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<h1 class="title" id="page-title">University of Illinois fires
professor Steven Salaita after Gaza massacre tweets</h1>
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<span property="dc:date dc:created"
content="2014-08-06T17:35:42+00:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
rel="sioc:has_creator">Submitted by <span class="username"
xml:lang="" about="/users/ali-abunimah"
typeof="sioc:UserAccount" property="foaf:name" datatype="">Ali
Abunimah</span> on Wed, 08/06/2014 - 17:35</span> </div>
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<p><b><small><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/university-illinois-fires-professor-steven-salaita-after-gaza-massacre-tweets">http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/university-illinois-fires-professor-steven-salaita-after-gaza-massacre-tweets</a></small></small></small></small></small></b><br>
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<p><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/steven-salaita">Steven
Salaita</a> was fired from his position as associate professor
in the American Indian studies program at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) apparently over views
critical of Israel, especially its <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/gazaunderattack">current
massacre in Gaza</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/cary-nelson">Cary
Nelson</a>, former president of the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP), who has publicly supported the
university’s decision to remove Salaita, gave frank comments to
The Electronic Intifada revealing the extent of his own
pro-Israel views.</p>
<p>Nelson acknowledged that he had been monitoring Salaita’s
social media use for months.</p>
<p>This indicates Salaita may be the victim of a retaliation
campaign. Salaita is the author of <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/salaita-skewers-liberalism-israels-dead-soul/10071"><em>Israel’s
Dead Soul</em></a> and <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-orientalism-and-islamophobia-american-left/3559"><em>The
Uncultured Wars, Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal
Thought</em></a>, as well as a contributor to a number of
publications including <a
href="http://www.salon.com/writer/steven_salaita/"><em>Salon</em></a>
and The Electronic Intifada.</p>
<p>He was a prominent campaigner for the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/american-studies-association">American
Studies Association’s</a> decision to boycott Israeli academic
institutions last December.</p>
<p>In May, Salaita wrote a post for The Electronic Intifada called
“<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/steven-salaita/how-practice-bds-academe">How
to practice BDS in academe</a>.”</p>
<h2>Fired not “revoked”</h2>
<p>This morning, <em>Inside Higher Ed</em> <a
href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/06/u-illinois-apparently-revokes-job-offer-controversial-scholar">reported</a>
that Salaita had merely had a job offer “revoked.”</p>
<p>Salaita was “recently informed by Chancellor Phyllis Wise that
the appointment would not go to the university’s board, and that
he did not have a job to come to in Illinois, according to two
sources with knowledge of the situation,” <em>Inside Higher Ed</em>
said.</p>
<p>“The sources familiar with the university’s decision say that
concern grew over the tone of [Salaita’s] comments on Twitter
about Israel’s policies in Gaza,” it added.</p>
<p>Neither the university nor Salaita have commented on the
matter. Salaita did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>But a source with close knowledge of the situation, who asked
not to be named because they were not authorized to speak
publicly, disputed <em>Inside Higher Ed’s</em> version. The
source told The Electronic Intifada that Salaita had actually
been “fired.”</p>
<p>The source said they had seen documentation indicating that
Salaita’s appointment had been through all the ordinary
procedures for hiring faculty, up to and including the
scheduling of new faculty orientation.</p>
<p>Salaita had already resigned from his position as associate
professor of English at Virginia Tech, according to <em>Inside
Higher Ed.</em> It would not make sense for Salaita to resign
from a secure position without already having been fully and
properly hired to a new one.</p>
<p>Even though <em>Inside Higher Ed’s</em> sources say the
opposite, the publication’s own analysis supports The Electronic
Intifada’s reporting that Salaita has actually been fired.</p>
<p>“As recently as two weeks ago, the university confirmed to
reporters that he [Salaita] was coming,” <em>Inside Higher Ed</em>
reported. “The university also declined to answer questions
about how rare it is for such appointments to fall through at
this stage.”</p>
<h2>Target</h2>
<p>Salaita’s exact status at the university is likely to be
important to the outcome of his case.</p>
<p>If a job offer was merely “revoked,” as <em>Inside Higher Ed’s</em>
sources claim, then Salaita would likely have far fewer
protections than if he had already been hired, and then fired.</p>
<p>Opponents of Palestinian rights are already seizing on this
distinction to spin and legitimize the decision to remove
Salaita for his opinions expressed in public forums.</p>
<p>According to <em>Inside Higher Ed</em>, AAUP past president
Cary Nelson, who is also an English professor at University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that “it was legitimate – at
the point of hiring – to consider issues of civility and
collegiality. In this case, [Nelson] said, that would lead him
to oppose Salaita’s appointment.”</p>
<p>Nelson’s views are important because his former role at AAUP
means he is often cited as an authority on academic freedom
issues, though his own anti-Palestinian biases are rarely
examined.</p>
<p>In a telephone interview with The Electronic Intifada from his
Urbana-Champaign home, Nelson went even further, claiming that
Salaita’s supposed social media transgressions “are more serious
than collegiality and civility.”</p>
<p>Nelson accused Salaita of “incitement to violence” for
retweeting a <a
href="https://twitter.com/djkilllist/status/486166701587722240">tweet</a>
