Since Congress, which appears to have a disproportionate number of genocidal maniacs in its ranks, is all right with the Palestinians being subjected to mass murder, it should come as no surprise that they are all right with their remaining unfree from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

As often has been the case in American history, the House of Representatives has failed to understand its role in the Constitution. The representatives might like to consult their own website, which notes that the First Amendment says,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The resolution passed Wednesday is a blatant attempt to abridge the freedom of speech. That is why it is a resolution and not incorporated into a law, because the law would be struck down immediately. As for the resolution, it is hateful hot air.

The resolution alleges that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is “antisemitic.” They seem to be worse readers of texts even than they are constitutional scholars. The phrase doesn’t mention Jews. It says that Palestine will be free.

Palestine is currently not free.

However, on 13 December, 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed the Oslo Peace Accords. These accords, which have the force of U.S. law, specified that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank by 1997 and turn their governance over to the Palestine Authority, that is, the state of Palestine. Had the Oslo accords been implemented, then from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine would have been free.

They were not implemented because the accords were deliberately derailed by the far right wing Likud Party led by Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu boasted about his role in ensuring that Palestine did not become free. The Likud wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population (which the New York Times is forbidden to tell you).

Video: “Netanyahu boasting about Manipulating America and derailing Oslo peace process”

So the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” can be read as an insistence that Oslo, which is US treaty law, actually be implemented.

The congressional resolution insists that the phrase must mean that the state of Palestine would constitute all the land of historic Palestine, i.e. the area of the British Mandate of Palestine. In such a scenario, there would be no place for Israel.

However, in those Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, signed by the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, that organization agreed to recognize Israel.

So supporters of the PLO and of the state of Palestine obviously do not mean by the chant to take back away that recognition. In fact, the ones who reneged are the Israelis, who took back away their recognition of Palestine.

It may be that some people who use the phrase “from the river to the sea” mean it in an anti-Israel fashion. That it always has this sense is not something that members Congress, most of whom are signally ignorant of the Middle East, can stipulate. If we stop letting Congress play ventriloquist with Palestinians, and listen to actual Palestinians, what do we hear?

Yusuf Munayyer wrote in Jewish Currents, “I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

MSNBC: “Rep. Rashida Tlaib responds to House censure vote”

Congress complains that the phrase seeks to deprive the Jewish people of the right of self-determination. But the Jewish people in the sense of followers of the Judaic religion are not a national unit. American Jews are Americans. If Congress is saying that all Jews everywhere have the right of collective self-determination and that it can only be exercised in historic Palestine, then it is saying that the 6 million American Jews are deprived of that right. The resolution reduces American Jews to second-class citizens in the US. What could be more antisemitic than this resolution?

The statement is not about the Judaic religion but about the political doctrines of Zionism, which Congress is attempting to impose on us all. Moreover, the perspective adopted in the congressional resolution is not that of garden variety Zionism but that of the most extreme, fascistic forms of the ideology, which rule out a Palestinian state and any basic human rights for the 14 million Palestinians, who surely have as much right to collective self-determination as the 16 million Jews.

In contrast, the Mandatory authority in British Palestine, given that charge by the Versailles Peace Conference and its San Remo satellite conference after World War I, in its last official pronouncement of London’s vision of the future, the 1939 White Paper, said:

“The objective of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State in such treaty relations with the United Kingdom as will provide satisfactorily for the commercial and strategic requirements of both countries in the future. The proposal for the establishment of the independent State would involve consultation with the Council of the League of Nations with a view to the termination of the Mandate.

The independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”

The mandatory authority envisioned that the Palestinian people in its charge would be no different from the Syrian people under French rule, the Iraqi people under British rule (class A mandates), or the people of French and British [formerly German] Togoland, which were Class B mandates. British Togoland became part of Ghana and French Togoland became the Togolese Republic or Togo. There is today a Syria, an Iraq, a Togo. There is no Palestine. International law was thwarted by hard line Zionists, in the crimes of whom Congress is an accessory after the fact.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were committed to ending the problem of statelessness and would not have wanted the Palestinians to be colonized forever, and forever to lack collective sovereignty.

Again, this principle was made explicit by the British government:

“His Majesty’s Government are charged as the Mandatory authority “to secure the development of self governing institutions” in Palestine. Apart from this specific obligation, they would regard it as contrary to the whole spirit of the Mandate system that the population of Palestine should remain forever under Mandatory tutelage. It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.”

