We interview Steven Salaita, the author of The Uncultured Wars, Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought. Through witty humour and incisive essays, his book critiques the American liberal-left’s complicity in perpetuating anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and imperialistic modes of thought. In doing so, he raises important questions about the nature of race relations and the manifest Orientalism in American political discourse today. His target is not the neoconservative right who are blatant and easily identified in their racist caricatures of Arabs and Muslims and in their dogmatic doctrine of the war on terror. Rather, he sounds the alarm on the  misrepresentative ideas of the liberal left, passively justifying the sensationalized excesses of the right:

“The specific issue of note, and the resultant theme of the book, is that of representation: how Arabs and Muslims are said to be, even by open-minded commentators, versus how they actually exist (in highly diverse ways).”

Joseph Shahadi’s review for The Electronic Intifada concludes that Salaita:

“brilliantly succeeds in deconstructing the hypocrisy [of the liberal left], making clear that liberal politics are no guarantor of empathy …. This is a worthy contribution to a tradition of works by Arab American essayists, a distinguished company that includes Joseph Massad, Elmaz Abinder, Diana Abu-Jaber, Edward Said and others.”

Interview script below:

Worldtown: During the Bush years, the “liberal left” was thought to have suffered a slow death against the neoconservative challenge. Yet, you wrote a whole book during this period as an indictment of dominant liberal left discourse. A discourse which is, in many ways, complacent in the harmful dogma of neoconservatives and responsible for misappropriating the voices of oppressed peoples. But to criticize the liberal left is almost seen as sacrilege, and in some ways, as turning your back on the rightful fight against neoconservatism. Is America really only left with one alternative to embedded neoconservative ideals - a whitewashed and liberal left unable to be truly representative of the causes and people it aims to be a voice for?

Steven Salaita: No, I think America has lots of alternatives, thankfully. As I show in The Uncultured Wars, the liberal-left is often complicit in the same modes of imperial power exemplified by neoconservatives. I also question whether the liberal-left represents causes and people other than those in power. US liberals don’t even claim in most cases to serve those beyond centers of power: they’re obsessed with Obama, Clinton, Shimon Peres, Michael Moore; not as interested in Indigenous peoples, the working class, Palestinians. In the end, Palestine will be liberated without them. The Americas will be decolonized without them. Corporate welfare-stealing from the poor to give to the rich-will be undermined without them. It has to be this way, because none of these things will happen with them.

WT: What was the red button that pushed you to publish this book and spread the message?

SS: There wasn’t a particular red button. Mostly the book came out of a very long process first of observation and then of analysis. The specific issue of note, and the resultant theme of the book, is that of representation: how Arabs and Muslims are said to be, even by open-minded commentators, versus how they actually exist (in highly diverse ways).

WT: There are plenty of people out there - Arabs and other minorities included - who have no problem with having “their” views written up and published by big media outlets like The New York Times. After all, this was once the paper to have drafted “A Reaffirmation of Principle” against Reaganites in the ’80s. Are people just not critical enough or are they ok with - what you’ve labeled - dehumanizing narratives that come out of this press?

SS: It depends on the people and the situation. There are always people willing to be appropriated into elite and highly restrictive media. But I believe that folks are well more critical and conscientious than both corporate media and many leftists allow.

WT: Can we talk a little more about Arabs who are too apologetic in their own right, or step down from voicing dissent. Do you have any proposals to tackle this “native informant” attitude that feeds into complacency?

SS: Well, I’m a bit wary of setting up a rhetorical framework wherein people can conveniently become straw men. Nor am I eager to deem certain individuals native informants. It’s too easy to accuse anybody, on the right, left, or center, of being in the thrall of an ideology-for-profit. It’s better in my mind to contest one another on the level of ideas. (This is not to deny or downplay the idea of the native informant, which is an important phenomenon; rather, I think it exists best in a site of theorization that doesn’t necessarily cohere with the sort of political discourse in which we are engaged.) I can tell you that I disagree adamantly with lots of voices in the Arab American community: Hussein Ibish, Ray Hanania, Ziad Asali. Then there are others whose work find highly troublesome: Nonie Darwish, Walid Phares, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat. But I don’t think it’s fair to speculate about people’s motivations or their interests absent of solid evidence. About the latter group, however, I feel confident saying they are peddling ideas that their audiences invented in advance of their careers. Even worse, those ideas are patently racist.

WT: In contrast, where are the truthful alternatives and why are minority voices, or other voices who aren’t afraid of sounding the alarm so seemingly absent? Or are we just missing something?

SS: Luckily, there are lots of people uncovering truth and speaking truth. I’m a big fan of Mahmood Mamdani, Sunaina Maira, Vandana Shiva, Houston Baker, Jr., Robert Warrior, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Sunera Thobani, others who I’m surely forgetting.

WT: What do we do?

SS: This one is challenging! Without copping out, I’d say we do what we can. It depends on the person and her or his circumstances. It also depends on the goal. I’m so vague because I don’t think there’s a blueprint. Useful action arises from dialogue, sometimes discordant, compromise, tension, determination, and, as corny as it sounds, love.

