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Steven Salaita Brings His War on Civility (and His Pity Party) to Stanford

Mar 27, 2015 12:44 pm By Robert Spencer

steven-salaitaSteven Salaita Brings His War on Civility (and His Pity Party) to Stanford
by Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene

The notion that words such as “civility” and “divisive” have clear definitions is under attack by academic moral relativists who grant themselves the right to twist words to mean whatever aids their quest for power. A recent Stanford University lecture co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and titled “Academic Freedom in the Context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Talk by Steven Salaita,” illustrated the point. Salaita—the former Virginia Tech professor and author of Israel’s Dead Soul currently suing both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and unnamed donors after his offer of a tenured professorship in American Indian studies was withdrawn due to his vitriolic, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets—delivered another in a series of nationwide lectures in which he portrayed himself as a martyr, valiantly battling the forces of “civility.”

The mostly professorial crowd of about sixty, including several sporting keffiyehs, crowded around a long table and spilled into the hallway. Regarding Salaita’s case, moderator and comparative literature professor David Palumbo-Liu referred conspiratorially to “wealthy donors [who] campaigned to kill the appointment . . . based on distorted and partial readings of his work and pronouncements,” including “some remarks [by Salaita that were] highly critical of Israel’s attack on Gaza.” Far from simply criticizing Israel, however, Salaita tweeted: “I wish all the f***ing West Bank settlers would go missing”; “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948”; and “If Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?”

Lamenting the “new conditions of outside threats and censorship” now “threatening” the “rights of . . . scholars,”—or, rather, the fact that actions have consequences—Palumbo-Liu displayed academe’s moral bankruptcy by introducing Salaita as a “composed, decent, dignified scholar” who has displayed “such class, honesty and courage under unimaginable pressure,” and whom he was “proud to call . . . a friend.”

Salaita began by praising the Stanford Undergraduate Senate’s recently passed, faculty-supported “resolution to divest from the occupation of the Palestinian Territories,” before claiming disingenuously, “I don’t really want to engage in any fisticuffs over the Israel-Palestinian conflict; that’s not the way this event was pitched to me or that I agreed to participate in.” He then elaborated:

My main argument is that even if you are adamantly pro-Israel, and even if you are repulsed by my political viewpoints, then you still oughtn’t to take the university’s side on this matter. The main reason is that it is never a good idea to voluntarily concede power to those above us on the hierarchy.

Salaita claimed this “hierarchy” is spellbound by the “whims of donors” and, worse, “boards of trustees [who] come from the business or legal world.” “If they are given the authority to begin meddling,” he added, “we will see an inevitable decline of academic freedom.” He defined the latter as the “need to protect faculty who deal with controversial ideas from administrative, social, or cultural recrimination,” because “a functional education will always involve a disruption of preconceived ideas.” Therefore, he concluded with a bit of sophomoric insight: “If you leave college holding the same ideas and ethics that you had when you entered into college, you did not get educated.”

Regarding his hate-filled Tweets, Salaita said, “I don’t actually teach the Israel/Palestine conflict. . . . I got caught up on this because of things I was tweeting.” (Or perhaps because of what he has written: all of his six books deal with modern Arab studies, Arab Americans, or Israel, a fact that makes his would-be appointment in American Indian Studies peculiar.) He conceded that, “Twitter is a kind of a cesspool of anger and racism,” but applied this judgment only to “people who are calling me horrible racist names on Twitter,” never to himself.

Salaita displayed his moral relativism when he addressed “the matter of civility,” which he called a “sprawling and ambiguous word . . . that has a moralistic undertone” and is “not inherently neutral.” “To be called uncivil is automatically a bad thing,” he admitted, before emptying the term of meaning by asserting, “Civility like any other discourse or vocabulary doesn’t arise in a vacuum, but in particular historical and political and cultural conditions.” Examining “civility in the context of the field of American Indian studies,” he claimed that:

[S]uch terms have particular meanings that attach themselves to profound forms of colonial violence. In fact, anywhere where settler-colonization occurred, the colonizer went forward with a distinctive binary of civilized vs. savage, so deploying a terminology such as civility . . . is deeply problematic and illustrates the ways a particular colonization can reassert and reinscribe itself without our conscious acknowledgement.

In Salaita’s self-serving postmodern ideology, one who insists on maintaining “civility” is guilty of imposing “settler-colonization,” whether intentionally or subconsciously.

