Columbia Professor Who Called Hamas Attacks Against Israel ‘Awesome’ Could Be Ousted as Petition to Fire Him Gains Thousands of Signatures

Joseph Massad praised the attack in an article in Electronic Intifada

More than 35,000 people have signed a petition to remove a member of Columbia University’s faculty who called the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel “awesome” and “incredible.”

Professor Joseph Massad made the observations in an article on the Electronic Intifada .

Honors student Maya Platek started the petition. “Condoning and supporting terrorism is not acceptable,” Platek wrote.

She said many students have expressed that they feel unsafe in his presence.

“Massad’s decision to praise the abhorrent attack encourages violence and misinformation in and outside of campus, particularly putting many Jewish and Israeli students on campus at risk,” Platek wrote.

Platek told the New York Post that she launched the petition “because I heard concerns from a couple dozen Columbia students, read the article, and was shocked.”

Massad’s Columbia biography states he teaches and writes about modern Arab politics and intellectual history. He has a history of anti-Israel views.

In 2005, a school report found he had “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel’s actions against Palestinians, according to a New York Times report .

Journalist Bari Weiss, an alum of Columbia, slammed the article.

“Joseph Massad, the author of this piece, is a tenured professor @Columbia. I have been criticizing him since I was an undergrad and was accused of being a hysteric and worse for doing so,” Weiss wrote on X . “I was just listening to what he had to say. Read it for yourself.”

The controversy comes as Columbia is dealing with at least one alleged hate crime committed on its campus in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.