The Dean of the Faculty of Law at Berkeley, Professor Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, Professor Fisk, out of the goodness of their hearts, invited student members of the graduating law class to their home for a celebratory dinner. Professor Chemerinsky is a constitutional law and federal civil procedure expert who has always championed free speech and the right to criticize the policies of any government. Sadly, in the days leading to the dinner, an activist group on campus affixed posters of the Dean depicting him with a bloody knife and fork with the caption, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.” This is the most offensive blood libel and a blatant example of anti-Semitic hate speech. Despite the dark pall of ethnic intolerance descending on the campus, the Dean and his wife hosted the dinner which is an annual tradition. At the dinner, one of the student guests proceeded to make a speech suggesting that somehow the Dean and his wife were responsible for US weapons transfers to Israel and the famine in Gaza. The Dean and his wife repeatedly instructed the slanderous rabble rouser to vacate their home. After much resistance, the student along with 10 of her comrades left. Parts of the incident were captured on video.
Neither the Dean nor his wife has anything to do with the US government or the Israeli government. The fact that they are Jewish is merely incidental to the stances they have taken as academics committed to the US Constitution and its presumption of equality for all under the law. If anything, Professor Chemerinsky has championed the right of Palestinian self-determination and is highly critical of the policies pursued by Netanyahu’s regime. He even criticized the doxxing of pro-peace students by right- wing groups at Harvard University last year. We are living in a time where innocent people are targeted for no reason in their own home. Ultimately, nobody can be legally targeted in their home. Their crime was being kind to their students. Read about Dean Chemerinsky’s horrible experience here: www.law.berkeley.edu/…
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