Steven Salaita, First Amendment Rights, Academic Freedom and the Elephant in the Room
In the summer of 2014, beginning on July 8, Israel launched a 50 day military operation against Gaza, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. People around the world were horrified by the images of carnage coming out of Gaza. Social media proved to be a powerful tool for disseminating information, video and photos, and expressing a shared sense of outrage.
Professor Steven Salaita raised his voice in a series of posts on Twitter condemning Israel’s actions. Administrators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign responded by terminating Salaita’s faculty appointment for “incivility” in the language and tone of his tweets. It has been alleged that the university dismissed Salaita in acquiescence to pressure from certain university donors.
In January, an independent fact finding mission commissioned by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel determined that, during Operation Protective Edge, over 2,100 residents of Gaza were killed, at least 70% were civilians, over 500 were children, over 11,000 people were wounded and over 100,000 were made homeless. Hospitals, medical centers, shelters and mosques were bombed. The report, titled “No Safe Place,” concluded:
“The attacks were characterised by heavy and unpredictable bombardments of civilian neighbourhoods in a manner that failed to discriminate between legitimate targets and protected populations and caused widespread destruction of homes and civilian property. Such indiscriminate attacks, by aircraft, drones, artillery, tanks and gunships, were unlikely to have been the result of decisions made by individual soldiers or commanders; they must have entailed approval from top-level decision-makers in the Israeli military and/or government.”
These findings are supported in a report released on May 4, by the Israeli group Breaking the Silence. The report contains graphic testimony from more than 60 Israeli soldiers describing attacks on civilians and reveals a “disturbing picture of the IDF’s policy of indiscriminate fire.”
This is what Steven Salaita railed against in his posts on Twitter, using language severely critical of the Israeli government, which UIUC donors and administrators found to be impermissible.
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Salaita’s termination “functions as a penalty for his speech on an issue of public concern, constitutes ‘viewpoint discrimination,’ a violation of the First Amendment, and also threatens academic freedom by punishing a faculty member for speaking as a citizen on a critical issue.” The CCR further wrote:
“Professor Steven Salaita was a tenured English professor at Virginia Tech University, whose scholarship focused on colonialism, militarism and occupation and who had written well-regarded books studying Arab-American literature and criticizing Zionism. It was on the basis of his excellent scholarly record that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offered Professor Salaita a tenured position in the University’s American Indian Studies department. Based on the contract he had with the University of Illinois, Professor Salaita resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech University and had prepared to move his family to Illinois. Yet, one week before school was to start, Professor Salaita received a terse letter from University Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, summarily informing him that his appointment was terminated.”
The CCR is representing Salaita in the lawsuit he filed in January against UIUC trustees, administrators and donors for violations of his First Amendment right to free speech and breach of his employment contract. The lawsuit is still in its early stages.
Source: www.counterpunch.org