Salaita to Speak at Press Conference Tomorrow at UIUC

Steven Salaita will be speaking tomorrow, Tuesday, September 9, at 12:30 pm, at a press conference at the University YMCA in Urbana, Illinois. Two days before the Board of Trustees meets.

Salaita will be joined by Robert Warrior, chair of the American Indian Studies department at UIUC; Michael Rothberg, chair of the English department at UIUC, Maria LaHood, a senior attorney from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and two UIUC students.

This is the first time Salaita will be speaking publicly about his situation.

His legal team includes the Center for Constitutional Rights and Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy in Chicago

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, “For those unable to attend the press conference in person, a copy of Prof. Salaita’s comments will be sent around afterwards and the speakers will be available for interview by phone beginning at 2 p.m. CDT.”

The University YMCA is located at 1001 S Wright Street in Urbana. The number is 217-337-1500.

If you’re in the area, please come and show your support.

13 Comments

  1. Susan Davis September 8, 2014 at 4:30 pm | #

    Reblogged this on Campus Faculty Association and commented:
    Tomorrow at the YMCA:

  2. Mike Donnel September 8, 2014 at 10:19 pm | #

    It’s beggars credulity to read this(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pmYiN4zNUegJ:www.goodreads.com/review/show/61019750+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) as anything other than the utterance of an anti-Semite. I hope the board of trustees slaps down hard Salaita’s vicious hate, and its enablers within the university..

    • MDZX September 9, 2014 at 2:53 am | #

      “This is sheer accidental brilliance. It has to be one of the few books ever published in which the author’s body of work so adeptly undermines his thesis” is the utterance of an anti-Semite? Because… the title of the book he is reviewing is “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control”?

      Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps the title of a book is not necessarily the entire thesis of said book, and claiming that someone hates Jews based on abstract inferences from two short sentences is more than a little silly?

      Goodness, the die-hard Zionist folks are really cranking up the absurdity and slander machines to overdrive this time.

      • bor September 9, 2014 at 4:59 am | #

        Inferences are being made from multiple tweets, mini-reviews, an article Salaita submitted as part of his job application at UIUC and from sections of his books.

        This mini-review is quite egregious precisely because it is so short and therefore the reader can only understand one thing from it, precisely what Mike Donnel gathered. Salaita has a master’s in English and has taught English at his former university. It’s hard to argue that he doesn’t know how to articulate his thoughts. What he wrote here is quite direct.

    • Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant September 9, 2014 at 9:32 am | #

      From The Daily Beast:

      http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/29/abe-foxman-rationalizes-blanket-spying-on-american-muslims.html#

      And from Ha’aretz:

      http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/even-after-boston-there-is-more-anti-jewish-than-anti-muslim-sentiment-in-u-s-says-adl-s-foxman.premium-1.517960

      That is the Foxman to which Salaita’s comment refers. Salaita is right: Foxman’s body of work does indeed undercut his [professed] thesis.

    • tree September 9, 2014 at 12:54 pm | #

      Foxman has been a tireless and quite successful promoter and defender of Israel for decades. His book was written as a counter to Walt and Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” (thus the subtitle of his book). In essence Foxman’s book denies that such a lobby exists, and the book also takes pot shots at Jimmy Carter’s “Peace not Apartheid”. Salaita’s review is easy to understand if you have any knowledge of Foxman’s “body of work”, which does in fact undercut his thesis that there is no Israel lobby in the US.

      It seems to me that the “vicious hate” is coming from those opposed to Salaita rather than from Saliata himself. Their arguments against him are strained beyond belief and they are demanding retribution for a political view they oppose. How is a valid criticism of a book that was overwhelmingly panned by an assortment of other readers an instance of “vicious hate” rather than a legitimate criticism? Apparently one can not dare to poke fun at Abe Foxman or his book without being called an “anti-semite”. Guys, you are overworking this and rendering the term meaningless by applying it to instances and individuals to whom it does not apply. You are actually providing material support for the message of one of Salaita’s “offending” tweets.

      • David September 9, 2014 at 4:28 pm | #

        Since you seem to have some familiarity with Foxman’s book, could you tell us whether his thesis is that there’s no pro-Israel lobby, that there’s a “myth of Jewish control,” both, or neither? Just from the book’s title and your post, I would have inferred that Foxman is attempting to refute (what he calls) of “the myth of Jewish control” over U.S. foreign policy. We don’t need Foxman or his career to know that there’s a pro-Israel lobby. (I’m not restricting lobby or lobbyist to whatever the legal requirements that require registration.) But regarding the claim of “Jewish control,” that’s a phrase that, at the least, has an antisemitic resonance.

      • tree September 9, 2014 at 6:55 pm | #

        David,

        Foxman’s book was specifically written as a “refutation” of both “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” by Walt and Mearsheimer, and “Peace Not Apartheid” by former President Carter. It should be discernible simply from Foxman’s title that he is calling “The Israel Lobby” a “deadly lie”. The claim of “Jewish control” is not a part of either W and M’s book, or Carter’s book, but was inserted into Foxman’s title in order to make a false claim of anti-semitism against those books. Foxman is the one introducing anti-semitic “resonance” in order to smear the authors and the books themselves, thus hoping to put an open discussion of their ideas out of the realm of acceptable discourse. This has been Foxman’s life work: preventing any criticism of Israel, and guaranteeing unquestioning support for whatever Israel does, and one of the ways he does that is by branding as anti-semitic any realistic criticism of Israel or US support for it.

  3. David September 10, 2014 at 9:07 am | #

    tree,

    Thank you for your response. If, indeed, Foxman is claiming there’s no such thing as a pro-Israel lobby (at least in the sense of a variety of organizations seeking to persuade Congress, presidential administrations, and the American public to support their views of what’s best for Israel and, I expect most of them believe, America), then his own career certainly is self-refuting. But having read W & M’s book, albeit not recently, I think they were claiming more than that by way of “the Israel Lobby,” which may explain why Noam Chomsky, for example, found fault with them.

    All that said, based on your explanation of Foxman’s book, it appears that Prof. Salaita’s brief review does not support the general charge against him. On the other hand, a more considered, even if still brief, review would have made the distinction you make between the lobby claim and the “Jewish control” part of the book’s title.

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