Steven Salaita’s Historiography of Victimhood
Had the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign not
nixed Steven Salaita’s appointment as professor of American Indian studies after his extended string of vituperative, vulgar Tweets, blog posts, and other
communications exposed his anti-Semitism and radicalism to a broad audience, he would have likely remained an obscure academic. Today his legions of professorial supporters view him as a
cause célèbre and
alleged victim of the “Israel lobby” and rich alumni.
Salaita may not have presented himself as a victim of academe’s alleged perfidy before Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s action in
August, but his fields of study assume the victimhood of indigenous peoples worldwide. Since world history is replete with conquests, intermarriage, assimilation, and the rise and fall of expansive empires, separating victims from victimizers through the millennia is a difficult process — unless, that is, the purpose of one’s academic work has less to do with the pursuit of truth than with achieving political goals through a quixotic, politicized reading of history.
Salaita embodies these incongruities. Given his would-be appointment in American Indian studies, one would assume that the bulk of his scholarly work treats the cultures and history of the various tribes of North America. In fact, all six of
his books deal with modern Arab studies, Arab Americans, or Israel. How this West Virginia
native of Arab ancestry could be offered a position in American Indian studies in spite of this fact is illustrated through the convoluted, jargon-laden work of Salaita’s mentors. His greatest, or most immediate, intellectual debt is to
Robert Warrior, the director of American Indian studies at UI who served on Salaita’s dissertation committee at the University of Oklahoma.
Warrior is a member of the Osage Nation “who
stands in solidarity with other tribal peoples around the world.” In contemporary ethnic studies this signifies that he, like Salaita the Palestinian, can claim victimhood and oppression at the hands of conquering powers — the European colonizers of North America, and the Jewish “colonizers” of modern Israel, respectively. This alliance of the oppressed unites in theory if not in fact these disparate fields of
study.
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