Will Columbia Professors Continue Writing for Al Ahram? [incl. Hamid Dabashi and Joseph Massad]

…after the Pan-Arabist paper initiated a paranoiacally thorough boycott of Israel? I doubt that Al Ahram’s boycott will phase the pathologically anti-Israel Hamid Dabashi or Joseph Massad, who are occasional contributors to the racist newspaper’s English-language website. But it should. Consider:

I’m in no position to prove that this is unprecedented in the history of journalism, or that a publication this important (Al Ahram is the New York Times of one of the most important countries in the Arab world, basically) has never before broken off even casual contact with a specific ethnic group the way Al Ahram has. But it doesn’t particularly matter. If MEALAC adpoted Al Ahram’s policy, Dabashi and Massad would probably be out of a job–just read the bit in the Ha’aretz article about the Al Ahram editor who was disciplined for even meeting with Israel’s ambassador to Egypt.

If Massad and Dabashi care more about maintaining Egypt’s venomously anti-Jewish intellectual atmosphere than they do about standing up to the paper’s flagrant racism, they should keep writing for Al Ahram. But Dabashi and Massad are both established enough to be able to find some other publication that will carry their work. And as critical as I’ve been of the two of them in the past, I hope they’re morally centered enough to recognize the poisonous tendencies that their future publication in Al Ahram would contribute to.