I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Professor Steven Salaita has no family members serving in the United States military.

Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix reports.

Virginia Tech Professor Argues Against ‘Support Our Troops’

A Virginia Tech University professor has taken a stand against the popular “Support Our Troops” expression, calling it an overused platitude that prompts Americans to blindly support U.S. military actions.

The phrase also serves as “an exploitation tool for cooperate charity” in “an era of compulsory patriotism,” Steven Salaita, an assistant professor of English, suggested in his recent Salon.com column, which was headlined: “No thanks: Stop saying ‘support the troops.’”

Salaita reportedly penned the column after he was asked to donate some spare change to the troops while out shopping.

“In recent years I’ve grown fatigued of appeals on behalf of the troops, which intensify in proportion to the belligerence or potential unpopularity of the imperial adventure du jour,” Salaita wrote. “In addition to donating change to the troops, we are repeatedly impelled to ‘support our troops’ or to ‘thank our troops.’ God constantly blesses them. Politicians exalt them. We are warned, ‘If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.’”

“Such troop worship is trite and tiresome, but that’s not its primary danger.”

He went on to argue that “a nation that continuously publicizes appeals to ‘support our troops’ is explicitly asking its citizens not to think.”

“It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation,” Salaita wrote, adding the “phenomenon of corporate charity for the troops tells us about commercial conduct in an era of compulsory patriotism.”

The column has prompted anger among many, including from one of Salaita’s colleagues at Virginia Tech.

“He wrote a thinly veiled, not too thoughtful, critique of American capitalism, dressed deceptively in the guise of a well-reasoned critique of what he called ‘unthinking patriotism,’” Buddy Howell, visiting assistant professor for the department of communication, told the student newspaper the Collegiate Times. “It lacks intellectual rigor. It never defines ‘patriotism,’ which he seems to have a problem with. Yet he is critical of the phrase ‘Support Our Troops,’ which he claims is empty and inexplicable.”