Salaita’s final jargon-filled diatribe took aim at the word “divisive”:

Divisive is a term that has meaning, but not a neutral meaning, and it is inscribed very deeply in disparate conditions of power. . . . So if the result is going to benefit, if only symbolically, a group of people that is always oppressed, I say then divide this house.

By claiming words have no meaning beyond what serves his immediate purpose, Salaita—the self-styled victim of the “hierarchy”—spoke the language of tyranny. It is an Orwellian tactic that allows adherents to claim that good is evil, freedom is slavery, and oppressors the oppressed. There’s no reason to trust any claims made by these dissemblers and sophists, but that won’t stop Salaita’s pity party from rolling on.

Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. Stillwell can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed Under: academia Tagged With: Stanford University, Steven Salaita


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 1:19 pm

    Not even a pretense of objectivity…it’s replete with curse words and demonization. If this is not anti-Semitism, I don’t know what it is.

    Settlers? The tens of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians and other Arab illegal immigrants who came to the British Mandate in the 1930s and 1940s were not ‘SETTLER-COLONISTS’?

    The main point of the Arab ‘settlers’ (who now call themselves Palestinian) is that they came BECAUSE of the Jewish entrepreneurs who brought new prosperity and JOBS to the region whereas previously, there had been a complete desert everywhere but on the Mediterranean coast.

    He says: “I don’t really want to engage in any fisticuffs…” What would he prefer? Suicide bombings?

    • Lioness says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 10:59 am

      He considers suicide bombers heroes.

  2. don vito says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 3:23 pm

    I would like to keep this civil, in the same vein it was presented by “the professor”. 1st cousin marriage.

  3. gravenimage says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 3:29 pm

    Steven Salaita Brings His War on Civility (and His Pity Party) to Stanford
    ………………………….

    One of the other things that these enablers of evil have in common with Jihadists themselves is their misuse of language—”civility” and “divisive” are used in different ways by useful idiots like Steven Salaita just as Muslims use words like “peace” and “justice”.

  4. RonaldB says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 3:48 pm

    It seems to me that if these types of claims are the basis of his lawsuit, the judge should have peremptorily thrown the case out of court with prejudice. The legal system has to exert some judgement on whether claims are legally justified: otherwise, anyone on a limited budget can be run over by someone with deep pockets or a sympathetic lawyer.

    In this case, the school has made a judgement that this particular person is unsuitable to represent the school. Salaita was offered a tenured position, which in itself might be enough to bring serious doubt as to the ability of the University of Illinois to conduct its own affairs, but they pulled back in time. Imagine this person as a tenured profession, almost impossible to get rid of. He obviously makes no distinction between his own opinions and principles of accepted discourse.

    The opinions of a school, or other business, should not be second-guessed by a court, based on a lawsuit based on extremely flimsy assertions. Why is there a legal basis for suing a school for a decision they made, even if the decision was influenced by donors?

    There might be a case for damages if Salaita can show that he passed over other employment possibilities due to his acceptance for the tenured position. In that case, he should be paid compensation: a far better proposition for the students than putting him into a position of tenured authority over them. Can you imagine how this post-objective ideologue would treat a student who fundamentally disagreed with him?

    I agree that the original offer made to him showed a deeply-flawed selection process at the University of Illinois, and perhaps they do owe some liability for their obvious carelessness and neglect in even taking his vita off the desk, rather than chucking it into the circular file.

  5. Dan says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 4:03 pm

    This is something the left just can’t seem to understand.

    When arguing your side, don’t curse, name call and mud sling.

    They’re so used to doing it verbally they think nothing of doing it online, and then are shocked when someone uses their rants as evidence against them.

    A long time ago, me dear sweet sainted mother, (And her wooden spoon.) said, “People who curse to make their point usually don’t have one. They’re hoping to intimidate you into conceding.”

    And where I come from, someone telling you to “blank off” are still fighting words.

    I think part of the reason people are so foul mouthed these days is because someone’s never poked them in the beak when they got out of line; like swearing in front of women and children.

    Also, because they grew up here, where they know they can sue if hit, they’re shocked when some local in a third world country kicks the stuffing out of them for their behavior.

