Who else but Steven Salaita, the former Virginia Tech English professor whose unhinged, Israel-hating tweets cost him a job at the University of Illinois, would deliver a lecture on the imagined superiority of Palestinian "environmentalism" in the face of Israeli "colonization and conflict"? In the latest Campus Watch research, Andrew Harrod reports on Salaita's incoherent ramblings, otherwise known as, "Natural History Under Siege." His article appears today at Jihad Watch:
Palestine "will never be decolonized unless it is first demythologized," stated Steven Salaita, a controversial academic whose job offer from the University of Illinois was rescinded last summer after a series of anti-Semitic tweets came to light. Speaking on "Natural History Under Siege" before an audience of about twenty-five persons at Washington, DC's anti-Israeli Jerusalem Fund think tank on February 13, Salaita employed pseudo-intellectual rhetoric to apply his own mythology of hackneyed postcolonial themes to his ancestral Palestinians.
For those who have come to expect puerile packaging of anti-Israel screeds with fact-free, high-flown, often incoherent verbiage on the basis of his past writings, Salaita did not disappoint. In his introduction, he described the geography of a "Palestine" (including apparently Israel) as a "cacophony, but also an ensemble," even though "not everybody can see it." This geography "is a simulation of ideology," a "diversion into mythic cultural adventure," and "for the crooked and pious alike it is always in some way holy." Despite "continuous reinvention . . . we can still speak of Palestine as an actual place" whose soil once "was rendered tactile and knowable" to him when he got dirt under his fingernails during a visit as a graduate student. Sometimes it's the little things.
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