Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 10 June 2011
Steven Salaita is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech who has written several books on the failure of liberal civil rights discourse to counter anti-Arab racism, particularly in the United States. In his new book, Israel’s Dead Soul, he evaluates the potential complicity between enlightened ideals and their opposite.
Salaita explores how civil rights discourse has been appropriated by Zionism, the belief that “Jews have the right to a nation-state in historic Palestine that is majority Jewish” (4), in order to legitimize cruel and indeed criminal policies against the Palestinian people. He also forcefully makes a plea — in the tradition of the late Edward Said — for the role of the intellectual as a dissident unaffiliated to power.
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