    • Larry A. Singleton says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 8:35 pm

      Dan a man after my own heart. I shoot my mouth off sometimes because I’ve backed my shit up in the past. That’s the way it’s done. I grew up getting jumped by and fighting black kids in school and brawling in bars for years afterwards. (usually getting my ass kicked) I try to remember, though, that there are human beings on the other end of my tirades which I have a tendency to forget sitting here safely in front of my laptop. Unfortunately, it seems that liberal cowards who do nothing but call you names without any substance to back them up is the rule rather than the exception as I’ve found commenting on Yahoo articles that look like it should have a swastika or “Al Jazeera” as a banner and the comments looking like followers of LoonWatch or Democracy Now; whenever I post pro-Israel comments, (if it gets past the Yahoo fascist censors), I’m always attacked with name calling…..never attacked on the facts or the issues….just attacked. I’m reminded of these sue happy liberals; I used to party with the Hells Angels, (keeping on the periphery with my mouth shut when we partied in the hills.), they used to talk about how many cops it would take before they were finally beat into submission when getting arrested. They never sued; it was just bragging rights, even when they were charged with assaulting a cop. I remember mouthing off to some cops one time. I like to joke “….and when I regained consciousness….”. This was back in my younger stupid days. The point is liberals are basically cowards. Read Until Proven Innocent about the Duke Lacrosse Rape case and how the faculty acted like a lynch mob in attacking and vilifying their own students. This book is an ass kicker; a mix of Horowitz’s Indoctrination U. and Edward Humes book Mean Justice on prosecutorial misconduct.

      Here’s a little info flyer I made up:

      UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA

      Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom and The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz

      Ivory Towers On Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America by Martin Kramer

      Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson (Another book explaining how our universities are totally out of control and taken over by liberal fascists. This is a mix of Edward Humes book about Prosecutorial Misconduct, Mean Justice and Horowitz’s Indoctrination U. and how our universities have purged all signs of conservatism and common decency.)

      The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers (Go to Amazon and read the Preface to this and the Introduction to “Taken Into Custody” by Stephen Baskerville; Your days of believing you live in a free country will disappear when you finish this book.)

      “Indoctrinate U.” Watch This Documentary!!! (You Tube Video)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA

      Politicizing Scholarship to Question Israel’s Existence [incl. Richard Falk] (Campus Watch)
      http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/14663

      The Least Free Place in America (You Tube video-Prager Univ.)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJaM8IOev7E

      Free speech on campus Pat Condell (You Tube)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XPHIfgFwsY&feature=em-subs_digest

      A solution in search of a problem: the university diversity scam (Prager University/Facebook)
      https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=857671457609045&fref=nf
      (Related: “Plunder: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation” by Steven Greenhut)

      Kelly File Special: Who’s Teaching Our Kids? Part I (and II thru VI) Liberal Bias In The Classroom. (You Tube)
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VXwqn3FM1o
      Part II Anti-Americanism In The Classroom.
      Part III Protecting Free Speech On Campus.
      Part IV Problem Of Political Balance On Campus?
      Part V How Do We Fix Our School System?
      Part VI Disadvantages Of Elite Education.

      Subscribe to Jihad/Campus Watch and the Middle East Forum/Quarterly, Family Security Matters, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Gatestone Institute, FrontPage Magazine, American Thinker, The Clarion Project, Cross Muslims, Palestinian Media Watch, Muhammad unveiled, Religion of Peace and read Raymond Ibrahim, Andrew Harrod, Efraim Karsh, Frank Gaffney, Patrick Poole, Caroline Glick, Bat Ye’or and others.

      Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer (Booklet)

      Slavery, Terrorism and Islam, (and Holocaust in Rwanda), by Peter Hammond (This is an Ass-Kicking little resource of 276 pages.)

      The Arab Muslim Slave Trade Of Africans, The Untold Story (You Tube)

  6. Tom W Harris says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 4:21 pm

    Why doesn’t he at least brush his teeth?

  7. Yohananw says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 5:14 pm

    >”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” … “When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.

  8. Fritz Kohlhaas says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 6:53 pm

    Salaita is a very stupid and ignorant man who has a very limited vocabulary when he gives one of his stupid and ignorant rants. There will come a day when someone will shut his foul mouth for good!

    • Keith says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 9:11 am

      He is isn’t he, have you noticed how many stupid and ignorant people with limited vocabulary seem to be in positions of authority nowdays.

