This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent and important article by Beth McMurtrie entitled, “Nearly a Year Later, Fallout From Salaita Case Lingers on Campuses.” It is definitely worth reading, and not just because I’m quoted in it several times. The article also provides an opportunity for some further reflection on the impact of this important case.
McMurtrie quotes me as saying that in the wake of the Salaita case “[a]dministrations will be far more hesitant to move in the way the University of Illinois did, with no attempt at due process.” Claire Potter apparently disagrees, arguing to McMurtrie that the case has “emboldened universities to eliminate voices that they see as disruptive to their branding, to their political agendas, to their trustees.” We both may be right. In fact, I share Potter’s concern that pressures, external and internal, on universities to remove, marginalize, or silence dissenting or “disruptive” faculty members are likely to increase. Certainly, the response to UIUC’s clumsy handling of the Salaita case has not discouraged the Wisconsin Legislature from seeking to facilitate such efforts. But I do think the swift and extensive reaction to Salaita’s dismissal across academia, culminating in the AAUP censure, has sent a powerful message to college and university administrators that such efforts will meet with stiff faculty resistance and that due process protections cannot be ignored so blithely. Surely the Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein cases a few years ago suggest that such protections are far from fool-proof, nevertheless they do provide important obstacles to the corporatizing agenda that administrators should now know may be ignored at their peril.
The Salaita case has, of course, raised many important and difficult questions about faculty use of social media. As McMurtrie’s article mentions, I recently participated in a panel (sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries at the American Library Association Convention in San Francisco) entitled “Should I Tweet That?” The question, as I noted at the panel, must be distinguished from a related question that I previously examined at some length in a talk in April: “Can I Tweet That?” What you should, under the principles of academic freedom, be permitted to say, I told the ALA panel, may not always be so wise to actually say. In other words, when the question is “Can I” (in the sense of “is it permitted”) the answer is likely to be “yes,” but when the question is “Should I” the answer may well be “probably not,” at least in those words. Potter’s statement that “The Salaita affair should have signaled to all of us that if you’re going to put speech out there, you better be ready for someone to try and hurt you for it,” is certainly true.
In 2013, the AAUP released a revised and greatly expanded version of our 2004 report on Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. That report noted:
Social-media sites blur the distinction between private and public communications in new ways. Unlike blogs or websites, which are generally accessible to anyone with Internet access who goes in search of the site, social-media sites offer the appearance of a space that is simultaneously private and public, one that is on a public medium (the Internet) and yet defined by the user through invitation-only entry points, such as Facebook “friend” requests, and a range of user-controlled privacy settings.
The report concluded:
Most colleges and universities have yet to formulate policies regarding social-media usage by faculty members. At institutions where such policies exist, the focus is frequently on the university’s reputation and not on the faculty’s academic freedom. . . .
This report recommends that each institution work with its faculty to develop policies governing the use of social media. Any such policy must recognize that social media can be used to make extramural utterances and thus their use is subject to Association-supported principles of academic freedom, which encompass extramural utterances. As Committee A previously noted regarding extramural utterances. [Italics in original] As Committee A previously noted regarding extramural utterances, “Professors should also have the freedom to address the larger community with regard to any matter of social, political, economic, or other interest, without institutional discipline or restraint, save in response to fundamental violations of professional ethics or statements that suggest disciplinary incompetence.”
Obviously, the literal distinction between “extramural” and “intramural” speech—speech outside or inside the university’s walls—has little meaning in the world of cyberspace. But the fundamental meaning of extramural speech, as a shorthand for speech in the public sphere and not in one’s area of academic expertise, fully applies in the realm of electronic communications, including social media.
This principle — that extramural speech on social media should be entitled to the same protection as such speech in traditional formats — still holds. However, in the less than two years since that report was approved it has become clear that college and university social media policies should do more than only reaffirm the applicability of academic freedom to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Tressie McMillan Cottom, whose blog McMurtrie cites, is surely correct that colleges and universities are “woefully underprepared” to deal with matters of public scholarship and public engagement. “In this moment,” Cottom writes, “we should call for institutions to state explicitly what they owe those who venture into public waters. Because public scholarship means pissing people off. You think it does not or that it can be done without doing that. You are wrong.”
