Debunking the Mystery Around the Wiesenthal Letter on Salaita

I real­ize that mys­te­ri­ous let­ters make for grandiose spec­u­la­tions, but even by those stan­dards the to-do about the mys­te­ri­ous let­ter sent last July by the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter in Los Ange­les about Salaita was a to-do that was … over­wrought, to say the least.

Part of the prob­lem seems to be that mys­ter­ies that aren’t quickly dis­puted and dis­pelled become ever so much more mys­te­ri­ous.  Con­sider the fol­low­ing com­ment by Ali Abunimah in The Elec­tronic Intifada on 8/7/14 (Elec­tronic Intifada):

Another Israel lobby group, the fer­vently anti-Palestinian Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter, has been more direct, accus­ing Salaita of being an “anti-Semite” and urg­ing in a let­ter to uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent Robert Easter that the uni­ver­sity “recon­sider” Salaita’s appointment.

The Jew­ish Voice reported (Jew­ish Voice) on the let­ter from the Wiesen­thal Center’s direc­tor Rabbi Meyer May and cam­pus out­reach coor­di­na­tor Aron Hier yes­ter­day, but does not say what date it was sent.

I’m not sure whether it’s exactly true that the Wiesen­thal Cen­ter is “fer­vently anti-Palestinian,” but the fact that the let­ter in ques­tion from the Wiesen­thal Cen­ter was never released for pub­lic con­sump­tion didn’t help dis­pel any myths about 1) what it said, exactly¹ or 2) when it was sent, a par­tic­u­larly impor­tant fact since the tim­ing in the Salaita affair is all-critical.

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Well, pub­lic infor­ma­tion that’s not been made pub­lic … that’s what FOIAs are for, right?

So to dis­pense with any more rumor-mongering — and I real­ize I’m a year out of date here — below please find the Wiesen­thal let­ter in its total two-page non-enormity, which you’ll note was sent July 28, 2014 to Bob Easter, who got it the next day:

 

 

And here it is in all its .pdf glory: FOIA15_419 WIESENTHAL LETTER

What do we learn from see­ing the actual let­ter rather than rumors about it?  To me it’s a pretty spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure of an entity that’s  appar­ently fer­vent about any­thing and every­thing  to exhibit any fer­vency whatsoever.

“We strongly believe …” or “we urge” … really?  That’s fer­vency?  It strikes me that our won­der­ful dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence, if writ­ten with this level of gusto, would read some­thing like:

When in the course of human events one nation strongly con­sid­ers the desir­abil­ity of some­what reduc­ing the bonds that have joined it to another …

Or some-such.

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Which leads me to a point I find myself mak­ing over and over and over (and over).  Too many peo­ple have spent too long shoot­ing off their mouths about what did and didn’t hap­pen in the Salaita Affair while at the same time spend­ing too much time extrap­o­lat­ing facts from scanty evi­dence, and too lit­tle time actu­ally gath­er­ing those facts.

This let­ter is a case in point, although I already know that some peo­ple see its mil­que­toast con­tent as yet fur­ther evi­dence of a care­fully staged conspiracy.

So be it.  Oh and by the way, when I got this FOIA result I imme­di­ately rec­og­nized the let­ter, or at least the let­ter­head.  Even though I have an eidetic mem­ory it took me a while to fig­ure out where I’d seen it before … in FOIA14-849, the 1,600 page doc­u­ment that I made pub­lic a month or so ago.  It should soon be avail­able from the UIUC archives which, in what only can be described as a some­what ironic sit­u­a­tion, con­tacted me 3 weeks ago to get copies of all my FOIAs because … (wait for it) … UIUC wouldn’t pro­vide them to its own archives.

Any­way.  No one else picked this doc­u­ment out of the FOIA 15–489 mix.  Which I think shows how much this nar­ra­tive is dri­ven by want-it-to-bes rather than … what’s that word?

Oh yes, facts.

1. There hav­ing been some excerpts of it quoted but appar­ently not the whole thing. [↩]