Bylaws just Jew haters’ cover

OPINION:

Thank you for Cal Thomas’ recent column “Free speech vs. banning Jews” (Web, Oct. 3) decrying the nine student groups at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law that have amended their bylaws to ban speakers who accept Israel’s right to exist.

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, while criticizing the bylaws, has disingenuously belittled them as a matter of the student groups’ right to free speech, however objectionable. But these bylaws say nothing about the views speakers can express. Rather, the bylaws provide that anyone who accepts the Jewish people’s right to statehood in their ancestral indigenous homeland may not serve as a speaker on any topic at all, irrespective of the person’s views on or knowledge about the subject to be discussed.

In effect, the bylaws consign “Zionists” to a caste of untouchables, altogether unworthy of participation in public debate. The fact that this targets the 90% of Berkeley Law’s Jewish students who support Israel, per Chemerinsky’s own estimate, makes clear this is a proxy attack on Jews collectively. Barbra Streisand’s tweet “When does anti-Zionism bleed into broad anti-Semitism?” answers itself. 

Professor Chemerinsky has trumpeted that “only” nine groups have adopted the odious bylaws. That’s obviously nine too many. Is there any doubt that if even one student group barred African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Latino or LGBT speakers unless they passed a political litmus test of self-hatred for their own community, the action would be forcefully condemned by the entire Berkeley administration? Why the double standard for Jews? 

Rather than defend the indefensible, Dean Chemerinsky should emphasize that the UC Regents have determined “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California” and make clear that the student groups’ despicable anti-Jewish bigotry will not be tolerated. 

STEPHEN A. SILVER

San Francisco