Here are a few examples.

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A review of What Israel Means to Me: “I don’t need to hear from the sanctimonious pricks in this book.” If you read the whole brief review, it certainly calls into question the degree to which Salaita can be tolerant of students or colleagues who express pro-Israel views, as he seems to think that anyone who has warm feelings for Israel is inherently a “sanctimonious prick”–surely all eighty essayists in the book don’t have anything else in common. (Here’s a wayback machine link.)

A review of Narnie Darwish’s They Call Me Infidel, which he acknowledges he never read: “Given Darwish’s annoying propensity to confuse reality with her well-timed con artistry, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s disingenuously substituting ‘infidel’ for ‘idiot,’ ‘imbecile,’ ‘ignoramus,’ or ‘impostor.'” (Here’s a Google cache link.)

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Many of Salaita’s reviews criticize what he sees as racism in books (such as Superfreakanomics), but that doesn’t stop him from making this comment in a review of Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens: “Yes, it’s always rewarding to read somebody pillorying Hitchens, if only because his disaffected little white fans treat the atheist as a God and it’s amusing listening to them argue with all the bluster and arrogance of mini-Hitches.” Charming. (Here’s a Google cache link).

And while Salaita’s advocates have ably (and reasonably persuasively, I think, though I haven’t followed the controversy extremely closely) defended him from the charge that his controversial tweets endorsed anti-Semitism (I’d say some of them were more anti-anti-anti-Semitism), I’m not sure it would be as easy to defend this review of Abe Foxman’s The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control from the charge of anti-Semitism: “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.” It’s hard to understand this as something other than Salaita endorsing the “myth” that Jews do control things. (Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly sums up the book’s thesis: “a rebuttal of a pernicious theory about a mythically powerful Jewish lobby.” So there is a mythically powerful Jewish lobby, and Foxman’s career proves it?) (Here’s a Google cache link.)

All these quotes, remember, are the product of reading a relative handful of Salaita’s reviews. I don’t have the time, patience, or interest to slog through all of them.

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So do I think this justifies unhiring him? My thoughts on the Salaita situation need a whole blog post, and so far I haven’t been able to care enough to put them in writing. The most I’ll say for now is that (1) I generally oppose conditioning hiring for an academic job on someone’s blog posts, tweets, or other non-academic writings unless they have volunteered that they think it’s a significant part of their portfolio; (2) there are exceptions in extreme circumstances; (3) I don’t have the desire to become enough of an expert on Salaita to judge whether he qualifies; and (4) whatever sensitivity/collegiality standard Illinois purports to be applying here shouldn’t be applied more strictly because Salaita is hostile to Israel, nor should anti-Semitism (if there is such) be taken less seriously than other forms of racism.

UPDATE: When I posted this, I hadn’t seen Jonathan’s post from earlier today suggesting that Illinois may have “unhired” Salaita because of pressure from donors. Needless to say, university presidents shouldn’t be giving in to pressure from donors, but should be making whatever decisions they make independently.

And here are what are likely to be my final words on the subject of Salaita for a while: Salaita may have been unfairly treated in part because of his political views, and not just how he expressed them, and how he expressed them may not justify how he was treated, either; again, without becoming an expert on the case, I’m not in a position to make a firm judgment on the situation. But a lot of people are using him as an example of how academics with pro-Palestinian or “anti-Zionist” views are punished in American universities. This is laughable. For every Steve Salaita, there are a larger number of people interested in Middle East Studies who get rejected for academic jobs, or decline to go into academia to begin with, because they have pro-Israel views. As I noted several years back, top universities have found it necessary to create special “Israel Studies” programs and chairs because Departments of Middle Eastern Studies are so closed to anyone who wants to do objective, much less sympathetic, scholarship on Israel. That final link goes to a story about what passes for debate at the Middle East Studies Association: “Should we boycott all Israeli goods, products, services, and people, or should we exempt academics?” The vast majority of those who are agitating for Salaita on the grounds that political views shouldn’t affect academic appointments don’t care at all that MES programs are so one-sidedly hostile to Israel, and hire accordingly.

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