Cottom’s blog post is worth reading in full, but her recommendations provide, I think, a useful supplement to the AAUP’s call for institutions to develop social media policies attentive to academic freedom concerns. She writes:
If you are investing in public scholars and public scholarship (and I hope you are, with a few caveats) then you should ask yourself if:
1. Your institution has a first line of defense for email and phone call onslaughts.
2. Your institution has a protocol for threats against researchers/professors/teachers
3. Your faculty governance has any awareness at all of what social media means to public scholarship
4. Your faculty governance has a clear policy of representing faculty against media/social media attacks
5. Your professional organization provides resources for besieged members, i.e. legal resources, mental health counseling, etc.
6. Your union has a policy on academic freedom that accounts for how new media blurs the lines between professional and personal selves across various mediums
I will stop at six because that seems like a good place to stop.
According to McMurtrie, Michael H. LeRoy, a professor of labor and employment law at Urbana-Champaign, is convinced that “the First Amendment offers far fewer protections than most professors probably think it does. Such protections, instead, should be spelled out by the university and written into employment contracts.” Indeed, this is a point made by others as well and it is one reason why the AAUP eventually came to endorse collective bargaining as perhaps the most effective mechanism, where available, to defend academic freedom principles. [In the next issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, to be published in September, I have an article documenting the long and sometimes painful history of AAUP’s move toward collective bargaining as a mechanism to defend the Association’s fundamental principles.] In fact, Professor Salaita’s lawsuit against UIUC is more a suit about breach of contract as it is about any Constitutional right. As Robert Post and Matthew Finkin have argued, academic freedom as championed by the AAUP is fundamentally a professional as opposed to a legal principle, while so-called “First Amendment academic freedom” is only partially derived from it and remains much more restrictive (and somewhat muddled).
At the AAUP’s Annual Conference in Washington last month, Philip Lee, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia, presented a paper arguing for “A Contract Theory of Academic Freedom,” based on his recent book, Academic Freedom at American Universities, and summarizing a useful article he published under that title in the St. Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 59, which offers a very informative survey of academic freedom and the law. In that article Lee proposes “[a]s an alternative to an exclusively First Amendment foundation” for academic freedom
a contract law-based conception specifically for professors. Contract law allows courts to protect the rights of professors at both public and private universities. It also allows for the recognition of professional norms and academic custom in interpreting the rights and duties of professors and their universities. Finally, contract law also allows courts to structure remedies that take into account the specific campus contexts that give rise to various disputes. Therefore, in order to create more consistency in the law and an alignment between institutional and professorial protections at both public and private universities, I argue that while constitutional law is still the proper mechanism for defending institutional rights from government interference, contract law should be the primary mechanism for protecting professorial academic freedom.
Whether or not one accepts Lee’s position, it should be clear that, rather than relying solely on the courts, faculty members are well advised to initiate efforts to strengthen protections for academic freedom in union contracts, where these exist, or in faculty handbooks and similar university policy statements that may have contractual standing. In many places, organizing an AAUP chapter may be the critical first step in such efforts.
Because I chair AAUP’s Committee A and also chaired the subcommittee that investigated the Salaita case, I have until now been reluctant to make any public statements regarding either the case itself or the AAUP’s role. But with the vote to place the UIUC administration on our censure list now past, I want to take this opportunity to respond to a number of questions raised on this blog and elsewhere about the AAUP’s investigation of this case.
For one thing, I shouldn’t have to reiterate yet again, but, alas, I must, that this case, insofar as the AAUP is concerned, was not about Israel, Palestine, or Gaza. Charges voiced in communications to the AAUP in the wake of both our report and our censure resolution and sadly repeated as well on the floor of the annual meeting that we were motivated at least in part by “anti-Israel” or even anti-Semitic prejudices are completely and totally unfounded. The AAUP takes no position at all on the content of Professor Salaita’s tweets; we defend only his freedom to make such statements without retribution, and protest only the blatant denial of due process in his treatment. As I recently explained on this blog, were a pro-Israel faculty member placed in a comparable position, we would likely have acted similarly. And we continue to oppose in principle academic boycotts, including the academic boycott of Israel advocated by many of Professor Salaita’s supporters.
