Within days of the May 18 disruption of a Jewish event at UC Irvine Irvine, we learned from the UCI campus paper that certain people among the protesters identified themselves as members of the National Lawyers Guild attached to UCI Law School, and that they were demanding that the protesters had a right to enter the room (which they were literally trying to force their way into).
Digging further, I learned from open sources that the NLG (founded in the 1930s as a legal arm of the Communist Party USA) did, in fact, have an affiliation with the UCI Law School (as they do with several other universities). In a posting, I called for UCI Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky to make a statement.
Now we have confirmation from the NLG itself that their members were present at the incident. The below letter from NLG is posted on the Facebook site of Students for Justice in Palestine, the organization that principally organized the disruption along with several other student groups.
http://www.nlg-la.org/article/nlg-contests-allegations-made-uci-chancellor-and-others
"On May 16, 2016, chapter members were informed that several combined UCI student groups were in need of Legal Observers for a series of actions in protest of certain events that would be taking place at Israel Week. Members of the UCI Law student Guild agreed to be Legal Observers for an action on the evening of May 18, 2016, and fulfilled their duties of accompanying the students, communicating with campus law enforcement on behalf of the students, and documenting the events as they happened."
Now that we have corroborated the fact that members of the NLG attached to the UCI Law School participated in the incident, I would like to turn my attention to UCI's Cross Cultural Center, an institution I have criticized in the past. The NLG letter also informs us that:
"When UCI police informed the observers that the attendees had left, the students walked back to the Cross-Cultural Center as a group. The observers did not encounter any event attendees as the protesters returned to the Cross-Cultural Center, and all students remained peaceful. The observers followed the students back to the Cross-Cultural Center to ensure their safety and complete our obligation to document the entire event."
Yes, Folks, once again the CCC has been used as a staging area for the anti-Israel crowd-just as it was in 2010 when the Michael Oren (Israeli ambassador to the US) speech was disrupted by the Muslim Student Union, and just as it was in 2015 and 2014 when the annual I(Israel) Fest was disrupted by MSU/SJP. I raised these issues in a letter to campus administrators in 2015 and met with the then head of the CCC. He basically told me he had been unaware of all this until he saw the MSU marching out of the CCC in the recent IFest protest and that he was unable to stop the free flow of people where they want to go.
But getting back to the UCI Law School, my question remains: Where is Dean Erwin Chemerinksy? To my knowledge, he still has not made any statement relative to the participation of members and/or students from his law school in this disruption that has brought more negative publicity to UCI. If I were Chancellor Howard Gillman, I would have called Chemerinsky into my office and demanded some answers. Where is his apology to the students whose event was disrupted by people who have no concept of the rights of others including people he is supposedly training? The letter from NLG was exactly what you would expect from a radical leftist organization that led the Occupy LA mess a few years back. From Chemerinsky, I expect more.
Somebody in authority at UCI needs to ask Chemerinsky some hard questions about what is going on at UCILS and why people from his school were involved in this incident. Somebody in authority needs to tell the CCC that if they truly represent all students on campus, they need to halt the use of their facility for staging disruptions of Jewish events.
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