A recenteventhosted by students at UC Berkeley’s law schooldrewnational criticism after featuring Israa Jaabis, a failed Palestinian suicide bomber released from Israeli prison in November 2023 as part of the hostage-prisoner exchange following Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Berkeley’s response was to invoke free speech, insisting that the university must remain content-neutral toward protected expression.
The answer lies in the political commitments of the department’s members. Half of Berkeley Rhetoric’s faculty, including the chair and other senior leaders, signed a statement issued just days after Hamas’ attack on Israel that openly took sides in the war — declaring solidarity “without hesitation” with those “who fight for justice in Palestine,” endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli universities, and omitting any mention of Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians.
These aren’t random student groups organizing protests. These are professors using their institutional authority to advance a political agenda.
That alignment reflects exactly what academic BDS (“boycott, divestment, sanctions”), the movement to implement an academic boycott of Israel,urgesfaculty to do.
Academic BDS brings boycott politics onto campus — into research, teaching, speaker invitations, study abroad, academic partnerships, and programming. It does so through two linked principles: boycott, which seeks to sever scholarly ties with Israeli institutions and Israel-related academic activity, and anti-normalization, which seeks to ensure that Israel, Zionism, and engagement with either are not treated as normal or legitimate parts of academic life.
When faculty embrace these principles, they shape the entire intellectual environment students encounter. The result is the abandonment of open inquiry in favor of the one-sided anti-Israel departmental programming Berkeley has seen repeatedly since October 7.
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Because most Jewish students identify with Zionism, academic BDS also fuels antisemitism by recasting Jewish identity, ties, and concerns as politically illegitimate and morally tainted.
At Berkeley, documented incidents targeting Jewish members of the campus community for harm increased by 531% in the two academic years after October 7. More than 40% of those incidents involved faculty or departments — as perpetrators, public defenders, or institutional enablers.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