So the first nation to pledge that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (by 1949!) was the United Kingdom, the mandatory authority to which the League of Nations and then the United Nations forwarded the rule of Palestine. Moreover, its pledges in this regard have continuing force in international law regarding the ultimate disposition of the Palestinian people.

The UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947 was no more than a (remarkably pro-Zionist) suggestion and did not have the force of law. Only the UNSC has executive authority, and that body never adopted the plan. Both the Zionists and the Palestinians rejected it. Some Zionist apologists pretend that David Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders accepted the plan, but then why did they usurp territory such as the Galilee that was not awarded to them? Ben Gurion wrote in his diary when Israel was founded in 1948 that its borders were not specified in the constitution, just as those of the United States had not been in its. He had in mind an expansionist Manifest Destiny, and tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Palestinian Gaza and southern Lebanon, and officials around him plotted to get the West Bank from the late 1950s. Does that sound like he accepted the UNGA map?

Moreover, the Palestinian rejection of the UNGA proposal is no grounds for forever denying them the right to citizenship in a state, which is denied to no other people in the world. That is, there are peoples who chafe at the citizenship they have, such as Syrian Kurds, but there is no other group of several million people who have been kept stateless for many decades the way the Palestinians have been.

An end to this statelessness is one of the things that is meant by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Congress has repeatedly obstructed any attempt to end Palestinian statelessness or to realize the vision of even the British colonialists, supercilious and racist as they were. Congress is clearly much more so. “It is proper,” British officials maintained, “that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.” “As early as possible” was not envisioned in 1939 as some date after 2024.

Palestinian academic Hatem Bazian says Arizona State University asked him to sign a contract in which he pledges not to criticise Israel at a university event.

Arizona State University is reported to have asked Palestinian academic Hatem Bazian to sign a contract in which he pledges not to criticise Israel at an event organised by the Muslim Students’ Association next month.

Chair of American Muslims for Palestine and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, Bazian said Arizona State University asked him to sign the university’s speaker agreement which included a clause that prohibits criticising Israel or engaging with the BDS movement.

Bazian refused to sign the agreement, saying agents loyal to Israel, constitute a real obstacle to freedom of expression and academic freedom in American universities.

He added that asking him to sign an agreement which includes a clause that prevents criticism and boycott of Israel is to ignore the freedom of thought and academic autonomy.

“I think that Israel ignores international law and puts pressure on the Palestinian people,” he said, adding that there are many pro-Israel organisations throughout the United States which try to prevent programmes and events that are organised in favour of the Palestinian cause by putting pressure on university administrations.

Last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a lawsuit against Arizona State University on behalf of American Muslims for Palestine and Hatem Bazian.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

——

bonus video added by Informed Comment:

American Academy of Religion: “Recolonizing the Academy Under a Trump Presidency”

“VICE News examines the Trump administration’s war on leakers, with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

“We’re really seeing leaks that are dangerous to the president, embarrassing to the president, by agencies that feel themselves endangered by the president.”

VICE News: “Daniel Ellsberg On Leaking In The Age Of Trump (HBO)”

Trump has his Twitter. Apparently far right wing Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has his Facebook. In a Facebook posting, Netanyahu vowed to close the Jerusalem office of the Qatar-backed Al Jazeera satellite news station. Failing that, he said, he would introduce legislation to ban Al Jazeera in Israel (presumably Israel/ Palestine, since Israel keeps 4.5 million Palestinians under siege or direct military rule).

Netanyahu accuses Al Jazeera of “incitement,” which in the right wing Israeli lexicon means reporting news about how the Israelis are militarily occupying and gradually expropriating the Palestinians.

Netanyahu is widely seen to be blaming Al Jazeera for his own poor judgment, inasmuch has he put metal detectors in the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, provoking demonstrations in Jerusalem and Jordan. Netanyahu was forced into a humiliating retreat, and the Israeli public thinks he should have had better sense in the first place.

Al Jazeera itself reported on this story, writing that Netanyahu held a cabinet meeting with high Israeli intelligence and security heads on June 12 to discuss shuttering Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem office. The channel alleged that Netanyahu wanted to take advantage of the closing of Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries, as part of their campaign against Qatar for its support of the Muslim Brotherhood and for various forms of political openness and free discussion.

