Our nation’s colleges and universities have for years now been radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination, where idea that oppose the establishment narrative are not evaluated or discussed at all except in order to make it clear to the hapless targets of this indoctrination that those who entertain them will be vilified, demonized, ostracized, and possibly expelled from school and rendered too notoriously toxic to get a job in their chosen field. Now the University of California, Berkeley, always an academic trendsetter, has made the Left’s increasingly open antisemitism official policy, as nine student groups have adopted a policy that prohibits people who support Israel from speaking at events. Berkeley, the home in the 1960s of the legendary “Free Speech” movement, has now come full circle and made the Left’s opposition to the freedom of expression and open discourse, as well as its Jew-hatred, open and undeniable.
The New York Post reported Friday that “the controversial bylaw, updated for the new academic year by a pro-Palestinian group on campus, says it aims to stop the spread of Zionist beliefs.” Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine explained that the nine neo-Nazi organizations “will not invite speakers that have expressed interest and continue to hold views, host, sponsor or promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine.”
Meanwhile, the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky’s response was mild and carefully worded: “It is troubling to broadly exclude a particular viewpoint from being expressed.” Troubling? It’s totalitarian, it’s evil, it’s against the very idea of what a university is supposed to be, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. “Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies.” He had to add that condemnation, or else he would have been banished forever from the soirees of the enlightened Leftists. Chemerinsky continued: “The principles of community for the Berkeley campus stress that we are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.”
Ensuring freedom of expression? Really? At Berkeley? The same Berkeley that canceled speeches by David Horowitz, Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter after authoritarian Leftist thugs threatened violence? The same Berkeley that had to pay $70,000 to Young America’s Foundation (YAF) over its efforts to prevent conservative speakers from appearing on campus? The ban on pro-Israel speakers just makes official what has been unofficial policy on campuses nationwide for years: not just pro-Israel speakers, but all opposing voices, are not allowed. Those who somehow get past all the hurdles and actually get an opportunity to speak will be shouted down, or subjected to walkouts, or even physically menaced. College and university campuses today are fascist states in which only one point of view is acceptable to be enunciated. Berkeley just made it official.
Those who would take refuge in the fact that this ban comes from student groups and not from the university itself should take note of what Kenneth Marcus pointed out in the Jewish Journal: “These are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus.” In other words, groups that represent the fruit of the Left’s decades-long embrace of identity politics have joined together in this open expression of anti-Semitism. They’re just the kind of students that our colleges and universities want to produce these days.
Marcus added: “If it wasn’t so frightening, one might be able to recognize the irony in the sight of campus progressives trying so hard to signal progressive virtue that they fall victim to a deeper moral shame.”
Indeed. And an even deeper moral shame is that Chemerinsky defended the students’ actions, even as he expressed his mild disapproval, by having the audacity to invoke the freedom of speech: “It is important to recognize that law student groups have free speech rights, including to express messages that I and others might find offensive.” All right. So they have the right to express messages that others might find offensive, but others do not have the right to express messages that they find offensive. They have the freedom of speech. Pro-Israel speakers do not. Conservative speakers do not.
Those who doubt David Horowitz’s dictum, “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” should ponder these events at Berkeley carefully. The totalitarians have gotten out, and they’re making the rules. Back in the 1920s and early 1930s, Nazism first spread widely on German campuses. Now today, the Left’s authoritarianism, fascism, and contempt for free discourse has come out into the open and become stated policy first on campuses. But it won’t end there.
I still remember the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s.
We foolish teenagers used to go to Berkeley to watch the riots, as a form of entertainment.
Jews should not be allowed to speak, how else can we establish a safe space away from the MAGA violence?
MAGA violence? Is that like Dirtbagocrat honesty, Say yes to bendovers?
I remember when your boy Richard Spencer said he was goin’ for your boy Barackkk;’s boy, the racist rapist JoJo Cabbage Brain Biden. He said the guy with the Jewish kid and grandkids, the guy who moved our Embassy to Israel’s capitol, the guy who engineered the Abraham Accords just isn’t his kinda guy.
Have they renamed any streets after JoJo yet, Bobo
Thanks for revealing to us the low-life Jew hating scumbag you truly are. And MAGA violence? When where. How long are you going to dine out on J6.
Jan 6th patriots that were ushered into the ellipsis were not rioters; they were a static crowd that had been a festive tailgate party atmosphere . . . until that benign gathering of supporters was attacked!
They were assaulted without cause, for almost half an hour with tear-gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bangs.
After half an hour, they’d had enough.
