According to a report in Tablet, a liberal Jewish website, Steven Salaita’s appointment at University of Illinois was to a job in Illinois’ American Indian Studies Department. However, the author Liel Leibovitz was unable to find any evidence that Salaita had published anything but anti-Israeli material.
The works authored by Salaita include Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures and Politics; Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes from and What it Means for Politics Today; Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader’s Guide; a review of a book about Hamas. The relationship to a presumed expertise in Native American affairs is anythng but clear. The closest Salaita comes to Native American , according to Leibovitz, is comparisons between Native Americans and Palestinians, equating the American racist extermination and apartheid to Israel.
Leibovitz describes Salaita’s work as “Devoid of any real understanding, context, or nuance, stupidly dogmatic, and frequently given to hyperbolic fits of hatred, it should not qualify as scholarship.”
In a sense this may be irrelevant. It ought to be the responsibility of the Department of American Indian Studies to determine who they feel is a good candidate. Perhaps they feel that there is benefit to be gained by involving a scholar with expertise in the confrontation between a genocidal Israel in the analysis of American Indian issues? This is an academic decision and ought not to tainted by UI’s somewhat tainted Chancellor or by the media. That assumption, however, opens another can of worms. Is the American Indian Studies Department at UI incompetent? The assertions by Liel Leibovitz in his review of Mr. Salaita’s writings on the Palestinian issue suggest that the controversy runs deeper, to the heart of Salaita’s own work. Although Mr. Leibovitz does not use the word anti-Semite, much of the material he cites from Professor Salaita’s published work seems driven more by bigotry than by any form of careful scholarship.
The right thing for Phyllis Wise to have done, if she could contain her arrogance, would have been to convene a panel of scholars to review the Departmental decision. The sad thing is that Chancellor Wise’s high handed behavior, like her behavior previously in the UW’s Aprikyan case, has blocked any real debate over Salaita’s qualifications.
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