RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uc-berkeley-calls-cops-on-protest-against-jewish-free-zones/

During the Black Lives Matter riots, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ endorsed police defunding. “Elements of our country’s law enforcement culture dehumanize some of the very people whose safety and wellness police officers are sworn to protect,” she falsely claimed.

Two weeks ago, UC Berkeley called the police on a conservative truck protesting campus antisemitism and the “Jewish Free Zones” erected by elements of its law school.

Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky had claimed that the university couldn’t take any action against the “Jewish Free Zones” enacted by student organizations even as he admitted that they would bar 90% of Jewish speakers. “That is their First Amendment right. I find their statement offensive, but they have the right to say it. To punish these student groups, or students, for their speech would clearly violate the Constitution,” he argued.

That was in early October.

In late October, Chemerinsky responded to a truck rented by a conservative group protesting the “Jewish Free Zone” by threatening that, “we’re exploring whether there’s any action that can be taken against the Accuracy in Media for the truck.”

According to Chemerinsky and Berkeley, banning Jews is free speech, protesting the ban isn’t.

Chemerinsky described the ban of 90% of Jewish speakers as merely “offensive”, but condemned a protest against it as “despicable” and “outrageous behavior.”

Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media, had decided to challenge the culture of campus antisemitism by renting a truck to name and shame the students responsible for the  “Jewish Free Zones”.

It’s a tactic that has been successfully used by groups fighting antisemitism like Canary Mission.

Recalling his own student days, Adam told me that, “When I attended the University of Florida we dealt with the same sort of nonsense and our campus Jewish groups wouldn’t do a thing about it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/indoctrinating-school-children-to-hate-israel-and-jews/

The cognitive war against Israel, a campaign on college campuses for well over a decade, has helped in positioning the Jewish state as an alleged racist, colonial oppressor of an innocent indigenous people, an illegal regime that exists on land wrongly confiscated from Palestinians.

Zionism, it is alleged, is a corrosive political ideology that inspires both the creation of an apartheid nation and the undiminished lust for more Palestinian land for a Greater Israel.

In this narrative, the Palestinians are cast as perennial victims whose human and civil rights are deprived for them due to white supremacy, racism, and the predations of an Israeli military that brutally enforces this unjust, illegal state of affairs.

Activists, both on and off campus, have been successful in promoting this flawed and factually inaccurate narrative, but the perceived injustices being done to the ever-aggrieved Palestinians resonates with young liberal minds who have an understandable affinity for the underdog and victim—especially if that bias and hatred are characterized by racism and oppression—exactly how Israel is now mistakenly perceived by many of its ideological foes.

Now, the same slanders, lies, and contortions of history and facts about the Israeli/Palestinian debate are being introduced to younger audiences with impressionable minds: school children.

A recent example of this troubling trend was revealed when critics became aware that the Newark, New Jersey school board had included an anti-Israel book on its mandatory reading list. The book, A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird, found its way into the sixth-grade English curriculum for the 2022-23 school year, and, according to the description on Amazon, “explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy.”

Of course, the same premise that campus activists chant about when they scream, “Free, free Palestine,” the factually false assertion that the land allegedly occupied by Israel is or ever was Palestinian land, is taken as truth, so Israel is already guilty in this narrative of having stolen others’ land.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/taxpayer-and-donor-funded-systemic-anti-semitism-at-berkeley/

Berkeley’s $3 billion budget comes from taxpayers through tuition paid for by government scholarships, state, local and federal grants, state funding and tax deductible contributions. While the University of California school insists that “the state provides just 14 percent of the university’s revenue”, taxpayers actually fund or underwrite much of its operation.

And that operation is systemically antisemitic.

When nine campus groups at the UC Berkeley School of Law announced that they wouldn’t host the vast majority of Jewish speakers (as Dean Erwin Chemerinksy admitted that it “would exclude about, I don’t know, 90 percent or more of our Jewish students”), it made headlines around the world. It was also in violation of federal and state not-discrimination laws.

The University of California is a 501(c)(3) and the UC Berkeley Foundation is the college’s own nonprofit. And UC Berkeley Law is eager to accept everything from gifts of stocks to cryptocurrency. Taxpayers subsidize this system even though the UC Berkeley Foundation which has assets approaching $3 billion. That money helps fund its systemic antisemitism.

Systemic antisemitism at the UC Berkeley School of Law is not just a private policy. The creation of “Jewish-Free Zones” at the law school are being subsidized by taxpayers.

And by Jewish donors.