by another Twitter user, stating: “Jeffrey goldberg’s story
should have ended at the pointy end of a shiv.”</p>
<p>Goldberg, a <a
href="http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/some-second-thoughts-and-reader-feedback-about-the-middle-east-and-social-media/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0">former
Israeli prison guard</a> who personally beat and tortured
Palestinian prisoners, and now a writer for <em>The Atlantic</em>,
is one of the most prominent defenders of Israel’s bombardment
that has killed more than one in every one thousand Palestinians
in Gaza over the last month.</p>
<p>While Salaita is known for an acerbic sense of humor – a likely
reason he would have retweeted the tweet – it is an oft-stated
norm of Twitter that “a retweet does not equal an endorsement.”</p>
<p>When pressed, Nelson could provide no example of any tweet
written by Salaita that “incited violence.”</p>
<p>Nelson acknowledged, however, that he has been closely
monitoring Salaita’s Twitter account for months. “There are
scores of tweets. I have screen captures,” he said. “The total
effect seems to me to cross a line.”</p>
<p>Salaita has “always tweeted in a very volatile and aggressive
way,” Nelson asserted, but “recently he’s begun to be much more
aggressive.”</p>
<p>Another example Nelson gave was an 8 July tweet by Salaita, at
the beginning of Israel’s current massacre in Gaza, <a
href="https://twitter.com/stevesalaita/statuses/486718092933099520">stating</a>,
“If you’re defending #Israel right now you’re an awful human
being.”</p>
<p>Nelson claimed that this might mean that students in one of
Salaita’s classes who “defended Israel” could face a hostile
environment.</p>
<p>But Nelson acknowledged that he knew of no complaints about
Salaita’s teaching and that Salaita was not even scheduled to
teach classes on Palestine and the Israelis.</p>
<p>Asked if he therefore supported a “pre-emptive firing” based on
a Tweet, Nelson again insisted that Salaita had not been
“fired,” but merely not hired. Nelson claimed that if Salaita
had already been hired, he would defend him.</p>
<p>When asked if he would oppose the hiring of a person who said
that “someone who defends Hamas firing rockets towards Tel Aviv
is an awful person,” Nelson answered: “No.”</p>
<p>There could be no clearer admission that Nelson’s opposition to
Salaita is based on the content of his views, specifically
criticism of Israel.</p>
<h2>Resistance to Israel is “criminal”</h2>
<p>This became clearer when Nelson expanded on his views on
Palestine and the Israelis.</p>
<p>Nelson defended Israel’s attack on Gaza as part of its “right
to self-defense,” although he stressed that many aspects of the
attack were “unethical” and “immoral” and that pictures of
children killed by Israel were “horrific.”</p>
<p>When asked whether he would condemn Israel’s <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-attacks-my-university-bombs-and-lies/13697">bombing
of the Islamic University of Gaza</a>, Nelson used cautious
language: “It’s very difficult for someone from a distance to
judge particular artillery strikes. My personal view is that
Israel should have been more careful. From what I know, there
are military actions as part of the Gaza incursion that seem
regrettable to me and should not have taken place.”</p>
<p>While asserting Israel’s right to bomb Gaza, Nelson denied that
Palestinians have any right to armed resistance to the
onslaught.</p>
<p>“I don’t know where that right would come from,” he said. “I
don’t view Gaza under as under occupation so I don’t see a right
to resistance.”</p>
<p>When asked if the International Committee of the Red Cross and
other international bodies were incorrect in their <a
href="http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/update/palestine-update-140610.htm">view</a>
that Israel’s siege of Gaza constitutes “collective punishment”
and is therefore a war crime, Nelson insisted he was unable to
make legal judgments.</p>
<p>Nelson added that he did not see that the situation in the
occupied West Bank “warrants resistance,” either. “I don’t think
there’s a right to violent resistance on the West Bank.”</p>
<p>Asked if he thought “all Palestinian military resistance is
criminal,” Nelson answered: “Yes. I think that is my view.”</p>
<p>When asked if any of Israel’s actions could be labeled
“criminal,” Nelson repeated that many were “immoral” and
“unethical,” but that he was not qualified to give legal
opinions about Israel’s actions.</p>
<p>Nelson, an outspoken campaigner against the nonviolent,
Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
(BDS), said that Palestinians should resort to “civil
disobedience” in the West Bank such as “blocking roads.”</p>
<p>Israel has <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-bombs-gaza-it-kills-palestinians-west-bank-too">shot
dead 17 Palestinians just in the last month</a> in the
occupied West Bank.</p>
<h2>BDS is “political violence”</h2>
<p>Nelson reaffirmed his strong opposition to the BDS movement
because some of its prominent advocates – he named <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/omar-barghouti">Omar
Barghouti</a> and philosopher <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/judith-butler">Judith
Butler</a> – dispute Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish
state.”</p>
<p>“I consider that to be a form of political violence,” Nelson
said.</p>
<p>Asked if he called himself a “Zionist,” Nelson answered: “Yes.”</p>
<p>If there were doubts about Nelson’s clear bias against
Palestinians and their pursuit of their rights by any means
(except of course the most invisible and ineffective), his frank
comments to The Electronic Intifada put them to rest.</p>
<p>On 21 July, Salaita was <a
href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/21/university-of-illinois-professor-blames-jews-for-anti-semitism/2/">attacked</a>
for his Twitter use in the right-wing, anti-Palestinian website
<em>The Daily Caller.</em></p>
<p>It seems clear that with Nelson now publicly leading the
charge, Salaita is the latest victim of a nationwide campaign to
intimidate into silence anyone on campus who criticizes Israel
or supports effective campaigns to secure Palestinian rights.</p>
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