[Peace-discuss] Salaita's views on "multiculturalism"

[Brussel, Morton K]

This brouhaha has now penetrated the UUC physics department, which is asking all its members, faculty, emeritii, and graduate students to endorse a statement about anti-semitism, diversity, antiracism and other anodyne, largely unobjectionable, issues, to which scientists are particularly attuned to (according to the physics statement) !

I’ve written my objections to this procedure and the statement to our Head. I have no idea whether others will be as incensed about it as I am, and/or will refuse to endorse this largely asinine statement.

In my response, I asked in particular for a definition of anti-semitism, and was glad to see quoted in the N-G the remark by Rosenstock that "there is no legal definition of anti-Semitism in Illinois that is binding on the university". I also rejected the contention that scientists/physicists are more attuned to human rights, etc., than others.

It is not incidental that those who promoted the physics statement are known apologists for Israel.

The commentary by Salaita you’ve sent below clearly pertains to what has been happening here.

The physics statement is at best gratuituous, since it essentially mirrors that of  Chancellor Jones’ on this issue; all the more disturbing in its boneheadedness.

—mkb

On Oct 15, 2019, at 9:42 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/university-illinois/we-have-a-problem-as-a-community-chancellor-s-email/article_cd6c6aea-4a65-5bcc-9867-c3480f3d4c66.html

Pertaining to the brouhaha on campus, excerpts from Steven Salaita's Israel's Dead Soul:

https://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/scholarship-dismissal-university/

At the modern corporate university, and especially at public neoliberal high-tech research universities like UIUC, multiculturalism and diversity constitute the official ideology of identity (as opposed to class) politics; civility and respect, as they have been evoked by administrators and trustees in the Salaita affair, constitute its bureaucratic and disciplinary practices. In the Chapter 1, “Israel as a Cultural Icon,” Salaita explores Zionists’ exploitation of multicultural spaces on campus:
"What are the ethical consequences of the coterminous relationship of Israel and Jewishness? They are many, none of them positive. First of all, it means that Israel cannot be included in multicultural celebrations without reflecting negatively on Jewish people, many of whom do not want to be identified in any way with the nation-state or who do not want the national-state to be their primary cultural identity.
Second, it entraps Jewish people in an unsavory paradigm, one in which they perform gruesome acts because of their culture. … Herein lies the main problem of conjoining culture and national character. Hillel and other Jewish civic organizations render themselves distinctly responsible for Israel’s violence by proclaiming themselves guardians of the state’s consciousness. … It is never a good idea, even though the trope of strategic essentialism, to link an ethnic group to a military apparatus. Such a move automatically justifies discourses—in this case anti-Semitic ones—that should never be justifiable. (p. 23)
In a manner that is rarely articulated in the belly of the beast, Salaita proceeds to place this critique in a larger educational/corporate/power context:
The frequent inclusion of Zionism in multicultural spaces, both physical and metaphorical, enables us to think more closely about the utility of multiculturalism as a discourse and a practice. Zionism represents centers of power financially and politically. It is an ideology (or set of ideologies) deeply inscribed in state power all over the world. It supports an enormous military economy and an imperialism whose reach is capacious. It partakes of the capitalist structures of neoliberalism that expropriate resources from the Southern Hemisphere into the Northern. Zionism is inseparable from the forms of structural injustice that occur throughout the world.
My point here is not to suggest that Zionism corrupts multiculturalism, though that is likely the case, at least in the abstract. I suggest instead the possibility that multiculturalism itself is problematic because it so easily accommodates Zionism (and other troublesome ideologies). Is the point of multiculturalism to oppose unjust power and racism? Or is it to provide spaces within institutions where ethnic minorities can escape racism? What is the point of using multicultural apparatuses to promote Israel as the apogee of Jewishness?
Although I have rarely heard it stated that multiculturalism is supposed to oppose power, it frequently appeases it, a judgment I base on nothing more than its continued existence. Academic and corporate institutions are set up to regulate and efficiently eliminate both internal and external challenges to their modes of governance and authority. In many ways, the promotion of multiculturalism is a diversion or a delusion … deep seated racism still exists in the institutions wherein the idea of multiculturalism was invented. (p. 28-29)"
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