UC Berkeley Law School Controversy: "Protecting the Welfare and Safety of Palestinian Students on Campus"

Sather Gate, UC Berkeley

Up in Berkeleyland, it's not just the UC Berkeley Law School. There are at least 9 identity-politics groups within the law school including the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, a bunch of future lawyers who don't believe in our constitutional right of free speech.

At any rate, 9 such groups, including the above, have decided they will not invite any speakers to campus who support Zionism (or, in other words, the right of Israel to exist). It is their legal opinion that they need to "protect the welfare and safety of Palestinian students on campus."

Protect them from what-ideas that they don't like?

The College Fix has the story:

 https://www.thecollegefix.com/uc-berkeley-school-of-law-groups-ban-zionist-speakers/

I am frankly surprised that UCB Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is so out of sorts on the issue. I mean, what did he expect?

Chemerinsky, a liberal guy who is considered (at least by liberals) to be one of the outstanding constitutional experts in the land, was previously dean of the law school at UC Irvine until a few years ago. (He was the first dean of UCI's newly-created law school.) Under Chemerinksy's reign, his school  was basically a training ground for future activist lawyers. They even had a chapter of the radical left National Lawyers Guild (NLG) affiliated with the law school. Their LA chapter director, James Lafferty, appeared at UCI to speak against the Jewish state of Israel.  While I was a part-time teacher at UCI and afterward, student members wearing those distinctive lime green NLG baseball caps would act as "legal observers" for the campus SJP/Muslim Student Union rascals as they disrupted pro-Israel events on campus including in my presence. Chemerinsky, however,  has been in denial. Just prior to taking over his duties at UCI, he told a largely Jewish audience (I was also present) in Orange County that he never would have moved from Duke University to UCI if he thought there was a problem of anti-Semitism at the campus.

But there was.

That leads me to wonder why some people think it is Palestinian students who need protection on campus rather than Jewish students. We have seen on campuses all over the nation how Jewish students are subjected to bullying, disruption, and intimidation by the forces of the Palestinian movement. A few years ago, just across the bay at San Francisco State University, students from the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) were openly expressing their fantasies of killing or stabbing Israeli soldiers. I have still yet to hear of Jewish students who support Israel engaging in that kind of violence and intimidation of pro-Palestinian students. "Protecting the welfare and safety of Palestinian students"? Give me a break.