The Salon blurb: A witch hunt against a Columbia professor, and the New York Times' disgraceful support for it, represent the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades.

An excerpt:

A member of the U.S. Congress calls for an assistant professor at a major university to be summarily fired. The right-wing tabloid press runs a series of vicious attacks on him, often misquoting him and perpetuating previous misquotes. Opinion pieces attacking "tenured radicals" and questioning professors' patriotism use him as their centerpiece. All of these attacks are spurred by a propaganda film made by an advocacy group, in which anonymous accusations are made and the professor is not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.

It is not 1953, the Congress member is not Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and the professor is not being accused of being a communist. No, it is 2005, the Congress member is Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and the professor is being accused of being anti-Israel.

The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved.

The targeted professor is Joseph Massad, of the Middle East Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University. Massad is the author of "Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan" (Columbia University Press, 2001), and of a forthcoming book treating the sexual depictions of Arabs in colonial literature, "Desiring Arabs." He is well-published, and his first book received rave reviews in journals such as Choice and the American Historical Review. His career would have been no more controversial than that of any academic historian working on Argentina or Uganda, had he not been a Palestinian-American teaching about Israel and Palestine in New York City. Nor, had he been critical of Argentinean or Ugandan policies, would any eyebrows have been raised in the United States.

The attacks on Massad, and two other professors in the department, were led by off-campus right-wing Zionist organizations aligned with Israel's Likud Party -- notably a murky Boston-based organization called "the David Project," which produced the film in which the accusations were made. (In fact, according to an in-depth report by Scott Sherman in the Nation, there is no single "film"; at least six versions exist, and it has never been screened for the public. When the Nation asked to view it, the David Project refused to make it available. Its head, Charles Jacobs, also refused to provide details to the Nation about the group's financial backers or its ties to professional pro-Israel lobbyists.)

Village Voice columnist Sydney Schanberg looked the the NYT's role in this case: The paper got an "exclusive" on Columbia's report in exchange for promising to not seek reaction from anyone. Big oops:

An excerpt from the April 12 column:

During the winter, Columbia University appointed a faculty committee to investigate and file a report on a dispute that has badly roiled its campus: a heated and very public controversy over student charges of anti-Israel bias by some members of the Middle East studies faculty. The 24-page report was readied for release on April 1, but the university decided to give the Times, an old friend with which it has quietly swapped favors over the years, a one-day advantage over the competition. However, Columbia set one condition: The Times had to agree, in return for this exclusive access, not to seek comment from any "other interested parties," such as the student body and, in particular, the Jewish students who had brought the allegations. Strangely, the reporter and her immediate editors accepted the conditions. The university also offered the same deal to the independent campus newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, which smartly turned it down and published a story with comments from the protesting students.

As long as I can remember, it has been an accepted rule of journalism that, absent some extreme circumstance, such as a threat to national security, a newsperson is never to acquiesce to a source's request to do less than a full reporting job or to leave basic information out of a story. The Times' own official policy contains the following: "We do not promise sources that we will refrain from additional reporting or efforts to verify the information being reported. We do not promise sources that we will refrain from seeking comment from others on the subject of the story. (We may, however, agree to a limited delay in further inquiries—until the close of stock trading, for example.)"

The Times' latest stumble was discovered and immediately exposed by The New York Sun, a fledgling daily with a decidedly rightist, pro-Israel stance that has been waging a campaign against the Times' coverage of the campus controversy. A few days later, on April 6, the Times published an Editor's Note (reserved for significant errors), which read, in part: "Under the Times' policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. . . . Last Wednesday night, after the article had been published on the Times' Web site, the reporter exchanged messages with one of the students who had lodged the original complaints. The student was expecting to read the report shortly. But because of the lateness of the hour, and concern about not having response from other interested parties, the reporter did not wait for a comment for later versions, including the printed one, after the student had read the report. Without a response from the complainants, the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form. The response was included in an article on Friday [the following day]."