It alleged that Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Al Jazeera not only of instigation but also of being Nazis. Lieberman, a former club bouncer from Moldova, once spoke of how it would be possible for Israel to blow up Egypt’s Aswan Dam and wash 90 million Egyptians into the Mediterranean, so I don’t think he is exactly James Madison. Likewise Al Jazeera says that in June, far far right Israelis demonstrated against the channel, demanding it be closed in Israel just as it was being closed in Saudi Arabia.

The right wing of hard line Jewish nationalism (such as the Likud Party from which Neanyahu springs) has no respect whatsoever for freedom of speech or the free flow of information which is why an Israel under a Lukud government is not actually fully a democracy (there is military censorship and there is no freedom at all in the Occupied territories that comprise about 1/3 of the population ruled by the Israeli government).

In fact, they’re trying as hard as they can to have Congress get rid of the US First Amendment and make it a felony to criticize them and advocate boycotting them in the United States.

Al Jazeera has been banned from lots of countries. It deals with that problem by phoning interviewees in those countries. Unless Netanyahu wants to make phone calls illegal, too, he can’t stop Al Jazeera putting critical voices on the air.

Not sure it is a good look for Netanyahu to ape Saudi Arabia’s media and foreign policies.

Or for his agents in AIPAC on the Hill to try to turn America into Saudi Arabia, either.

——-

Related video:

TYT: “Will Senate Amend Law Criminalizing Israel Boycotters?”

Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Friday, saying the investigation had not been able to proceed because of legal obstacles.

“Today is an important victory for me and for the U.N. human rights system,” Assange said in an address on the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Assange, 45, has lived in the embassy since 2012 when he took refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations. He feared Sweden would hand him over to the United States to face prosecution for information leaks as thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents were published by WikiLeaks.

Swedish Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny said that the investigation could be reopened if Assange came to Sweden before the statute of limitations deadline for rape allegation in 2020. “We are not making a statement about his guilt,” Ny added.

Assange said being detained for seven years without charge while his children grew up and his name was slandered is something that he won’t “forgive or forget.”

The United Nations has decried the unfair treatment of Assange, declaring that he was being arbitrarily detained and that his human rights were violated.

Assange thanked the United Nations and Ecudor who “stood by my asylum despote intense pressure” in his address.

Ecuador’s government welcomed the decision by Sweden, but said it was long overdue.

“Ecuador regrets that the Swedish prosecutor delayed more than four years in carrying out this interview,” said Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Guillaume Long. “This unnecessary delay was despite the repeated insistence from the Ecuadorean government — ever since the granting of asylum in 2012 — that this interview was not only possible but that Ecuador would facilitate its carrying out in our embassy.”

“Given that the European arrest warrant no longer holds, Ecuador will now be intensifying its diplomatic efforts with the U.K. so that Julian Assange can gain safe passage in order to enjoy his asylum in Ecuador,” said Long.

After a seven-year stand-off with Sweden, Assange may still not be able to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy. British police said that if Assange were to leave the embassy it was still their obligation to arrest him. But the British government has not commented on whether the United States had made a request to extradite Assange.

“Westminster Magistrates’ Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange following him failing to surrender to the court on the 29 June 2012,” British police said. “The Metropolitan Police Service is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the embassy.”

Assange claimed he has the basic right to seek asylum like everyone else and that the decision of the British police is unaccpetable.

“My legal staff have contacted the United Kingdom authorities and we hope to engage in a dialogue about what is the best way forward,” he said.

As the founder of WikiLeaks, Assange said it will continue its publication. “The threats toward me, my staff and WikiLeaks will not be tolerated.”

Assange also said the release of Chelsea Manning this week a “even more important” victory. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst who leaked three-quarters of a million classified U.S. war reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, was released from military prison Wednesday morning after seven years.

“While today is an important victory, the road is far from over,” Assange said.

Via TeleSur

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Democracy Now!: “Human Rights Lawyer: Sweden Dropping Investigation of WikiLeaks’ Assange is “Long Overdue Decision”

During the past week we’ve been subjected to hours of testimony by or interviews with James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence.

On Sunday, Clapper made waves when he said on CNN that Donald Trump is engaged in an assault on US institutions by doing things like firing the head of the CIA and challenging the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative.

We can agree with that sentiment without agreeing that Clapper can be the poster boy for upholding the integrity of US institutions.

Clapper is a former head of the Army’s Defense Intelligence Agency and for 7 years, 2010-2017, he headed up Barack Obama’s NI, which oversees the 17 intelligence agencies including the shadowy NSA.