Second, charges made on this blog and echoed elsewhere, including on the floor of the annual meeting, that our report involved a “rush to judgment” are, frankly, ridiculous. To be sure, Professor Salaita’s legal case is far from resolved and is likely to continue for some time, but surely that should not prevent the AAUP from reaching its own conclusions. Indeed, it can well be argued that AAUP’s processes move too slowly; after all, it took others only a few weeks to initiate a boycott of UIUC. Only in academia could a deliberative process lasting nearly a year be deemed “rushed.”
To be sure, as our report and prior communications with UIUC administrators indicated, we might well have begun our investigation earlier had it not been for our commitment to wait for the results of the University’s own internal faculty investigation, conducted by the Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT), which ultimately provided important material for our own report, although we disagreed with some of their conclusions. Once that campus report was published, however, we moved swiftly to appoint an investigating subcommittee composed of three members of Committee A (an unusual step in itself, reflecting our recognition of this case’s notoriety and importance), who visited the campus for two days in late February and interviewed a large number of faculty members of varied opinions and status, as well as administrators, including Chancellor Phyllis Wise and her attorney. The wild claim of one commenter to this blog that the AAUP “abandoned its traditional external review procedures to instead essentially adopt the vast majority of the findings of a local group, the CAFT — sacrificing a large part of its credibility in the process” is simply nonsense, as even a superficial reading of the two reports quickly reveals.
Indeed, our investigation was as thorough as any in AAUP’s history. To be sure, we did not independently file FOIA requests for materials, nor did we wait to learn the results of such requests made by Professor Salaita’s attorneys and others, in good measure since such delay would surely have pushed a censure vote back until June 2016, in which case we might well have rightly been accused not of rushing but of interminably postponing judgment. And here I’d like to comment on the extensive efforts by Andrew Scheinman to examine via FOIA requests the motivations and actions of UIUC administrators in this case. Scheinman is surely to be applauded for his work, but his occasional comments on this blog to the effect that the AAUP’s efforts are flawed because we did not pursue the case in the way that he has done misconstrues the nature and purpose of AAUP academic freedom investigations. Our concern in these investigations is not to uncover all relevant information or to determine the “truth” of what occurred, but simply to determine whether or not there were violations of AAUP principles and whether or not such violations merit placement of the investigated administration on our censure list.
Hence, in the Salaita case while more detailed information about the role played in the University’s decision by various supporters, donors, and individual pro-Salaita faculty members — information revealed by Scheinman after the completion of our investigation on the basis of his FOIA requests — is undeniably pertinent, especially to Professor Salaita’s lawsuit — it is not directly relevant to the concerns of the AAUP’s investigation. A complete and accurate account of the “true” motives driving Chancellor Wise and the UI trustees is surely worth seeking, but such an account is hardly essential to determining whether or not UIUC violated Professor Salaita’s academic freedom and whether or not the University’s actions had an impact on the climate for academic freedom more generally at UIUC and, by extension, in American higher education as a whole. Sad to say, that was fairly evident from the start and, as McMurtrie’s article and UIUC’s placement on the AAUP’s censure list attest, remains obvious today.
Nonsense. Specifically nonsense is your statement that:
Scheinman is surely to be applauded for his work, but his occasional comments on this blog to the effect that the AAUP’s efforts are flawed because we did not pursue the case in the way that he has done misconstrues the nature and purpose of AAUP academic freedom investigations.
My point was and will be that the AAUP exists to create a framework for insuring the protection of the rights of its members, and that by failing to avail yourselves of some fact-gathering tools with teeth, what you presented to UIUC was a willingness to take whatever they would give you.
Sure, you found errors in UIUC’s procedures based on what little fact gathering you did, but the lackadaisical approach you took guarantees that in the future UIUC and other schools will do exactly the same things, only they’ll do them under more cover, knowing full well you don’t have the resolution to really go after them.
Or do you really want to argue that what you did was a hard-hitting investigation? Because it wasn’t, nor was that of the CAFT. And what continues to amaze me is how defensive you are about this simple — and obvious — fact.
And by the way, the time-frame for FOIAs is very short, mine have been taking forever only because UIUC has branded me a frequent filer. Once again, you and the CAFT had many tools available to you, and you used almost none of them. Perhaps you wished for or worried about “civility” in your dealings with UIUC, a posture I’d associate with fear of them more than anything else.
Regardless, what you showed them was how weak you were of your own accord, and what you’ve invited them to do — and trust me they’ll proceed to do it — is to run over the rights of the academics there with equal vigor, but with a little more pre-calculation.
