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.
First some background before sharing some video and observations.
A professor of Asian studies offered extra credit for students in a class to attend the protest:
This drew a direct rebuke from the administration to all faculty and staff:
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.
The second speaker here, who was wearing a dress and I am guessing goes by “they/them” pronouns, is the head of the graduate students union:
As I say, the crowd was tiny for a school with over 30,000 students. Even though some speakers, like this last one here, spouted cliches recycled from the Vietnam Era, protests of old generated much larger audiences. I am not convinced that all the people who watched any of the protests were even students or staff. Any campus protest draws a lot of the old fossil Communists from the Berkeley community, mostly followers of an old Trotskyite has-been named Bob Avakian, who still commands a cult-like following of geriatric lefties that clusters for old-school teach-ins at Revolution Books on Durant Ave. Whatever the issue, their message is always the same: worldwide revolution is right around the corner!
Still, there was one disturbing and highly revealing aspect of the event. The official campus event staff that was watching for trouble wore yellow safety vests, and out of sight a block away was a large reserve police presence, though there was never any chance that Antifa would cause trouble because they are pro-Hamas, needless to say. But there was a small group of masked individuals, wearing orange safety vests and thus hoping to appear “official,” who went up to students who were taking pictures on their phones telling them to stop taking pictures because it was threatening to the protesters, who might be doxxed. I politely informed one of these goons that he had no legal authority to issue such a command at a newsworthy event in a public space, and he backed off.
The protesters wearing masks were not doing so out of COVID fear. It is never a good sign when a political faction wears masks to conceal their identity.
And the Berkeley “Warn Me” crime notification system sent out this message late in the day:
An attempted robbery occurred at the rally located on upper Sproul Plaza. Suspects attempted to grab victim’s backpack, flag, and ultimately grabbed her metal water bottle. The suspect with the metal water bottle walked around in the crowd and eventually swung the water bottle hitting the victim. Victim did not need further medical assistance. Suspects are still outstanding. This case is under investigation.
Still, good to see that while this protest was going on, other students had their tables out on the plaza with more sensible interests:
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