No surprise here. Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley, have filed a lawsuit (h/t) claiming that university officials have failed to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation by anti-Israeli groups:
A pattern of harassment and physical assaults by members of two Muslim student groups at the University of California, Berkeley crosses the line from allowing free speech into creating a hostile campus environment, an attorney representing two students argued in court papers filed this week.
Jessica Felber and Brian Maissy are suing the University of California and Berkeley President Mark Yudoff, along with Berkeley’s chancellor, the Regents of the University of California, the Associated Students University of California and Berkeley’s dean of students for failing to protect them from verbal and physical assaults.
The university is seeking to have the case dismissed on the ground that the anti-Israeli students have a right to voice their opinions and that the University cannot interfere. But the lawsuit makes clear that opinions are not the problem:
Students at the checkpoints [set up as mock Israeli checkpoints] carry “realistic looking assault weapons—’imitation firearms’—as part of the event,” Siegal wrote, citing a California statute prohibiting such reenactments unless they are authorized by the school.
Declarations by Felber, Maissy, and Berkeley Professor Mel Gordon detail examples of incidents that they felt crossed the line into intimidation and harassment. Each complains that school officials failed to discipline the people involved.
Felber, who graduated in December, said she was physically assaulted on campus by an SJP member in March 2010. Hussam Zakharia, then leader of SJP, rammed a shopping cart into her back during simultaneous “Israel Apartheid Week” and “Israel Peace and Diversity Week” events.
She was treated for her injuries and later received therapy as a result of the incident. After that, Felber said, she was so intimidated that she was afraid to leave home without an escort.
The problems at U.C. Berkeley mirror problems elsewhere in the U.C. system, particularly at U.C. Irvine.
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From the biography section of your link to Mark Yudof…
“His wife, Judy, is the immediate past international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. She also serves on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and the international board of Hillel. In 1993, Mark and Judy Yudof were co-recipients of the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award.”
Why does a man like this allow these “events” to take place at Berkeley?
I don’t understand.
He’s likely a Democrat, and therefore Communist. In the Communist worldview, Jews have no rights. Better question, where’s the ADL? When I went to college, Jewish groups were quite militant and aggressive in their defense of Jews. What is the Jewish student union on campus doing? Is there one? If not, why not?
An assault with a shopping-cart, undefended, will lead to a killing with a knife or gun. The Muslims have taken over the American university system and made it toxic. The intolerance of the Islamics finds its match in the intolerance of the academy. When the prevailing view in the academy is that Israel and Jews are guilty of atrocities against Muslims, and that Muslims are innocent victims of Israeli aggression you have a situation in which Jews will become a scarce commodity.
Universities take Islamic money and must subscribe to Islamic anti-Semitism, raw Jew-hatred. We can cleanse our universities by stopping the inflow of dollars from Islamic countries, banning Muslim student associations which deprive speakers on campus of their First Amendment rights and whose students engage in anti-Semitic thuggery, and expelling those students entirely after a civil trial.
This is not surprising at all. In one of the last classes I took as an undergrad years ago, the “professor” (he may have been a mere lecturer), a 1960s retread given to regaling the class with stories of his young vagabond days in Europe, told us one day we were having a guest lecturer.
The class had absolutely nothing to do with politics. But suddenly the guest lecturer was in front of the class, a young Palestinian woman in full garb. She was either a former student or a friend of his.
She launched into a tirade against Israel that lasted the entire class. Lucky for me, I was sitting in the back corner as usual … otherwise I’d have been sprayed with angry spittle.
(UN)surprisingly, there was never a guest lecturer to provide an opposing view.
LukeHandCool (who thinks the university classroom atmosphere can be one of the most hostile environments to intellectual life on the planet).
Berkley …just the name makes me giggle …. google dumpster muffin to understand why
I was at a business-roundtable speech given by Yudoff in mid 2009, at the height of the economic meltdown. He was speaking to about a hundred small business owners who were, to say the least, struggling in the economic vise grip and worried about losing their livelihoods. So what did he complain about? His U.C. budget. What we wanted everyone to do was contact their state legislators to make sure that funding wasn’t cut, even if that meant raising taxes on ourselves, “because education is our future.” What an a-hole.
More directly, though, just because he has some affiliation with a nominally Jewish group means absolutely nothing, and in fact may mean that he believes he has to bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of impropriety. As a Berkeley alum, I can say that the atmosphere in the whole city is metaphorically a gas chamber. Whatever happens to be politically correct at any given moment is overwhelmingly toxic, and right now delegitimization of Israel is probably above global warming on the agenda. Few people there get the irony of using free speech to demand complete conformity with the tenet du jour.
Sorry, typo: What HE (Yudoff) wanted his audience to do was contact legislators.
Mock checkpoints? Dang, that would seem to call for someone in a keffiyah and a mock suicide vest.
How do the gay Muslim students feel about this?
@ Anchovy. One thinks it’s a shame, the other doesn’t care.
The rest were tossed off of buildings and slaughterednor buriednup to their necks in the Mojave and stoned.
Most of the Jewish students would willingly walk into the nazi gas chambers with the help of other Jews like george soros. Pathetic. Lazy. Willing to live off of their parents from whom they learned to think like this.
How ironic that anti Israeli leftwing JINOs (Jews in Name Only) are assaulted and harassed by their leftwing brothers and sisters in arms. Yet they are so stupid they don’t see that they are just tools and that their leftwing views will not shield them should their socialist “friends” come to power.