You can already see that in the statement by Adesida in today’s News-Gazette about how they’re going to fill their budget hole. They understand something that I continue to think AAUP/CAFT didn’t: power comes to those who exercise it.
Oh and btw, I wrote you and other committee members as well as CAFT members prior to the release of your report. And you never bothered to respond. Why?
Andrew Scheinman
samizdat-startups.org
The hostile tone of your rapid-fire reply is unfortunate, given that my intent in the portion of this post to which you respond (or did you intend to say that the entire post is “nonsense?”) was to applaud your efforts but to indicate that the purpose of our investigation differed from yours. Note that I say “purpose of our investigation” not, as you write, the purpose of the AAUP, which by the way is not simply, as you claim, “to create a framework for insuring the protection of the rights of its members.” We do not defend only our members (Professor Salaita was not at the time, and I believe may not be now, an AAUP member). Our purpose is to define and defend (to the best of our ability) principles for the profession as a whole. Investigations and our censure list are one set of tools we use to defend (and sometimes further develop) those principles.
The FOIA requests that you are employing represent another kind of tool, but a tool that I don’t believe was essential to the purposes of our investigation, although obviously you disagree. To be sure, it is a useful tool for many purposes and that is why the AAUP’s Academe blog welcomed your post of May 16 reporting on your work and has continued to publish your comments, even the hostile ones. But it is at least arguable whether this tool has any greater “teeth” than our censure. Certainly, you have continued to publish the results of your inquiries, which I find salutary and admirable, but I see no evidence, alas, that you have had any greater success in changing the behavior of the UIUC administration than have others, including the AAUP. I might also note that lawsuits, like the one filed by Professor Salaita, are also effective tools — perhaps more than any kind of investigation — but the AAUP doesn’t do those either, although we have provided Professor Salaita with financial support in his fight.
Whether or not we did “a hard-hitting investigation” is, in the end, a matter of opinion, but we in the AAUP are not journalists and we do not strive above all to be “hard-hitting.” We strive simply to determine, as I wrote, whether or not AAUP policies were violated and whether or not the violations rise to the level of censure. In this case, these determinations were relatively easy to make without recourse to the kind of efforts you deplore us for failing to undertake.
Finally, you claim to have written to me before our report was released. I am not aware of any emails sent by you to me at any time. The first I learned of your efforts was in mid-May, when I read your post on the Academe blog. Our policies require that a report be published at least four weeks before any censure vote at the annual meeting so that members who might attend that meeting will have adequate notice of the issues to be debated. Since a draft of the report is always circulated in advance to interested parties the report had to be completed, as it in fact was, in late March and finalized in April. Moreover, I saw no reason to respond to your original post at the time and refrained from any response to your criticisms as I refrained from any public comment on the case as a whole, until today, after which I will resume my silence on this matter.
“Hostile.” Don’t be silly, I’m not hostile. Taking exception isn’t the same as hostility. At a metaphysical level we can agree to disagree with what an “investigation” constitutes, I’d say that the common experience has become that injecting a bit more lawyering into otherwise purely academic pursuits is a good thing.
As for effects, I can tell you that I’ve seen some notable changes in UIUC FOIA’s producedures as a result of my FOIAs. I don’t claim to do anything so grandiose as to change their behaviors, merely accumulate evidence that might help to do so.
I sent an email to you on April 28 to which I attached the open letter to the CAFT that I wrote. You didn’t reply. I’m not broken up by that, and I certainly am happy to receive the complements from you.
Just to be clear, it’s not that you did a bad job — you and the CAFT both did GOOD jobs. it’s rather that UIUC responds best to force, and I think you could have applied more force if more digging had been done …
AOS
Glad to see there is no hostility. I just double-checked and I do not appear to have received your email of April 28 (perhaps it went into spam? I was also on vacation that week, so. . . ), but in any event that was the date of the public release of our report, so it would have been too late for us to change anything. I am glad to hear that UIUC has changed its approach to FOIA requests, in response to your efforts. If only they would change their approach to the Salaita case. As for force, you are probably correct that it is needed; we believe that placement on our censure list, no matter what we did or did not uncover in our report, is about the greatest force we were able to exert at the moment.