WT: Who do you hope picks up the message of this book?

SS: Anybody who reads it. But I’d be especially happy if the message reaches those who don’t.

WT: In your opinion, who are some of the “liberal” left that deserve especial scrutiny?

SS: Anybody whose analysis of Arabs, Muslims, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and the disempowered in general reduces those people to romantic or fanciful notions of cultural pathology or political/economic dependency. If you want me to be specific, I think The Nation is poor, obsessed with the hard right and often flat-out silly. The Huffington Post is also poor, not much of a surprise given its ostentatious founder and publisher. The New York Times is terrible, as are all large-scale corporate media. At The Times, Thomas Friedman, a vicious racist and an intellectual midget, is considered to be a leading liberal voice; at the Washington Post, Richard Cohen, whose grandiloquence far surpasses his intelligence, is the resident liberal. MoveOn is basically a defective arm of the Democratic Party. DailyKos appears to be terrified of the dark possibility of taking up for Palestinians. Over at MSNBC, Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow delight liberals, but have very little to say about real matters of decolonization. There are obviously exceptions here and there; I’m speaking of the general tenor of these publications.

WT: How does the son of Arab immigrants in Appalachian country become interested, and eventually pursue an academic career in Native Studies anyway?

SS: I took a course many years ago in the Native American literature and was hooked. I found lots of correlations between the discourses of colonization in North America and Palestine. I’ve found that an engagement-a humble engagement, given to constant learning and listening-with Indigenous politics is essential if one wants to properly understand the way corporate and military power is leveraged by Western governments.

WT: In The Uncultured Wars, you describe how Virgina Tech - a presumably unlikely site - provides the ideal setting to be openly critical. Meanwhile, the Ivy league seems to be permanently fossilizing any “progressive” values they may have held at any level. Can you comment on this?

SS: We have to look at academe as sort of a supplement to or a handmaid of state power. There is a terrible history, in the US and elsewhere, of professors and universities being complicit in all types of military violence, either by providing elaborate rhetorical justification or by actually providing logistical support. Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger were at Harvard-while there, McNamara helped plan bombing runs. Anthropologists played a crucial role in the colonization of North America. Even now, psychiatrists, doctors, and others participate in torture, under the guise of providing care and counsel. Scholars like Kanan Makiya and Bernard Lewis were involved with policymaking during the Bush II administration. The Israeli historian Michael Oren served as a reservist in the Israeli army during Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon. Plus, respectable academe is a repository of enthusiastic Zionism, and it is very hostile to those who vocally oppose it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t challenges at a rural place like Virginia Tech.

WT: Do you feel the inclusion of Arab narratives in mainstream popular culture, i.e. the recent film  Amreeka, are a help to the cause? The cause being realizing that Arabs and minorities in America are living, breathing, normal human beings with their own history and experiences.

SS: I think it’s great when Arab and other ethnic minority artists find audiences for their work, but I’m skeptical about the ability of art to contribute tangibly to social change.

WT: You’ve highlighted some important contrasts between the Vtech shooting in 2007 and the recent Fort Hood Massacre deemed as an “Act of Terror” by the media. As an Arab-American, what can you share about the way these two situations have received attention..

SS: Because Nidal Hasan was an Arab Muslim, his act immediately became one of terrorism. But the shooting of public places-even in non-civilian spaces like military bases-is a frequent and entrenched dimension of American life. None of the prior shootings, dozens of them, was widely conceptualized as terrorism. Hasan’s was the first. We can reasonably surmise that his ethnic identity has much to do with this fact. There have been public shootings after Hasan’s terrible deed; they haven’t been deemed acts of terrorism. Across a range of violent actions we can see a direct correlation between ideology/ethnicity and classifications such as “preemptive,” “terrorist,” “resistance,” “insurgent,” and “rational.”

WT: Obama as president championed the self-confidence of a deflated Liberal left. But since inauguration, we see rising Islamophobia, as well as rendition and racial profiling under an ever expansive War on Terror. What’s gonna give?

SS: Either the systematic modes of imperial and economic domination give, in which case all kinds of good possibilities arise, or not much of substance will give. People need to quit thinking that a particular individual can become president and do good for the world. The office isn’t structured that way. The president is largely a figurehead and an obedient facilitator of the interests of wealthy people around the globe. If you want to wait for a US president to improve the world then go ahead and plan on dying disappointed. If people want an injustice to give then they need to attack that injustice themselves. And they need to attack the interests of those who are benefitting from that particular injustice. The beneficiaries of Islamophobia are numerous.

WT: Finally, have you seen Avatar? Please share your views.

SS: I haven’t seen it yet. I can only make a general observation about Hollywood: it can never make a movie set in Africa without a white protagonist, and it can never make a movie about any sort of Indigenous resistance to white colonization without a white hero gone native leading that resistance. (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia, Dances with Wolves…)

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THE UNCULTURED WARS was published by Zed Books in 2009 and can be purchased through their website and in good book stores around the North America and the UK.