Steven Salaita

I understand the amusement we derive from ridiculous Nobel Prize nominations, but the humor often relies on veneration of the Prize as something noble or even sacrosanct. In reality, plenty of assholes have won.

FYI: if you're short on cash or can't make it to the store, tie a garbage bag around a couch cushion. It works.

I wish students godspeed in each of their efforts to undermine or outwit administrators, landlords, cops, financial institutions, textbook companies, and military recruiters.

Zionism isn't merely incompatible with Black and Indigenous liberation; it's an active force of counterrevolution.

As the USA quickly approaches half a million (official) covid deaths, I'm finding it difficult to fathom the enormity of this disaster. 500,000 is an incomprehensible number of human souls, made worse because centers of power so coolly rendered them expendable.

Contempt for social climbers and careerists isn't irrational or unreasonable. It's based on at least a tacit understanding that they're fucking things up for everyone else.

Stubborn devotion to supposedly impractical and unrealistic ideals is the only way persecuted communities will ever achieve freedom. Social climbers and careerists, always selling surrender as the responsible choice, betray the collective for (often pitiful) individual rewards.

Don't do it. You're worth so much more than a bit role in the settler's delusional cosmology. Let Zionists renounce their destructive ideology. Then perhaps we can look into this business of compromise--but only on the terms of our choosing.

We've already lost our land. Israel continues to kill and steal on the daily. We can't even assert an identity without triggering severe, often deadly consequences. We literally have nothing left to compromise but our very existence.

Ask who benefits if you compromise according to the oppressor's narrative. Ask why the narrative is perfectly calibrated to make you sound obdurate and irrational. Ask how the narrative so adroitly ascribes displacement and dispossession to your own deficiencies.

The narrative of "compromise," as applied to the oppressed, is a mechanism of control and intimidation. It relies on the logic of colonial accumulation. It conceptualizes deference to power as wise and noble. It prioritizes the oppressor's comfort. It's also lazy and boring.

I apologize. I know I sound self-righteous. But this notion of "compromise" I often see from professional loudmouths triggers severe disgust, both personal and philosophical. You needn't accept their attenuated vision of "compromise." You don't even have to entertain it.

If you told me I'd get a tenured professorship or a lucrative podcast or a comfy political gig merely by compromising a long-held vision of Palestinian liberation, then I'd tell you to fuck off before calmly putting my school bus into drive.

We don't need to befriend the settler, the chauvinist, the culture warrior, the class antagonist. We need to deprive them of power.