So we agree. I was thinking about it as I was walking the dog in the great heat that currently pervades us (in Rochester NY) and I realize that the hostility I feel is towards UIUC, my alum, for the way they’ve treated me and the way they’re treating a lot of other people — Salaita included — all in the name of “university business,” a rather oxymoronic proposition.
My reflexive response to anything UIUC related is at this point to say that what they do should be met with force, because in my experience they respond to nothing else. The censure was deserved and thought out; my call for FOIAs and etc. has primarily to do with my own experiences at how unwilling they are to do anything unless pushed and pushed and pushed.
UIUC is now in a budget crunch, and I’m sure they’re going to use that as an excuse to engage in more nonsense. While I sympathize with the grimness that reduced $ may bring, I unfortunately think those circumstances are being used as an excuse to purge the voices they don’t like, Salaita’s being only the tip of the iceberg.
Well that’s a grim prognosis, and I hope I’m proved wrong.
AOS
Professors Scheinman and Reichman,
You both have provided so much leadership and brilliant work on this important case–please know that American academics everywhere are in your debt. If your investigations were in different directions, please know that it was and is ALL appreciated. The case for academic freedom is stronger because of you both, as well as the AAUP team that brought it to a censure vote. Congratulate each other, even if you didn’t agree on key issues, and keep up the good work!
Jane Harty
Senior Lecturer
Pacific Lutheran University
1978-present
Thank you, Jane, for your kind words.
I appreciate the measured tone and attention to detail in this post, and the clarification about academic freedom and the First Amendment has long been needed.
I take issue with one point, where you state that AAUP’s position would have been the same had Salaita’s tweets been pro-Israel. From where I sit–highly critical of Israel but also of the Palestinians–the apposite comparison is not “pro-Israel” but abusive of another historically protected minority in the US, especially blacks, women, or Native Americans. I still, reading back through the documents and even reading this post, do not find credible the assertion that AAUP would have jumped to the defense of a scholar who repeatedly tweeted racist stereotypes against blacks while claiming not to be a racist and attacking those who called him a racist. From where I sit, that is how Salaita’s comments read; and it seems implicit in AAUP’s stance that it has decided this reading is invalid. Clearly I am not alone in finding that Salaita’s speech is deeply noxious, and while protected by the First Amendment, not at all clearly protected by academic freedom. I see it as a clear example of “hate speech” and I am compelled by the arguments that universities do have some affirmative obligation to protect minorities on their campuses from hate speech, even from professors.
Obviously, others feel virtually any “pro-Israel” commentary is “hate speech.” These are difficult and thorny issues, and I do think that jumping in so quickly has had the appearance of coming very close to endorsing Salaita’s speech as outside the bounds of hate speech. I want to reiterate that I am not clear what *should* have been done, and I find the recent examples of African-American scholars tweeting about white students to be also hard cases. I don’t think any of these, as they stand now, are “core” cases of academic freedom per se, and I do think a slower move toward a more comprehensive statement would have appeared better.
As it is, as a secular Jew who considers Israel a right-wing menace, I still feel as if AAUP has said the university must accept professors who promulgate racist stereotypes against Jews, and downplayed the profound noxiousness both of Salaita’s comments and of his defenses of them, and I simply do not believe it would have acted so quickly had the target population been a different minority, and this concerns me.
Thank you, Tanya, for this thoughtful comment. Obviously, I disagree with your contention that AAUP acted too “quickly.” After all, more than ten months transpired between Professor Salaita’s dismissal and our censure vote. Moreover, neither that vote nor our report should be taken as by themselves thorough treatments in principle of the sorts of thorny issues that you raise — which have been for years and will continue to be discussed and debated in AAUP reports and policy statements — but simply as assessments of the specific circumstances surrounding this case, which from our perspective involved the summary dismissal with no due process of a professor with tenure rights (I know this is disputed, but that is our position, which we argue quite thoroughly in our investigative report), in response to his controversial (and to many “hateful” and “offensive”) statements. You might not believe me, but the content of those statements was almost entirely irrelevant from our perspective.
As for “hate speech,” this has been addressed in the Association’s 1994 policy statement “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes,” which states: “On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it may not be expressed. . . . An institution of higher learning fails to fulfill its mission if it asserts the power to proscribe ideas—and racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults almost always express ideas, however repugnant. Indeed, by proscribing any ideas, a university sets an example that profoundly disserves its academic mission.”
