Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on July 28, 2017

Participants hold signs at Turning Point USA's 2016 activist winter retreat in West Palm Beach, FL. Turning Point launched a blacklist of professors called Professor Watchlist. (Photo: Turning Point USA/Facebook)

In August of 2014, Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after pro-Israel groups contacted the university administration to complain about Salaitas twitter posts. The posts sharply criticized Israels bombing campaign against Gaza, which resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths, including more than 500 children.

At the time, we wrote of two consequences of the Salaita firing for higher education: the first described the possible Gazafication of dissent against Israels occupation as documented by numerous students and faculty facing harassment or intimidation for their criticism of Israel. The second asked more pointedly whether the Salaita firing created the conditions for a new blacklist of scholars who dared to criticize the state, racism, and U.S. imperialism.

Three years later, it is clear that the answer to the second question is yes: the Salaita firing was a watershed that has created both a set of tactics, and as importantly a confidence, among reactionary forces in the U.S., that U.S. university faculty, including tenured faculty, can be harassed, trolled, smeared and bulliedeven out of a job for daring to act as public advocates for social justice.

We may call this trend the Salaitification of higher education. It takes the special form of a new, emboldened alt-right who have taken to emulating tactics first deployed by Zionists and defenders of Israel to stalk and attempt to destroy the careers of American academic dissidents. To wit:

As with the Salaita case, these episodes reveal a clear pattern: University administrations falling silent, or actively participating in, persecution of faculty in a concession to the hard right, often openly racist, sexist political attacks.

Zionists and Israel supporters who attacked Salaita called him a racist, bigot and anti-Semite, while themselves falling silent about the deaths of Palestinian children.

We also see universities invoking free speech and academic freedom primarily to restrict them when they involve critiques of racism, sexism and U.S. imperialism. In an insidious, but typically neoliberal move, the language of social justice is used to attack the principles of social justice.

Here, we see the corporate,neoliberal university at its nefarious worst: aligning itself with the de facto politics of reactionary states (in the Salaita case Israel and the U.S., in the latter specifically the Trump administration).

The Salaitification of American higher education means the willing participation by university administrations in suppression of oppressed racial, gendered, and sexed faculty voices in the name of what theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called in its firing of Salaita civility, and what dissidents knew at the time to be code words for censorship and the tacit defense of reactionary ideas.

It is the task of activists, radicals, students, teachers, faculty, workers and citizens everywhere to resist the Salaita effect. Egregious political horrors like Israels 2014 bombing of Gaza, and Trumps bigoted targeting of Muslims, Latinos, LGBTQ people, immigrants may otherwise be carried out still by alt-right forces in the name of civility.Only when University faculty and students everywhere demonstrate solidarity with their dissident peers everywhere can we have a true challenge to Salaitification and the alt.right, and an end to formal and informal blacklisting and termination of lives and careers. Indeed, Steven Salaita recently announced that he is leaving academe forever, having been unable to find a permanent job since his firing by UIUC.

Students and faculty seeking to show their own solidarity in fighting back against the alt right should join up now with campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, join the American Association of University Professors, or take up with the new national campus anti-fascism network.

To vary slightly the words ofMartin Niemller, we cant wait for them to come for us.

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Where Zionism and the 'alt-right' meet - Mondoweiss

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