In ’21, Scott Shenker, a computer scientist, wrote UC Berkeley a $25 million check. That same year the Wertheim Family Foundation pledged $100 million to UC Berkeley Optometry. A year earlier, Bob Haas injected yet another $24 million into UC Berkeley. And they are not alone.

https://whiterosemagazine.com/

What surreal anti-Semitic act occurred on campus this week? It’s hard to keep up. Amidst the brouhaha over several UC Berkeley student groups’ ban on “Zionist speakers,” a former CAIR staffer being asked to investigate anti-Semitism at CUNY and Brooklyn College scheduling “implicit bias training” on Yom Kippur, many may have missed that on Sept. 28, the editorial board of the Wellesley College newspaper The Wellesley News called for the “liberation of Palestine.”

In other words, Wellesley College, a supposed beacon of liberalism, called for Israel’s destruction. The editorial, of course, doesn’t actually use the word “destruction,” but anyone even vaguely familiar with Palestinian propaganda knows “liberation” means the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jews.

With this editorial, Wellesley finally beat out Harvard in the anti-Semitic Olympics. The Harvard Crimson, after all, at least confined itself to “only” endorsing BDS in an April 29 editorial.

What was Wellesley’s response to its campus paper’s call for ethnic cleansing? An official statement said, “The Wellesley News is a student newspaper—an organization that is editorially independent from Wellesley College. Its editorials reflect the views of the newspaper’s editorial board; they do not reflect the views of Wellesley College.” Considering how ferociously American universities usually react to hate speech, this is a decidedly underwhelming rejoinder.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-stanford-owes-you-an-apology-get-in-line-israel-jews-bds-admissions-quota-harvard-asian-americans-teshuvah-11666200168?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer, once described his fellow Jews as “a people who can’t sleep and won’t let anybody else sleep, either.” But of all the speculations, complaints and laments rifling through my yiddishe kop, I confess that one possibility for last week went uncontemplated: an apology from Stanford University, my alma mater, for restricting the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s.

“Who asked for it?” another Jewish alum remarked to me. If Jewish parents were to compile their top 20 issues with U.S. colleges, the lack of apologies for old quotas wouldn’t make the list. First would be the same issue everyone has: outrageous tuition, for which college presidents and administrators might feel ashamed if they weren’t so convinced of their moral superiority.

Next on the list would come the treatment of Israel. Why is the dissemination of Soviet-vintage anti-Zionist propaganda the perennial preoccupation of student activists, egged on by radical professors? In my freshman year, the Students of Color Coalition, the dominant campus political machine, organized a broad coalition of student groups in favor of divestment from Israel. Alongside the old calumnies, it hyped to Hispanic students that U.S. Border Patrol uses some Israeli technology. To black students it played up minor training sessions that some U.S. police receive in “apartheid Israel,” as if that’s why we have police shootings. It’s called intersectionality: Each group is given its own reason to blame the Jews.

Nineteen student groups were arrayed against Israel, and only Jews and conservatives defended it. Liberal Jews, throughout their time at Stanford, were pressured to choose: Turn your back on Israel and the Jewish people, or lose your standing as progressives. Jewish parents worry about that dynamic.

Wokeness itself is often a concern because of its structural antagonism to the Jews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/welcome-to-the-no-go-zones-for-jews-at-berkeley-law-school/

When Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) at Berkeley’s law school promoted a bylaw that would create what critics have characterized as “no-go zones for Jews,” they may not have anticipated the thunderous and widespread denunciation they have since experienced for their toxic and radical tactic to marginalize and alienate Zionists and Jews on campus.

“LSJP is so excited to announce that multiple student affinity groups and clubs at Berkeley Law have adopted a pro-Palestine bylaw divesting all funds from institutions and companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, and banning future use of funds towards such companies!” the group wrote in an August Instagram post. “LSJP is calling ALL student organizations at Berkeley Law to take an anti-racist and anti-settler colonial stand and adopt the bylaw into their constitutions ASAP!”

In addition to urging the student groups to commit to supporting the ongoing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, the bylaw also included very troubling language that seeks to expunge any speech by individuals who might be considered pro-Israel or pro-Zionist, especially speech meant to correct the many factual and historical inaccuracies in the pro-Palestinian narrative inherent in this insidious bylaw.

“[I]n the interest of protecting the safety and welfare of Palestinian students on campus,” the suggested language read, groups who adopt this bylaw “will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” [Emphasis added]

And in language which is Orwellian in its attempt to paint bigotry as virtue, cooperating student groups, the bylaw read, will proclaim that they are “publicly stipulating the organization’s position of anti-racism and anti-settler colonialism to speakers, ensuring that proposals for speakers emphasize the organization’s desire for equality and inclusion,” all of this for the purpose, of course, of creating “a safe and inclusive space for Palestinian students and students that are in the support of the liberation of Palestine . . . .”