My hearti­est con­grat­u­la­tions go out to the Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Rights and their client Pro­fes­sor Steven Salai­ta, who deserved­ly was award­ed $875,000 — far less than the assumed amount of wages he would have gar­nered over the next few decades as a tenured pro­fes­sor — by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois to set­tle the law­suit brought against them.

What the Salaita case most reminded me of was the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which destroyed careers and lives through the very kind of manipulation of words and ideas seen here.

But although I’m glad for his vic­to­ry and all that it means for aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom around the coun­try, I have to say that I am sad­dened that we will not see a full tri­al on this case — leav­ing so many impor­tant ques­tions unanswered.

When the news that the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois had rescind­ed its offer of employ­ment to Sali­a­ta due his alleged ​”anti-semit­ic” remarks,” I was imme­di­ate­ly sus­pi­cious. My own crit­i­cism of Israel had often earned me the dis­dain and ire of the crowd that sees defense of Israel — right or wrong — as the mea­sur­ing stick of being a ​“real” or ​“good” Jew. I had to won­der whether the charge of anti-semi­tism was deserved or just anoth­er instance in which crit­i­cism of Israel’s poli­cies was wrong­ly equat­ed with anti-semitism.

I had read Salaita’s tweets in the New York Times and else­where, and while I could under­stand while some might have found them offen­sive, I cer­tain­ly didn’t feel that they were anti-semit­ic. But I won­dered if and why papers like the Times hadn’t asked, ​”Were these hand­ful of tweets indica­tive of the sum total of what Salai­ta has said on Twit­ter? If not, were they indica­tive of his gen­er­al writ­ings and thoughts on the Internet?”

Going to his Twit­ter account, I found the answers. As of Sep­tem­ber 2014, around the time when he first wrote the con­tro­ver­sial tweets, Salai­ta had writ­ten more than 9,000 tweets. And among them, these few — all writ­ten dur­ing the Israeli bomb­ing of Gaza — were the only ones that could even pos­si­bly be con­strued as anti-Israel, let alone anti-semet­ic. And of those few, almost all were writ­ten dur­ing the four days in July 2014, when thou­sands of Pales­tini­ans (most­ly women, the elder­ly and chil­dren) had lost their lives and homes to an inces­sant Israeli bom­bard­ment—a bom­bard­ment that drew anger and oppo­si­tion from mil­lions through­out the world and the con­dem­na­tion of vir­tu­al­ly every human rights group in the world. Salaita’s tweets were angry — but the slaugh­ter of hun­dreds of unarmed civil­ians should make every­one angry.

The ques­tions for me, then, as they should have been for the uni­ver­si­ty and most cer­tain­ly for any decent reporter were, ​“Who was watch­ing? Who was read­ing Salaita’s Twit­ter account close­ly enough to cher­ry pick 10 from among the thou­sands? And why?”

A few days lat­er, while perus­ing the media reports about the case, I stum­bled across a list of over 200 oth­er pro­fes­sors — Arabs, Jews and oth­ers — who were being tar­get­ed as being anti-semit­ic, unfit to teach and which called for all fed­er­al fund­ing to be denied to those pro­fes­sors and Mid­dle East Stud­ies pro­grams. Their crime? Sign­ing a peti­tion in sup­port of the boy­cott of Israeli goods and insti­tu­tions. The orga­ni­za­tion behind the peti­tion? A group known as AMCHA, an orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Pro­fes­sor Tam­my Ross­man-Ben­jamin of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-San­ta Cruz.

But AMCHA was not alone. Oper­at­ing on cam­pus and tar­get­ing as anti-semit­ic both pro­fes­sors and anti-Israeli occu­pa­tion stu­dent groups are a num­ber of appar­ent­ly well-fund­ed groups from Stand With Us, which receives large amounts of fund­ing from the Israeli gov­ern­ment to Cam­pus Watch, the Anti-Defama­tion League, the Simon Wisen­thal Cen­ter and Cam­pus Macabees, the new orga­ni­za­tion backed by right-wing bil­lion­aire and casi­no king Shel­don Adelson.

Were any of these groups involved in tar­get­ing and defam­ing Salai­ta? Or are there oth­ers? Was Salaita’s fir­ing an iso­lat­ed inci­dent that seems to have par­tial­ly back­fired, or was it a tri­al bal­loon for rid­ding our nation’s cam­pus­es of anti-occu­pa­tion pro­fes­sors and groups? Was Salaita’s treat­ment the result of a zeal­ous indi­vid­ual or part of a larg­er scheme that has tried to squelch the boy­cott, divest­ment and sanc­tions (BDS) move­ment by try­ing to pass laws in state leg­is­la­tures, city coun­cils and else­where mak­ing divest­ment ille­gal?

Why are these ques­tions impor­tant? Because even beyond the crit­i­cal issue of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom lies the big­ger issue of free­dom of ideas them­selves. What the Salai­ta case most remind­ed me of was the rise of McCarthy­ism and the Red Scare, which destroyed careers and lives through the very kind of manip­u­la­tion of words and ideas seen here.

While most who think of that peri­od as an aber­ra­tion (if they think of it at all), the same pat­tern, if not exact­ly the same forces are present in the Salai­ta case. Here, in what may or may not even­tu­al­ly may be exposed to the full light of day, we see the impact of a new right-wing alliance that involves the com­plic­i­ty of uni­ver­si­ty offi­cials in demo­niz­ing a cer­tain kind of polit­i­cal dis­course, and the will­ful igno­rance of the main­stream media which becomes an echo-cham­ber for the uni­ver­si­ty, repeat­ing unex­am­ined half-truths and distortions.

While I am hap­py for Steven Salai­ta and con­grat­u­late the Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tion­al rights for what they’ve won, I am sor­ry for what we’ve lost: the abil­i­ty to know the answers to these ques­tions — answers that could only have come from a full trial.