I cannot say, without a review of all our past cases, whether or not the AAUP has in the past defended any faculty members who have made racist statements about blacks, although I think it likely that we have. However, perhaps more pertinent is to ask whether the University of Illinois has treated racist remarks against blacks in a manner consistent with their treatment of Professor Salaita? And, as our report documented, the verdict is that they have not, as evidenced by UIUC’s treatment of a long-time faculty member, Professor Robert Weissberg, who regularly advocated principles of white supremacy. Here is what we wrote about this in our report:
“Weissberg, now retired from the Department of Political Science, was a frequent speaker at meetings of American Renaissance, widely considered a white supremacist group. According to an official summary of one such conference in 2012, he ‘pointed out that there are still many ‘Whitopias’ in America and . . . many ways to keep them white, such as zoning that requires large houses and a cultural ambiance or classical music and refined demeanor that repels undesirables. This approach to maintaining whiteness has the advantage that people can make a living catering to whites in their enclaves.’ In an earlier essay, he wrote, ‘Black-white co-existence is a little like having an incurable medical condition.’ And he added, ‘Blacks generally have a well-deserved reputation for hair-triggered collective violence.’ The administration took no action against him, reflecting a tolerance for offensive extramural expression not witnessed in the Salaita case, although it is unclear whether anyone outside the university had ever attempted to exert pressure on the administration to take such action.” (For more background on Weissberg and UIUC’s inconsistency on what is offensive see John K. Wilson, “The Racist Professor at the University of Illinois,” Academe Blog, September 4, 2014, https://academeblog.org/2014/09/04/the-racist-professor-at-the-university….)
As for the recent cases that you mention of allegedly “anti-white” comments on social media, these differ from the Salaita case insofar as the universities concerned did not seek to sanction, much less summarily dismiss, those faculty members for their comments. Had the universities done so, the AAUP, if asked, would surely have defended those faculty members regardless of any opinions we might have had about the contents of their commentary.
Nonetheless, I much appreciate the considered (and considerate) approach of your remarks. These are indeed difficult issues, but no one ever argued that freedom is easy.
Tanya,
What “racist stereotypes against Jews” did Salaita promulgate?
@Edward
“Die Juden sind unser Unglück!” (“The Jews are our misfortune!”)
Wandering Jew — the belief that Jews should never have peace and a home but instead forever wonder from place to place as punishment for the crucifixion. Wagner in his Kundry character provides the tie between the classic medieval version and the later Nazi version that Salaita et al. advocate for.
Jud Süß (“Süss the Jew”) — dangers allowing Jews to move to a city on equal terms engage in trade
• Jews are behind a plan for global conquest, — He uses “neo-cons”
• Jews work through Masonic lodges — The typical anti-Zionists secret conspiracies about Jewish lobbies manipulating the government in secret.
• Jews use liberalism to weaken church and state — Well they are liberals so BDSERS generally talk about Jews using foreign policy neo-conservatives to undermine state and liberal organizations / interest groups.
• Jews control the press — Yep.
• Jews work through radicals and revolutionaries — Again you need to flip flop the political orientation but this is claim about conservatives….
• Jews manipulate the economy, especially through banking monopolies and the power of gold — I’ve never heard him say this though other BDSers modernize gold to “big banks”
• Jews encourage issuing paper currency not tied to the gold standard — Again BDSers frequenly updated to concern about derivatives and so forth.
• Jews promote financial speculation and use of credit — See above on financials.
• Jews replace traditional educational curriculum to discourage independent thinking — The secret donor conspiracy to discourage independent thinking about the Palestinians… that’s the basis of his lawsuit.
• Jews encourage immorality among Christian youth — Yep where immorality is “imperialism”, “colonialism”… and not the sexual stuff that doesn’t bother leftists.
• Jews use intellectuals to confuse people — Yep
• Jews control “puppet” governments both through secret allies and by blackmailing elected officials — Yes that’s the claim about AIPAC…
• Jews weaken laws through liberal interpretations — Yes the whole charge about international law.
• Jews will suspend civil liberties during an emergency and then make the measures permanent — Yep. Salaita talks about how America is becoming fascist with regard to security and ties to Zionism… You see this regularly on the focus on Israel police training.
Let’s turn this around. What parts of anti-Semitism does Salaita not advocate in a leftist modified form?
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