George Saliba is an American historian who is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, where he has been since 1979. Saliba is currently the founding director of the Farouk Jabre Center for Arabic & Islamic Science & Philosophy and the Jabre-Khwarizmi Chair in the History Department.

The Columbia Unbecoming controversy was a controversy involving three professors at Columbia University in New York who some students and faculty thought were biased against Israel. At the center of the controversy was Joseph Massad, a Palestinian assistant professor who led the class Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies and who described Israel as a racist, settler-colonial state. For years, he was allegedly dissented by students in his class who disagreed with him. Pundits called for Columbia to fire him as they saw him as unfit to teach.