Autophagia at Berkeley

Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky has never been a favorite of mine, but I love irony, and this week he’s my avatar of people whose actions have come back to bite them. He has publicly bragged, for example, how much easier it is to avoid anti-discrimination laws in his faculty hires than it is in student admission, tacitly admitting that is what he has done and what he encourages others to do. But that seems to be of no avail to him now that he’s become a target for the Left and Jihadists acting in coalition.

One of his recent hires is Chesa Boudin, son of two terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.  Chesa, in case you forgot, is the former San Francisco district attorney whose soft on crime policies were so extreme that San Franciscans voted to recall him, a highly unusual occurrence. (Chesa attributed this to the city’s “hard turn to the right.”) Chesa was hired to head the law school’s Criminal & Justice Center.  To Chemerinsky, “Chesa has substantial experience across the criminal justice system. He has thought deeply about the system and I cannot think of anyone better to create and direct this important center.”

I mean who better than a district attorney too far left and tolerant of criminals for even San Francisco to teach criminal justice?

This week, Chemerinsky and wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, got an uncomfortable lesson in the perils of ceding space and voice to ill-educated, boorish, students.

They host dinners for new graduates in their backyard and at one, law student Malak Afaneh arrived wrapped in a keffiyeh with her own microphone and PA equipment. (Iowahawk posts, “Who doesn’t love it when somebody shows up at your party and turns it into Hamas Karaoke Night” and not since Radical Chic has there been a clueless progressive idiot house party this flat-out hilarious.)

She proceeded to denounce the school’s investments in Boeing, Lockheed Martin and BlackRock, saying the school was complacent in genocide.  When asked to leave by the hosts, she refused. Professor Fisk attempted to wrestle the microphone from Afaneh’s hand and the hosts asked the police to remove her for trespassing on private grounds. Chemerinsky, who is referred to often as an expert on the First Amendment, quite correctly asserts that the right to free speech doesn’t mean you can come into anyone’s backyard to make speeches. Afaneh’s response: “We have attorneys…. This is our First Amendment right. The National Lawyers Guild have informed us….” It’s an odd juxtaposition, a student attacking a dean who hired Chesa Boudin, claiming support for her conduct by the NLG, which features Chesa and his terrorist parents on their own webpage.  

Afaneh claims she was humiliated and traumatized by being asked to leave. 

Chemerinsky plans more dinners: 

The student organization announced on April 1 that it would boycott Chemerinsky’s annual dinners, planned for three days this week. Caricatures of him holding a bloody knife and fork with the caption “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza Starves!” were circulated on bulletin boards and social media and posted around campus and at the law school. The group said the professor is an outspoken critic of pro-Palestinian organizers on campus.

In a statement on the Berkeley Law website Wednesday, Chemerinsky said the organizers informed him through student government leaders that if he didn’t cancel the dinners, they would attend in protest. He said he went forward with the dinners in hopes that the protests would be peaceful. He said he believed he was being targeted for being Jewish.

[snip]

circulating on social media, shows a drawn caricature of Chemerinsky holding a knife and fork with crumbs on his face.

“Although many complained to me about the posters and how they deeply offended them, I felt that though deeply offensive, they were speech protected by the First Amendment. But I was upset that those in our community had to see this disturbing, antisemitic poster around the law school,” Chemerinsky wrote in a statement.

Chemerinsky said he would continue his dinners on Wednesday and Thursday and that security would be present. He said any students who disrupt the gatherings “will be reported to student conduct and a violation of the student conduct code is reported to the Bar.” 

Barkan said Chemerinsky voiced the same consequences to the protest group as they left his home on Tuesday, but there’s no indication that he’s moved forward with the disciplinary reports.

The NLG condemned the dean: “University professors should NEVER put their hands on students.” They claim that when Fisk tried to remove the disruptive student, which she is entitled by law to do, she committed an assault. 

Shabana Mir, a professor at something called the American Islamic College, paints Afaneh as a poor mistreated heroine in a stream of highly hyperbolic X posts, of which these are a sample:

“I am a mother as well as a professor. It is heartbreaking how Malak is ready for this professor’s aggressive manhandling, her gritted teeth fury. Do you see what this shows? It shows that this is familiar to Malak. She is unsurprised. She has no expectation of safety.”

“Malak’s participation on this famously liberal campus, Berkeley, is always contingent. She must fight, every step of the way, for her right to be as herself, and to remember her people. Powerful campus forces demand that she strip herself down to a new person, but she persists.

“They know you. They know white supremacy and imperialism through intimate encounters. They know what to expect. They’re not allowed childhood or youth. This is their path. You torment them, our precious children, the fruit of our labors and dreams. May you be cursed you for it.

CAIR has, naturally, joined in with the NLG. Something called the San Francisco Bay office of CAIR condemned the “assault”on Afaneh by Professor Fisk. Not to be left out of the brawl, an outfit called the People’s City Council-Los Angeles joined the fray and the Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine adopted their strategic advice:

“…students should ‘put some skin in the game and put on a birdog/heckling exhibit everywhere Chemerinsky goes until he resigns.”

In sum, there are too many Islamists and leftists working together to remove the dean and his wife to expect this contretemps in a backyard will quickly vanish, with Chemerinsky and Fisk victorious.

Will the faculty he hired when ignoring anti-discrimination laws have the dean’s back as these forces grow? My read of college faculties and leftists generally says they won’t. 

American Thinker

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