Berkeley- Sordid city on a hill
Berkeley, California is a weird place. I wish I could say that UC Berkeley is just an island of insanity located within the city limits, but the truth is that the whole city is nuts. I mean this is the place that was the hometown of Billy Martin, the crazy NY Yankee player, manager, drinker and brawler who George Steinbrenner seemingly fired fifty times. My question is why the Yankee owner would hire anyone from Berkeley in the first place. One former Yankee wrote a book about the era entitled, "The Bronx Zoo". But I digress.
The Berkeley city council is another hotbed of wacko leftists who worry about everything except what's going on in the city itself. The latest controversy involves city council member Cheryl Davila who has designated UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian as her standby in case she is committed to an insane asylum or otherwise unavailable for city council duties (whatever those might be). That has caused three local rabbis to protest her choice of this Palestinian agitator for a lot of good reasons.
https://www.jweekly.com/2018/08/02/berkeley-rabbis-object-to-bazian-as-standby-for-city-councils-davila/
Having an anti-semite like Bazian sit on the Berkeley city council even for one day would be the crowning touch on the town's history as a zoo in its own right. Can you imagine a resolution calling for an intifada in the US?
And who is Ms Davila? It seems her main issue as city council member is her support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel, an issue that has great significance for the welfare of Berkeley.
It must be satisfying to the residents of Berkeley that they live in such a world class city, so involved in international affairs while their town has degenerated into a Dodge City of social protest with students, homeless people, Antifa types, and other assorted thrill-seekers sleeping on the streets and laying down in the middle of Telegraph Avenue to protest things like higher tuition and people like Milo Yiannopoulos coming to town to try and give a speech. The university, an aging dowager posing as one of the world's greatest universities (It isn't), reminds one of Gloria Swanson portraying Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Its faculty includes clowns like Robert Reich, Judith Butler, Jennifer Granholm, Erwin Chemerinsky, and of course, Bazian himself. This is the place where the former chancellor, a wimp named Ridiculous Nicolas Dirks, had an escape tunnel built into his office in case a student riot threatened to overrun his office. Naturally, it was built at taxpayer expense. Even Chapo Guzman had the decency to pay for his own escape tunnel when he absconded from a Mexico City prison a couple of years back. Ridiculous Nicolas, of course, didn't have Chapo's financial resources (other than the taxpayers).
I wish I could say all this is just a passing phase until the Republicans get into office, but the situation isn't going anywhere soon. This lunacy in Berkeley has existed my entire life, and there is no relief in sight. Sixty years from now my grandsons will be shaking their heads and wondering when it all went wrong. I just hope none of them ever winds up studying there. Fortunately, I don't have any granddaughters, whom I would rather see in a ------------- than at UC Berkeley.
But if the opposition of three principled rabbis can stop this silly appointment of Hatem Bazian, perhaps it will be like Mao Ze Dong once said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one single step."
Or was it the great Palestinian (Egyptian, actually) philosopher, killer, and plunderer, Yasir Arafat, who said it?
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