Clapper massively undermined the 4th Amendment of the Constitution with bulk warrantless surveillance of the US public. It was the malpractice of the NSA under Clapper that drove otherwise good soldier Edward Snowden to risk life and liberty to blow the whistle.

I wrote about Clapper in 2014,

“James Clapper. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was involved in massive and willful violations of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He perjured himself before Congress, denying that the NSA was collecting masses of personal material from Americans. President Obama excused Clapper’s behavior on both accounts, saying he should be more careful. A-Rod should have been more careful. Clapper should not have told Congress a bald-faced lie, and shouldn’t have snooped into our metadata to begin with. Showing his fascist colors, he now wants to make journalists “accomplices” for publishing Snowden’s revelations. Clapper himself should be in the slammer, not Snowden.”

Clapper’s NSA was collecting location data on 5 billion cell phones around the world, including those of some Americans.

The NSA also used dirty tricks to weaken encryption standards, the kind of thing that led directly to the massive ransomware hacks that hit hospitals and other key institutions this weekend. That attack hit Microsoft. Apple has better encryption, but Clapper’s friend Jim Comey tried to weaken privacy on all Apple devices to solve one mass killing (there are hundreds of those a year).

Apparently no one told Obama what the NSA was up to for the first year or year and a half of his presidency. Talk about Deep State! Frontline reported that he finally got read in, in 2010. I suppose it must have been Clapper who deigned to let the Commander in Chief know that the NSA had unilaterally suspended the constitution and was rifling through the private papers and effects of millions of people. It is one of the things about the Obama presidency about which future historians will judge him negatively, that he just nodded and let Clapper carry on.

Senator Ron Wyden knew what Clapper and other US security agencies were up to, but could not speak out for fear of being arrested. He hinted around as broadly as he could that a provision in the highly unpatriotic USA PATRIOT Act was being misused for mass spying on us.

What kind of tinpot dictatorship do we live in where a sitting senator can know of executive branch crimes against the constitution, and be afraid to speak about it on the floor of the senate?

Clapper testified under oath before Congress about these issues and was directly asked if he was surveilling us.

He said, “No.”

He lied under oath.

Lying under oath was actually the charge on which Bill Clinton was impeached by the lower house (and I do mean lower).

Clapper also wanted to violate the first amendment of the constitution (having more or less abolished the 4th amendment) by jailing reporters who covered the Snowden revelations!

Clapper skated. I don’t know if, like J. Edgar Hoover, he just has fat files on the foibles of Washington heavyweights or what. For some reason he was teflon.

So, Clapper cannot be the poster boy for objections to Trump acting high-handedly.

We have to find someone with integrity to idolize as a Trump critic if we are actually going to dig out of this hole.

—–

*An earlier version of this essay misidentified Mr. Clapper as having been head of the NSA.

Related video:

Ron Wyden: “DNI Clapper tells Wyden the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans”

“My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn’t be defended as I was,” Rousso said on Twitter.

Henry Rousso, a French historian and a prominent scholar on the Holocaust, said he was detained for more than 10 hours by federal border agents at a Houston airport and was almost deported for being an “illegal” immigrant before his lawyers and an official at the school he was visiting intervened on his behalf.

“I have been detained 10 hours at Houston International Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was ‘inexperienced’,” Henry Rousso wrote on Twitter Saturday.

Rousso has given dozens of speeches over the years at several prominent U.S. universities as well as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and was a visiting professor at Texas A&M in 2007, according to his online profile.

“On the other side of the Atlantic, one now has to face complete arbitrariness and incompetence,” Rousso told the Huffington Post Sunday, adding that “the United States aren’t quite the United States anymore.”

He told the online outlet that he was interrogated by border officials after they were not satisfied by his tourist visa or the invitation from Texas A&M University. He was subjected to a formal questioning which included his taking an oath and giving fingerprints as well as a standard body search to which he objected.

There were “questions about my father, my mother, my family situation, with the same questions asked dozens of times: who employs me, where I live et cetera,” Rousso was quoted as saying in the Huffington Post article.

He was then told that his paperwork was not in order and that he would be put on a plane back to Paris 20 hours later. However, he was asked if he wanted to contact his embassy and he said yes.

He was able to get in touch with lawyers as well as the head of the university he was visiting who managed to convince the federal airport agents to let him enter the United States.

As they let him through, the police said that the official who stopped him was “inexperienced” and was unaware that activities connected to teaching and research could be carried out with an ordinary tourist visa.

