Native Canadian Ryan Mervin Bellerose, who has become known for debunking the academically popular Palestinian/Native-American comparison by writing about the commonalities between Jews and Native-Americans, reports on two University of Alberta lectures from former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita. Last year, Salaita’s offered position in the American Indian studies program at the University of Illinois was rescinded because of his vicious anti-Israel, anti-Semitic tweets. Bellerose handily dismisses any claims to expertise Salaita may have harbored on the subject to which he aspired, as well as reporting on his more ridiculous utterances:
He claimed Edmonton was Metis land, and it is not – it is Cree land actually. He claimed he was a displaced Palestinian, but his father is from Jordan and his mothers family is from Beit Jallah, which is in a Palestinian Authority controlled area, so it’s not like he cannot go back and live on his “ancestral lands.”. . . . At his second talk, I sat quietly while he told several lies, one of which was that, “I never raises my voice. I have a 2-year old son and sometimes he makes me cry because I can’t yell at him. I’m just not a confrontational person.”
