Steven Salaita and the Racistist Ghost of Edward Said: Joshua Murovchik
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/steven-salaita-and-the-ghost-of-edward-said/
The hottest flap in American academia this semester revolves around
the decision of the chancellor of the University of Illinois to block
the appointment of Steven Salaita to a tenured professorship on the
grounds of his comments on Twitter during this summer’s conflict
between Israel and Hamas. The chancellor drew a distinction between
free speech and “disrespectful words . . .that demean and abuse.”
Salaita’s offending torrent of tweets began with the kidnapping of
three Israeli teenagers in June. “You may be too refined to say it,
but I’m not,” wrote Salaita. “I wish all the f***ing West Bank
settlers would go missing.” Then, during the fighting, he poured forth
an endless stream of accusations that Israel was committing “genocide”
and that America was under the control of Israel. “Israel slaps around
the USA, and all [Republicans] do is ask for more,” said one. “Redneck
. . . slogan . . . Gaza is a disaster but Netanyahu is my master,”
said another. A third read: “Israel’s message to Obama and Kerry:
we’ll kill as many Palestinians as we want, when we want. p.s.: f***
you, pay me.”
If the theme of Israeli control of the United States carried a whiff
of anti-Semitism, the aroma wafted even stronger from Salaita’s
Goodreads review (spotted by David Bernstein) of Abraham Foxman’s 2009
book, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish
Control. Salaita quipped “It has to be one of the few books ever
published in which the author’s body of work so adeptly undermines his
thesis.” Although the syntax is garbled, Salaita’s meaning was clear:
the work of the Anti-Defamation League, to which Foxman has devoted
his career, proves the reality of Jewish control. If this Jew-baiting
was thinly veiled, Salaita dropped all compunction this summer when he
tweeted: “Zionists: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something
horrible into something honorable since 1948.”
Defenders complained that Salaita ought not to be held accountable
academically for his tweets, while critics like Tablet’s Liel
Leibowitz brought evidence that Salaita’s putatively scholarly work
has the same tone and quality as his tweets. Martin Kramer offered
this example: “It is well known by Palestinians,” writes Salaita,
“that anytime one of them enters or exits Israel, regardless of
nationality, he or she will likely undergo an anal or vaginal probe.
These probes… aren’t intended to be pragmatic. They are acts of
psychological domineering and political assertion.” This is, of
course, sheer invention. Were there even a shred of truth to it, every
human rights group you can think of would have been shouting to the
rooftops: however oppressed they may be, Palestinians do not keep
their knowledge of Israeli abuses to themselves.
This bizarre example is taken from Salaita’s book, “Israel’s Dead
Soul,” published by Temple University Press. His other titles listed
on Amazon are: “Anti-Arab Racism in the USA”; “The Holy Land in
Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan”; “The Uncultured Wars:
Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought”; “Modern
Arab-American Fiction”; and “Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures
and Politics”. Now here’s the punchline: the professorship that had
been offered to Salaita was in American Indian Studies.
How did we get here? It turns out that the head of the American Indian
Studies department, who apparently pushed the appointment through
until it reached the chancellor’s desk, is an ideological soul mate of
Salaita’s. This department chairman, Robert Warrior, whose advanced
degrees are all in religion and theology, lists himself as Professor
of American Indian studies, English and History, as well as teaching
something called simply “theory.” Salaita, whose writings are
overwhelmingly about Arabs and Israel and who was listed as a teacher
of English in his last job, is apparently reaching for similar
breadth. What really joins these two polymaths is Edward W. Said, of
whom both are disciples.
Salaita and Warrior are of little importance except as symptoms of the
immense and corrosive impact on American academia of Said. A review in
The Guardian in 2001 called Said “arguably the most influential
intellectual of our time,” and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer said in
1999 that he was “among the truly important intellects of our
century.” An online search of syllabi a few years ago found 868
separate courses at American universities in which his books were
assigned; there are courses at some major universities devoted solely
to his thought; and Cambridge University Press has even published “The
Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said”.
Yet the man’s work rested squarely on an intellectual fraud. Its
cornerstone was his canonical book, Orientalism, purportedly a survey
of the western discipline of oriental studies, in which he argued that
“every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a
racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Elsewhere in
the book he said that his generalizations about Europeans applied
equally to Americans. Said claimed to prove his indictment by offering
a variety of quotes from a variety of Europeans. But experts showed
that Said misrepresented the work of some scholars and misquoted
others. The still deeper problem was that many of those Said quoted
had no standing in the field of oriental studies, while other towering
figures whose writing was admiring of Arab and Islamic culture were
omitted. For example, Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew, called by some
the founder of Islamic studies in the West but passed over by Said,
wrote in his diary during his time in the Arab world:
I truly entered into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that
ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim, and
judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which . . . can
satisfy philosophic minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a
similar rational level.
Some “ethnocentrism.”
When challenged on such omissions, Said replied testily that he could
not mention “every Orientalist who ever lived.” But of course he was
obligated to include a figure of Goldziher’s stature, all the more,
were he a genuine scholar, because it confounded his hypothesis. He
was obligated moreover thanks to his own broad generalizations. Had
Said written merely that some Westerners had pejorative attitudes
toward other cultures, he would have said nothing new or interesting
and would not have achieved fame. It was his claim to reveal something
endemic to Westerners that gave his work its explosive character.
The implications were nailed by Sadiq al-Azm, a Syrian Marxist
philosopher (and on of that country’s most admired dissidents) who
wrote:
Said . . . . trac[es] the origins of Orientalism all the way back to
Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Dante. In other words, Orientalism is
not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, but is the natural product
of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to
misrepresent other . . . cultures . . . in favor of Occidental
self-affirmation, domination, and ascendency.
He might have added that if this bent of mind preceded Christianity,
it is not a product of Western culture as we know it, but of Europeans
ethnically. In other words Said’s work boils down to the proposition
“all white people are inherently racists.” Not only does this itself
seem like a racist proposition, but it is problematic in another way:
if racism inheres in the DNA of white people, can they be blamed for
it—as Said did so thunderously?
Despite the contradictions and the scurrilous methodology, Said’s
claim resonated with the guilt felt by Europeans over colonialism and
by Americans over Jim Crow and slavery—a guilt that would have been
more valuable had it emerged when these evils were still practiced
rather than after the fact. This elevated him to iconic status. As
Salaita put it in a eulogy: “those who are concerned with the fate of
humanity must believe that Said was correct, because if he wasn’t,
then there is nothing [worthwhile] for humans to aspire to.”
The result has been a generation of Said epigones dominating American
and European universities, exemplified by Professor Warrior and by
Steven Salaita, whose turbid writings are not so much sprinkled with
the word “racism” as flooded with it. He knows that racism is endemic,
that Israel is racist, and that because of this anti-Semitism is
“honorable.” With such deep knowledge as this, is he not qualified to
teach in almost any discipline?
Joshua Muravchik is the author of “Making David Into Goliath: How the
World Turned Against Israel”
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