In Support of Wadie Said, son of late Edward Said

Dear President Reid and Dean Wu,

Recently, we have been made aware of a campaign by the group StandWithUs to derail the candidacy of Wadie Said for Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School for purely political reasons. The allegations brought against him can be found here:

http://www.standwithus.com/news_post.asp?NPI=1029

We the undersigned are writing to you to oppose this campaign and we urge you to ignore this effort for several reasons:

(1) Academic appointments should not be held hostage to political considerations. The StandWithUs organization would make support for all Israeli policies a necessary condition for being hired. This would effectively bar many Arabs and Muslims---and many leftists or progressives---from becoming professors at Wayne State University. Such a politically correct litmus test would have a profoundly harmful effect on the intellectual life of the university.

(2) Wadie Saids positions cited by StandWithUs regarding the right of return and the right of armed resistance are hardly radical. The right of return for Palestinian refugees is stipulated in UN Resolution 194. In general, the right of refugees to return to their homes is uncontroversial in international law: who would deny that, for example, displaced Kosovars should be allowed to return to Kosovo, or displaced Sudanese to Sudan? As for the right of self-defense against armed attack (which should not be confused with terrorist attacks against civilians), one need look no further than apartheid South Africa, where the African National Congress (ANC) under the leadership of Nelson Mandela waged a violent campaign against the white-supremacist state. The fact that ANC guerillas often resorted to terrorist tactics did not undermine their fundamental legal right under international law to resist the apartheid system by force.

(3) Wadie Saids filial relation to Edward Said is a patently absurd argument for denying his appointment, for reasons that hardly need elaborating. The fact that StandWithUs cites this is symptomatic of the weakness of their argument. Hiring should be based on merit, not on biological inheritance.

(4) The StandWithUs letter states, apropos of Islamic law, that it is not clear why a public, state supported University would teach religious law or dedicate a class to the law of one religion while ignoring the legal systems of other religions. This statement implies that every class touching on religious issues must discuss all religions. According to this criterion, Wayne State University Law School would be bound to discontinue the course currently offered entitled Legal History, which surveys the highlights of Roman and English legal history. Since this class necessarily includes extensive discussion of relevant religious issues---and ignores, say, authoritative verse treatises on Dharma of the Hindu community in fourth-century India---the StandWithUs criterion would construe the course as discriminatory. Moreover, the very claim that studying religious law is somehow in conflict with the fact that Wayne State is a public university must again be referred to your current course listings, which offers courses on Jewish Law and Tribal Justice Systems. It is easy to distinguish between studying a subject and promoting it. Finally, given the odd attention StandWithUs devotes to Mr. Saids personal history (his ethnicity, his father), it is curious that they do not mention his Christian heritage: as opponents of religious education, should they not fear that he will use his academic position to advance Christian legal doctrines, rather than to promote Islamic law?

We urge you to ignore the smear campaign advanced by StandWithUs, which if taken seriously, would cause unfair discrimination against the candidacy of Wadie Said at Wayne State University Law School.

We thank you for taking the time to read this letter.