“My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn’t be defended as I was,” Rousso said on Twitter, thanking the people who supported him. The Jewish-French scholar speculated that the officer was suspicious of him because he was born in Egypt.

The news comes just weeks after President Donald Trump’s travel ban on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries — which did not include Egypt — was suspended by a federal judge following major protests against what many called a “Muslim ban.”

Via TeleSur

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Newsy: ” French historian detained by US Customs”

Update: North Dakota prosecutor changes charge against Amy Goodman to ‘rioting.’

The Democracy Now! host said the charge is a “direct attack” on freedom of the press.

Journalist Amy Goodman says she will turn herself in next week to authorities to fight the charge of trespassing after filming a vicious dog attack on Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.

Goodman, who says she was simply doing her job, will turn herself in to Morton County–Mandan Combined Law Enforcement and Corrections Center on Oct. 17.

“I intend to vigorously fight the charge as I see it as a direct attack on the First Amendment: Freedom of the press and the public’s right to know, said Goodman on her program “Democracy Now!”

The award-winning journalist was arrested for trespassing last month while covering an attack by private security guards armed with attack dogs on Native American protesters at the Standing Rock Sioux camp.

Goodman and her production team filmed live video of “the Dakota Access Pipeline Company’s security guards physically assaulting non-violent, mostly native american land protectors, pepper spraying them and unleashing attack dogs, one of which was shown with blood dripping from its nose and mouth,” Goodman said on Democracy Now!

“Why are you letting her dogs go after the protestors?,” said Goodman, while covering the incident, interviewing a number of Native Americans who were attacked.The live video was viewed by more than 14 million people.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and actress Shailene Woodley are other well known figures who have been arrested for their protests over the US$3.7 billion project. The pipeline is expected to transport over half a million barrels of oil a day through federal and private lands in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois.

Indigenous and environmental activists say the project will ruin sacred burial grounds and pollute local water supplies. While construction has been stopped along small sections, protesters have vowed to continue fighting the project until it is fully shut down.

Police and private security have been more aggressively breaking up peaceful pipeline protests of late. Up to 21 people were arrested during a prayer service in late September with North Dakota police using shotguns, assault rifles and armored vehicles in the military style assault.

Via TeleSur

——–

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Democracy Now! “Journalist Amy Goodman to Turn Herself in to North Dakota Authorities”

There is no honor among thieves or ideologues, and it is sad to see a great university’s leadership descend into petty squabbling and vicious infighting over the illegal firing of Professor Steven Salaita.

In recent days new revelations and developments have emerged that make clearer the contours of the crime that was committed against Salaita. What happened was this. Salaita is a specialist in Native American studies who has also written about Palestinians in a comparative vein, and was at Virginia Tech. In 2013 he was hired by the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; in summer of 2014 he moved to Urbana, and sold his house in Virginia, bringing his family out. Then Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu launched a brutal attack on the defenseless little Gaza Strip, which left some 2000 dead, 400 of them children. Whatever the provocation for this assault, it was certainly disproportionate and showed a reckless disregard for the lives of noncombatants, and therefore a war crime. The Israeli human rights group Breaking Silence collected testimonies from Israeli soldiers who invaded Gaza indicating that they were given such loose rules of engagement that war crimes were inevitable.

Salaita said as much on Twitter that summer, sometimes deploying hyperbole and ridicule to get his point across. His bold micro-blogging provoked the usual angry letters from fanatics demanding that his constitutional rights be abrogated by the university administration, and through mid-July the communications of Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees about Salaita mainly concerned how to deal with this uproar.

Then, on the July 24 meeting, something changed. Critics allege that the Board of Trustees got enormous pressure from powerful and wealthy pro-Israel donors to fire Salaita, and that the Trustees caved.

Although the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is a public, state university, it, like all state universities, has been deliberately defunded by the state legislature over the past 30 years, in what must be a nation-wide conspiracy of some shadowy lobbying organization of the ALEC sort. Without sufficient funds from the legislature, the state universities have been forced to raise tuition and to seek large private endowments from donors. Most of the donors are hard-working, public-spirited and philanthropic people who want to help their alma mater. But a handful sometimes start thinking their donation has bought them influence over how the university is run (an attitude that is unfair to the other donors, and to the university itself).

Demonstrably, the university got pressure from pro-Israel extreme nationalists who boasted of having made 6-figure gifts to the university that they would be discontinuing. Why they think their gift to an institution dedicated to free speech and critical thinking gives them the right to abrogate the professors’ and students’ free speech and critical thinking I’ll never understand.

