The Weekly Standard reports on the moonbattery prevailing among the Middle Eastern Studies faculty at Columbia University. The department that hosts Obama's PLO buddy Rashid Khalidi is also home to professor Joseph Massad:

In Desiring Arabs, Massad asserts that the West "produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." But for colonialism, Massad contends, there would be no gay people in the Middle East for the tyrannical governments of Egypt and Iran to persecute. Although Massad says he opposes hanging gay people, he shifts the blame from the hooded executioners to the United States.

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Columbia last fall and made a similar claim ("In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country."), students laughed and booed. They recently, however, elected to award Massad the Lionel Trilling Book Award for making the nearly identical claim.

Hey, what do you expect for only $36,997 per year tuition?

Hat tip: American Thinker; on a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.