletion. That is not grounds to justify adding further unreliably sourced content to the article now. If there are problems with the article, the answer is to fix them, not make them worse.

• Being belligerent, rude, attacking/maligning editors who are trying to help or assuming bad faith on their part does nothing to strengthen the merits of the edit you have requested. Nor does ignoring the advice given by said editors on how to improve your request. No one is obligated to make or even review what you have proposed just because you have made an edit request. If you behave in a manner which is difficult to work with, people will simply not work with you. Wikipedia is a collaborative project, so please extend to your collaborators the same civility that you expect to be extended to you. SI09 (talk) 12:29, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your consideration. However, with respect, I am not sure why you are suggesting that my suggested comments were belligerent or rude. I apologize if they came across that way. I explicitly thanked the other editor in a previous post, while subsequently pointing out that I had not cited the EI as a news source. I am very appreciative of your and others' time to consider edits.

EI was explicitly cited solely as a primary source where Mr. Massad had published his own statements there.

If you would prefer to proceed on the basis of EI not being cited when these are primary sources for what Massad said when choosing to publish in the EI, which again suggests to me a concern that the primary sources could have somehow been falsified in some way (otherwise, I'm not sure what else would be the accuracy concern here? Perhaps you can explain this to me?), then we might consider completely omitting discussion of the article from the page. I think it is problematic for a page on a living person to cite defamatory interpretations of an article while not allowing for Mr. Massad's response to be published or the original article's text to be referenced.

At a minimum, this sentence "In October 2023, Massad wrote an essay in Electronic Intifada on the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel in which he praised the attacks as "awesome", "astounding", and "incredible" and that they were a "stunning victory"." currently in the article should be deleted since it is an unsourced (and factually incorrect/opinionated) summary of the article. This could be changed to "In October 2023, Massad wrote an essay in Electronic Intifada on the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. This essay has been interpreted by some critics and US Senators as praise for the October 11 attacks on Israel, while Massad has denied that it constituted praise for the attacks and has alleged that his article has been "mischaracterized"" [Cite to Stephanie Saul, "Who Are the Columbia Professors Mentioned in the House Hearing?", New York Times, 17 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/nyregion/jospeh-massad-katherine-franke-mohamed-abdou-columbia-university.html].

Thanks for your consideration. Mingusmingusmingus67 (talk) 15:17, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

• While it may not have been the intention, using words like "bizarre", "inconsistent", "rather farfetched insinuation" about another editor's judgment and good-faith advice comes across as uncivil. Please be careful with your word choices. Intended tone is not always clear on the internet.
• The EI citation currently in the article was written by Massad himself. The EI citation you have provided, though claiming to have included a statement directly from him, was written by a different writer. There is a distinction between the two.
• The article states "Massad has issued this statement in response to media inquiries", and not that he has sent it to EI specifically. If this is true, there should be other sources that have also received and published this statement.
• The specific sentence you are referring to is already heavily sourced with 4 different citations (citations 34-37), none of which are EI. This is also clearly a very notable controversy. This isn't grounds to delete the discussion.
• The existing text of the article already very clearly states that the article being supportive of the attacks is not a statement of fact, but a characterisation made by the specific organisations listed. There is no need to further hedge or obscure this statement.
• Having read his response statement in detail now, at no point does he actually deny that he/his article praised the attacks. He denies that he supported attacking Israel as a country (i.e. the end goal of the attacks) or glorified the slaughter of Jews, but he does not actually deny praising the attacks themselves (i.e the methodology of the attacks). He clarifies that he was referring to the Israeli military rather than the country of Israel (point 1), and he reiterates praise for the methods used (point 5).
• I also think it's important to mention that non-extended confirmed users are not allowed to suggest potentially controversial edits on topics related to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. While you are allowed to make edit requests, these are expected to be uncontroversial. We have still carefully considered your request in good faith, but really this request should not have been made in the first place. I would be cautious about being persistent on its inclusion. SI09 (talk) 09:58, 27 July 2025 (UTC)