Steven Salaita’s outlook on Israel is no secret. The English professor recently published a book called “Israel’s Dead Soul.” He also mocked Israel and promoted a boycott of Israeli products in blog posts on ‘Electronic Intifada.’ But his expletive-laced anti-Israel tweets may have just cost him a new job at the University of Illinois.
Salaita had resigned from his post as associate professor of English at Virginia Tech and was to join the American Indian studies department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this month. But he was recently notified by Chancellor Phyllis Wise that the job offer was rescinded.
According to Inside Higher Ed, “sources familiar with the university’s decision say that concern grew over the tone of his comments on Twitter about Israel’s policies in Gaza, which struck some as crossing a line into uncivil behavior.”
After news broke of Salaita’s appointment at the University of Illinois, bloggers and other news outlets criticized Salaita for his controversial twitter feed. In response, a UI spokeswoman defended Salaita, asserting that “faculty have a wide range of scholarly and political views, and we recognize the freedom-of-speech rights of all of our employees.” That was in late July.
But as the Gaza-Israel crisis escalated, so did the tenor of Salaita’s tweets.
Worry not, Zionist trolls! I’m awake and ready to once again provide the conscience you must suppress in order to support #Israel.
— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 31, 2014
According to Zionist logic, caring about #Gaza necessarily means hating Syria, loving #ISIS, and being infatuated by North Korea.
— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 29, 2014
At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised? #Gaza
— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014
Cary Nelson, an English professor at UI, told Inside Higher Ed that it was not the content, but the “venomous” and “over-the-top” tone of the tweets that likely cost Salaita his job. She noted that many faculty members have openly criticized Israel and that “(t)here is nothing ‘unpopular’ on this campus about hostility to Israel.”
