Then this March, Massad casually suggested that Israel “possibly poison[ed] [Arafat] at the end.” No sources were cited. No explanation was given. And the topic quickly shifted to something else.

No conspiracy theory, though, is more baffling than his take on the creation of Israel. According to a January 2003 column, the “Zionists,” in creating Israel, engaged in a “project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been.”

Though Massad is not a Holocaust denier—and, in fact, has repeatedly criticized Holocaust denial—the reasonable implication of Zionists “evicting [Jews] from Europe” is that the creators of Israel somehow played a role in the genocide that inspired so many European Jews to pack up and head to the Middle East.

And while he does not dispute that Hitler killed six million Jews, Massad is a denier of Holocaust denial. In 2004, he wrote, “[T]hose who deny the holocaust among Palestinians have no position whatsoever inside the PLO nor any legitimacy among the Palestinian intelligentsia.”

Claiming that the Palestinian leadership is free of Holocaust deniers is simply absurd. Fatah’s official newspaper and television station have for years promoted Holocaust denial and praised the deniers, all of which has been chronicled by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.

And the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is a renowned Holocaust denier, who in his doctoral thesis gave credence to low-ball counts of numbers of victims and even wrote, “A partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement.”

Overall in Palestinian politics, however, Massad’s heart clearly lies with the Islamic terrorists of Hamas. This March, he lamented the “economic choking and starvation” resulting from the “international isolation” of Hamas. Last November, he was even more open with his fondness for Hamas, writing that the Islamic terrorist entity “can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it.”

When Columbia’s ad hoc committee reviewing Massad’s tenure bid makes it decision soon, it needs to ask: Does someone who weaves bizarre conspiracy theories, denies the existence of obvious Holocaust deniers, and has a soft spot for Hamas deserve a lifetime appointment?