[The following report and analysis was published by Ali Abuminah of Electronic Intifada on 19 May 2013.]
In an unprecedented act of political censorship Al Jazeera English has deleted an article by noted Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad after coming under intense criticism from Zionists in recent days.
Massad told The Electronic Intifada that he had “received confirmation” from his editor at Al Jazeera English that “management pulled the article.” The Electronic Intifada was able to independently confirm that the article was pulled.
The piece, “The Last of the Semites,” published on 14 May, was taken down from the main Al Jazeera English site this morning. The link now redirects to Al Jazeera’s main page.
The article had been one of the most viewed and emailed articles on the site and had been tweeted hundreds of times.
Intense criticism
Since its publication, the article generated intense criticism from Zionist extremists, including a columnist in the virulently anti-Palestinian Jerusalem Post, and condemnation on Twitter from President Barack Obama’s favorite Israel lobby gatekeeper and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg:
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John Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative anti-Palestinian Zionist magazine Commentary tweeted about Massad, “Congratulations, donors to Columbia University, for paying this monstrous fuckhead’s salary!”
The backlash has been so intense precisely because Massad goes to the core of Israel’s claim to represent Jews and to cast its critics as anti-Semitic by showing that indeed it is Israel and Zionism that partake of the same anti-Semitism that targeted European Jews.
In doing so, Massad pulls the rug from under Zionists and Israel lobbyists by demonstrating that they are the anti-Semites and taking away the most formidable weapon they wield against critics of Israel: the accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
By neutralizing this ideological weapon that Israel has used so effectively in the Western media to cover up its colonization of Palestine, Massad’s pro-Jewish position and strenuous attack on Zionist anti-Semitism is clearly understood by Israel lobby figures such as Goldberg as a complete obliteration of their ideological arsenal.
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[For more of and on this developing story, visit Electronic Intifada by clicking here]
[Click here to view a PDF of the Massad`s censored article.]