On Scene at the Pro-Hamas Campus “Walkout”AT Berkeley Steven Hayward
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/author/steven
As noted earlier in the week, I was on campus at Berkeley yesterday to host a guest lecture at the law school from Hadley Arkes about his latest book Mere Natural Law (podcast forthcoming), but yesterday happened to coincide with the “National Walkout” in favor of Hamas called for on college campuses nationwide.
I decided to take in some of the scene down at Sproul Plaza, the main site for campus protest at Berkeley ever since the Free Speech Movement was born at that location back in 1964.
I’ll add that unlike Penn and other elite universities, a clear and unequivocal faculty statement against campus pro-Hamas protests has gained nearly 400 faculty signatures so far—over 10 percent of the faculty. Some excerpts:
Open Letter on Recent Events in Israel and Gaza to the UC-Berkeley Community
On the morning of October 7, Hamas terrorists launched a brutal and vicious attack, entering Israel from Gaza. In villages and towns near the Israel/Gaza border, they murdered by gun, knife, and fire more than 1,000 unarmed civilians, including babies, children, women, the elderly, and entire families, in their homes and on the street.
They went door-to-door annihilating whole families. They killed children in front of their parents and siblings. They abused women, and paraded their mistreated naked bodies. They massacred hundreds of young people attending a nature party in the desert. And they took captive over 150 children, infants, elderly in wheelchairs, women and men, to be used as human shields, and worse. . .
While we individually have many different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we emphatically agree with President Biden’s characterization of this murderous attack – the purposeful annihilation, rape, kidnapping, and execution of civilians – as a violation of every code of human morality.
Some in our campus community have described these massacres perpetrated by Hamas as “resistance” to be “celebrated” in a “freedom struggle.” This is repugnant and indefensible. For many of us, as we went on social media on Sunday night and Monday morning, it was shocking to realize that literally while Hamas terrorists were going house-to-house seeking to murder as many Jews as they could, some pro-Palestinian organizations on our own campus were gathering petition signatures for statements that celebrated these Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and rejected any critique of their actions. . .
Unlike the Harvard faculty statement that was signed mostly by faculty from the hard sciences, many of the Berkeley faculty signatories are from the humanities and social sciences, and included the chancellor, Carol Christ, and (the very left) law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
The protest itself was rather underwhelming. It ran continuously from noon to when I wandered by again around 4:30, and there were never more than about 300 people listening to the deranged speakers drone on and on with the same cliches about “genocide,” “colonialism,” and so forth.
Notice in this first clip how the speaker specifically calls out Berkeley Law School for special criticism. Other speakers who I did not record not only attacked Berkeley Law, but mentioned by name Prof. Steven Solomon (author of the Wall Street Journal column last week entitled “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students”) and Dean Chemerinsky. It is truly a bizarro world when Chemerinsky is being attacked from the left.
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