The Jan 6th patriots were set up – enticed in, attacked, then hunted for responding to the unprovoked attack by taking selfies.
The fact that DC manufactured and maintained the lie about officer Sicknick for months proves it.
The fact that DC refuses to release 1,400 hours of video shows it.
The fact that no serious hunt for the fake pipe bomber proves it.
And more. Our government is lawless and considers every one of us who doesn’t support it as domestic terrorists.
If your comment is not satire then it is a manifestation of a deep level of stupidity and willful ignorance.
Your trolling isn’t even amusing, anymore. It’s just sad.
Wouldn’t that be “Berserkeley?” Just a typo, I know.
Right 🙂
They never wanted free speech for anybody but themselves.
And just as there is no free lunch, there is no free speech.
It’s really not true that everybody in those nine student groups at Berkeley hates Jews. As a matter of fact, some of them have helpfully demonstrated their support of the Jewish community by strongly encouraging all Jews on campus to proudly display the Star of David wherever they go.
Maybe they should force the leaders of those groups and the college to change their anti Semitic policies? Or maybe they encourage Jews to wear the Star of David so they’ll be targets?
No decent person would belong to such groups.
Rimshot! 🥁
(What scares me is some activist idiot might read your post and get an idea. 😲)
I doubt anyone among those Berkeley “student groups,” save possible for the Arab ones, have lived in Israel. I detest all forms of censorship.
Chereminsky: “The principles of community for the Berkeley campus stress that we are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.”
What a mealymouthed milquetoast response. I remember this loser on the equally milquetoast Hugh Hewitt show. He was a loser then and he is still one. How about resigning in protest.
1930’s Germany didn’t distinguish between secular Jews, who considered themselves Germans first, and devout Jews. Now there is a storm coming for American Jews, in fact in some cities it is already here…..and it doesn’t distinguish between Conservative, mostly Orthodox Jews, and the Leftist secular Jews. The left’s newly regained power in America there will be a second Holocaust. And the Progressive Left has seen the naïveté of American secular Jews and is ready to take full advantage of it. These useful idiot Jews might as well march themselves into the gas chambers where the Zyklon B will be EPA approved.
Thought the Third Reich died at the end of WWII? Guess again.
In America secular liberal Jews and the ADL have always voted for their own executioners.
American secular liberal Jews are classic useful idiots. They will be useful to the Democrats until they are no longer useful. Noam Chomsky and all the other smug Leftist Jewish Israel haters like Ariel Gold, co-chair of Code Pink, Steven Goldstein, the director of the “Anne Frank Center.” Mark Hetfield, HIAS president, Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut and The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt will be swept up and sent away. In another era Goldstein, Hetfield, Greenblatt and Eric Fingerhut would be called Kapos or Sonderkommandos. These people are traitors to America and are selling out the Jews
They will know the truth when it is too late.
The Progressive Left has always been the source of Jew Hatred and Israel hatred, most significantly since the Six Day War. They always couch it in anti-Zionism. Like Germany in the 1920s today’s American anti-Semitism finds fertile ground in academia. Read Richard Cravatts, Ph.D.’s https://dhfcblog.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/cravattsjewhatred.pdf for an excellent overview on the situation on today’s college campuses. These woke Ivy League law schools are breeding a generation of Jew Hating lawyers who will end up in government. I can only imagine the anti-semitic policies that will be developed and enacted by future Democrat admins when these little Hitlers are running things.For now the Jew hating Ivy League legal activists don’t have the guts to pull the trigger. But wait a few years.
The BLM movement, the Israel Divestment BDS movement and the Students for Justice in Palestine, all at the universities, are ground zero for anti-Semitism.
When this takes root, as it most assuredly will, how long before Jews are kicked out of “certain professions”? How long before there is another KristalNacht? How long before Biden’s FBI is renamed the SS?
Well-Said!
The vile Dhimmi-crats and their Muslim allies represent the new National Socialists. Vilifying Jews who’ve lived in the middle east for millennia before the supremacist, totalitarian, belligerent and hate-filled ideology of “Submission” was founded. And, slandering Israel with the most manifestly dishonest and wicked slander, of alleged “apartheid,” is vile and evil.
Hey Dr. Spencer:
Berserkeley is good, but Nuremberkeley is even better!
Make it go viral, dude!
the entry arch at Berkeley seems to need a three word sign: “Cowardice Macht Frei” as a modern version of the duplicity of the entry sign at Auschwitz
Good point. It does bear a strong resemblance to the Auschwitz entry gate. They should put up the original slogan Arbeit Macht Frei and tell the world who they really are.
I actually thought you were serious. I admit I can be stupid sometimes.