“Why don’t you get me a f**cking job at your institution if you care so much about my well-being,” tweeted on July 9 Steven Salaita, a would-be academic who destroyed his career with anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter and elsewhere. Accordingly forced in 2014 into a self-described “honest living” as a school bus driver near Washington, DC, he has called into question with subsequent tweets why anyone like him would be a teacher in the first place.
Predictably, the signature obsession for Salaita, an American of Palestinian descent, is Israel-hatred. On May 30, 2019, he tweeted that “Israel is actually good at…killing” and “stealing.” Contrarily, “Zionists think that Israel is good at…democracy…civil rights…illuminating the world.”
The “Zionist” presidential candidate, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, made Salaita scoff on June 28, 2019, at her “anti-war brand” of politics. “Zionism is a form of warfare,” and therefore “Gabbard is by definition pro-war.” “One of the cruelest things about Zionism is how it systematically makes racists and barbarians of people who empathize with the dispossessed,” he elaborated on April 11.
Zionists are actually “genocidaires” in a July 2 Salaita tweet, even though 1.2 million Arabs in the Palestine Mandate when Israel declared independence in 1948 have now grown to perhaps over six million in this territory. He himself leaves unanswered the logical rebuttal to this absurd charge. As Israel’s supporters ask, “how can Israel be committing genocide when the Palestinian population is growing?”
Salaita’s faux genocide motif extended to the Israeli-American commentator Caroline Glick on July 10 after she had insightfully criticized the fraudulent, late Columbia University professor Edward Said. “The native’s demise is a precondition of the colonizer’s existence,” he tweeted while inferring commonplace falsehoods about “native” Palestinians and Jewish “colonizers.” Salaita accused that “Zionists keep defaming Palestinians, even unto our graves,” an ironic claim, given that Said had fabricated much of his “Palestinian” biography.
“Nothing will be fine until we get rid of Zionism and install equality instead,” Salaita further ranted on August 16, 2019. Then another Twitter tirade on April 1: “If you’re serious about a safer, more livable world, then ending Zionism needs to be part of the calculation.” Then, as he tweeted on July 30, “having refused to disappear, as prescribed by the ideology, it is Palestinians who will have the final word on Zionism.”
For good measure, on June 29 Salaita slammed Israeli “settlement” communities in Judea and Samaria as an “ecological abomination filled with miserable fanatics.” He did not explain how corrupt Palestinian Authority governance has been more environmentally friendly than an increasingly green Israel. He also denounced these Israeli communities as “just plain f**cking ugly” without showing how neighboring Palestinian dwellings are any more aesthetic.
Exposure of Salaita and his ilk face makes him scream “snitch” at people such as Bari Weiss, the Jewish opinion columnist who recently left the New York Times in disgust over its insufferable leftist/anti-Semitic biases. In his June 4 tweet, “Zionist repression” prompted her “to get ARAB AND MUSLIM professors fired because she’s a pro-Israel fanatic.” “Zionist fanatics are so accustomed to snitching (and being rewarded for it),” he had earlier stated on August 27, 2019, in reference to her fellow Jewish New York Times columnist, Bret Stephens.
Salaita’s “devotion to justice” defines Israel as merely one of many execrable Western imperialist nations, as a May 26 tweet showed. Unbeknownst to the aforementioned burgeoning “Palestinian” population (including 1.9 million Arab citizens of Israel), “Israel will never forgive Palestinians for refusing to disappear.” Meanwhile sage Salaita pronounced that the “USA will never forgive Natives for surviving” (Someone should tell Senator Elizabeth Warren.) and “France will never forgive Haitians for getting free” (When do the French think of Haiti?).
Two days after President Donald Trump’s July 3, 2020, Independence Day weekend address at South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore monument, Salaita showed his true colors on American patriotism. He condemned “‘America’ as an ongoing settler colonial project,” as if American citizens like him from all manner of ethnic and historic backgrounds would eternally remain foreign. Salaita, who understands himself as such a “colonist” in America but claims to be indigenous to “Palestine,” must have quite a confused identity complex.
Later on July 19, Salaita continued his anti-imperialist virtue signaling by advocating that America “shutter” its military bases, “starting with the ones on foreign soil.” This “foreign soil” includes for him America’s 50th state, Hawaii, as well as Guȧhan (Guam), Samoa, and Puerto Rico. He gave no indication of having consulted the American citizens in these territories about his ideas.
The January 2 American drone strike killing of the Iranian jihadist terrorist Qassam Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq, brought more leftist cant from Salaita. “Nothing like a bit of bloodletting in the Middle East to illuminate the overt racism and chauvinistic arrogance of US imperialism,” he tweeted that day. Later on April 2 he arrogantly claimed that Americans condemned China’s handling of the COVID-19 virus because “their national identity would evaporate without a barbaric adversary to demonize.”
Like other leftist ideologues, Salaita pairs unhinged rhetoric with a self-appointed role as speech arbiter. For him “a banal statement like ‘all lives matter’ unequivocally communicates white supremacy,” he tweeted on June 19, a “damning indictment of the United States.” Meanwhile “many supposed defenses of free speech are just a pretext to suggest that Black and brown people aren’t suited to modernity,” he added on July 15.
Sane people can only hope that humanity never follows Salaita’s disastrous socialist road to misery. “It’s never really been theoretical rigor or political logic that attracted me to socialism,” he tweeted on May 25 about a repeatedly discredited ideology. He vainly hoped for socialism’s “promise of a world in which decency is nurtured and rewarded.”
In Salaita’s crazed imagination workers could actually benefit from COVID-19 crashing the global economy. “Of course members of the leisure class who became wealthy by stealing our wages are demanding that we return to work,” he tweeted on March 24. Yet workers supposedly unconcerned about daily survival “should stay on break until that class no longer exists.”
Pol Pot-like, Salaita expressed particular ire for the airline and cruise ship industries on March 23:
Cruise ships transform diverse and beautiful ecosystems into generic simulations of paradise for petite bourgeois tourists. Airlines are an environmental disaster. Let both industries die for the good of the world.
Chinese fortune cookies are more insightful than Salaita, and yet he had become a member of the modern ivory tower. He exemplifies an out-of-control, intellectually bankrupt education-industrial complex that offers increasingly diminishing returns to the exorbitant payments of taxpayers, students, parents, and alumni. Before undergoing further fleecing, these benefactors of academia should ask whether more professors would be better suited as bus drivers like Steven Salaita.