Abruptly, Vice President for Academic Affairs Christophe Pierre and Chancellor Phyllis Wise wrote Salaita to announce that his appointment would not be brought to the UIUC Board of Trustees.

This way of putting the matter made it appear that Wise was making the decision herself. But the reality may be that the Board gave her her marching orders. She now says she’s “tired of carrying water” for the Trustees. In fact, she said, “I am going to talk with (university counsel) Scott (Rice) about setting the record straight…”

Note that although it is the custom that academic appointments are approved by the Board of Trustees or the Regents, that approval is generally pro forma and by law, Salaita had already been hired and had a contract. It appears to have occurred to some Board Trustees that they could attempt to do an end run around their contractual obligations to Salaita by pretending that he had not actually been hired until the Trustee vote on the matter.

The American Association of University Professors laughed that argument out of court even before the courts laughed it out of court.

Salaita was fired after having been hired, a tort that in the law is called “promissory estoppel,” and which is very illegal in Illinois law. And he was fired for constitutionally protected speech

Once Salaita sued, the court required UIUC to preserve or turn over communications relevant to the decision.

But it is alleged by a UI commission that Chancellor Wise started using her personal, instead of her university email to discuss the case, so as to get around disclosure requirements, and that not all the relevant communications leading up to the decision were turned over to the court, as required.

Last week, in a massive defeat for the university administration, a a Federal judge refused to throw out Salaita’s lawsuit. The judge seems to me actively to have made fun of the university’s two central claims, a) that it hadn’t actually hired Salaita and so could cancel his appointment and b) that his “incivility” on Twitter amounted to obscenity. The judge pointed out that the Supreme Court had found in 1971 that a book cover with the title “fuck the draft” was not obscene or illegal. The judge was implicitly saying that if you can say ‘fuck the draft’ then you can wonder when Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu would show up with a necklace of children’s teeth, as Salaita tweeted. (His vicious assault on Gaza did kill 400 children). Pro-Israel Jewish nationalists, cocooning in a hothouse atmosphere, have decided that no trenchant criticism of Israel or its leaders will be allowed, and they have sought to enforce the prohibition with all the tools of a cult. The judge slapped them down.

As apparently had been agreed beforehand, Wise offered her resignation to the Board of Trustees once the Federal court allowed the suit to go forward. The judgment, in fact, boded very badly for the university if the case goes to trial.

But in a twist, the university administration rejected the resignation and fired her instead. She maintains that she was owed $400,000 as a retention incentive, but she won’t receive it if she is fired. She has resubmitted her resignation and insists on getting it. This is yet another lawsuit.

The Board appears to believe that the evidence that emerged that Wise may not have been in compliance with court orders about turning over emails and preserving further ones is a firing offence. The issue has also become political, with the governor of Illinois characterizing the $400,000 as a “bonus” which she does not deserve.

Cary Nelson, a powerful faculty member at UIUC and pro-Israel fanatic who supported Salaita’s firing later said that he thought it would be fair to give Salaita a settlement of a million dollars to go away. That is, it was worth $1 mn. of state money to Nelson to avoid having on campus a colleague with whom he disagrees. Nelson had, scarily enough, been high in the American Association of University Professors’ academic freedom committee for years. I very much doubt that he would have defended my freedom of speech.

But it turns out that Nelson was wrong. The university is not going to get away with paying Salaita $1 mn. to go away.

Wise’s career is in tatters. She is out $400,000 and had to give up her last year of a 5-year term as chancellor. A lot of chancellors or provosts go to another university to become president. That is not a likely move for her now. Moreover, she now thinks she was made the fall guy by the very Board that may have conspired with extremist donors to instruct her to do the firing. It seems entirely possible that the scandal may yet reach into the Board of Trustees itself and other members of the upper administration.

It is entirely possible that Salaita, who has in the meantime accepted an appointment at the American University in Beirut, will have to be reinstated. If the university is wise it will just reappoint him and give him a settlement and avoid the lawsuit, which it seems likely to lose very badly.

The case reeks of corruption, of high-handed and over-paid administrators flaunting the law and allowing themselves to become tools of sectional interests (the very definition of corruption in office in the eyes of the Founding Fathers). To have our professors forced to flee abroad for jobs is the most shameful thing of all. It is as though we are some seedy fascist state where some frank tweets about geopolitics result in political exile.

——-

Related video:

AMED SFSU “American Studies Association 2014: Scholars Under Attack”