  9. Hand Rearden says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 6:58 pm

    “The main reason is that it is never a good idea to voluntarily concede power to those above us on the hierarchy.”

    1. errr…Mr. Salaita, isn’t this the alpha and omega of socialism, its entire purpose summed up in one sentence? Isn’t this what the Constitution was established to prevent? And let’s not beat around the bush, you, Mr. Salaita, are a socialist from your toes to the crown of your head.

    2. The First Amendment protects your right to free speech. It doesn’t give you a right to be paid for it. Academic freedom was meant to give wide scope to scholars to speak on the findings of their field of scholarly inquiry. It was not meant as a licence for ignorant defamation. Any scholar who has to use some version of the word fu*k in their argument is so intellectually impoverished that that itself should be sufficient grounds for academic removal. It is the tool of the fourth-rater.

  10. Nimrod says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 7:26 pm

    Every time someone tries to use “colonialism” as a reason for something, everyone should be thinking “Marxist zero-sum conflict theory”.

    And they would be if our educational institutions were doing their jobs. Instead, what we get is an attempt to indoctrinate people with Marxist beliefs without teaching them that these beliefs are in fact Marxist in origin.

    Almost nobody teaches the Marxist origins of these things because Marxism has a very deserved bad reputation, and if the connection were clarified for students then they might experience skepticism. Afterward they might reject such beliefs and that isnt what the “teachers” want.

    I encourage everyone to learn what Marxist zero-sum conflict theory is so they can make people aware of what “teachers” usually won’t: that it’s based on the same discredited ideology that brought you things like National Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Marxism-Maoism, and associated humanitarian disasters.

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theories

    • 3--bp, says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 10:08 am

      Well said, Nimrod.

      In addition:

      Marxism as a system of thought is an extremely BINARY worldview. It requires an absolute and static ‘Oppressor / Oppressed’ relationship. No questioning of that relationship is permitted.

      For example: The Marxist view of race in America is that black people are OPPRESSED, and white people are OPPRESSORS. If they allowed ANY amount of rational skepticism, such as ‘It can’t be that ALL problems within black culture are caused by oppression from white people,’ their paradigm, would FALL APART. Even a small amount of questioning reveals Marxist critical theory as childishly lacking in nuance.

      Marxism is the most rigid and deterministic philosophy on the planet. That’s why it’s impossible to have a reasonable debate with a hardcore lefty. They are completely unable to see the world through any paradigm except their own. If they were, they would not be able to remain Marxists.

  11. Horace Yo says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 8:28 pm

    This worthless, waste of space, tweeting twit is an example of the communist vanguard that is taking over our country in every way possible faster than ever seen before and about to attain critical mass. They invade, pervert, and hollow out our education systems from kindergarden to graduate school with destructive actions designed to brainwash students and cripple civilisation and American culture. Fight back hard. Get them barred and fired. Get after your legislators to appoint traditionalists to university governing boards and pay lots of attention to what your elected or appointed public school boards are doing on a daily or weekly basis. The destroyers are agressively taking over all of it and the corrupted judges are enabling them. Watch and name the leftist legislators and judges pushing this crap too.

    • David says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 10:23 am

      If colleges are not going to reflect our traditional culture and norms, then why don’t we scrap classes like English Literature? Having those classes is similar to having tithes to pay the priestly class. In this case, its those so-called academics like Salatia. Why is his class and subject still required?

  12. Lucretius says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 8:32 pm

    Geez, all this bloated Chomskyite verbiage about “hierarchy” over blowing his chance to get paid to sit his ass down in a tenured chair for the rest of his life. Whiner.

  13. Lucretius says

    Mar 27, 2015 at 8:54 pm

    For anyone wanting to read a short critique of Chomsky’s absurd ideas about freedom and “hierarchy” which underlies this verbal vomit, I suggest http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=20016

    • Nimrod says

      Mar 28, 2015 at 4:31 pm

      Excellent, thanks. It’s sad that the nonsense of people like Chomsky and Marx has formed its own de facto religion, and even more sad that this de facto religion has taken over academia. But the ally that it’s found in the mentally and physically destructive religion of Islam is a pathetic intellectual disaster.

  14. 300bpm says

    Mar 28, 2015 at 10:09 am

    This is what our universities have become.

    Send your kids to trade schools instead.

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