Sunday, May 23, 2004

Jew Hatred Comes to Berkeley

Via Instapundit comes this chilling example of just how far the left will go in their quest to support the contemptible "Palestinian Cause;" open Jew hatred, and at Berkeley no less:
Weinberg graduates this month as a student whose days at Cal were marked by what he calls "pinnacles of horror," in the pinched tone of a man betrayed. He remembers pro-Palestinian protesters insisting that Israeli border crossings are as bad as Nazi death camps. He remembers the glass front door of Berkeley's Hillel building -- where he attends Friday night services -- shattered by a cinderblock, with the message F**K JEWS scrawled nearby. He remembers the spray-painted swastikas discovered one Monday morning last September on the walls of four lecture rooms in LeConte Hall accompanied by the chilling bilingual message, "Die, Juden. "

In recent years the international press has documented the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world. Jewish schoolkids have been attacked by epithet-shouting gangs in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Brazil. Synagogues have been destroyed in Marseille and Istanbul; a Jewish school was firebombed this spring in Montreal; "Death to the Jews" was shouted through bullhorns outside a temple in South Africa. AP ran photos last month of a Jewish graveyard in eastern France where a hundred tombstones had been spray-painted with blood-red swastikas and the Nazi slogan Juden Raus: "Jews out." The Chicago Sun-Times and the British Guardian report that a ubiquitous chant at European soccer matches -- leveled at London and Rotterdam teams perceived as having Jewish roots -- is "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

Such anti-Semitism has always seemed the sinister province of fascists and neo-Nazis, Spanish Inquisitors and tattooed skinheads. How topsy-turvy, then, to discover that some of the most virulent anti-Semitism in America today seethes amid the multicultural ferment of American college campuses. And at UC Berkeley, which owes as much of its allure to radical rhetoric as to academic excellence, it thrives.

"Anti-Semitism is not part of the average Berkeley student's thinking, but it exists in certain departments," said theater arts professor Mel Gordon, who was involved in an altercation with student supporters of Palestine in 2001. "It's an obnoxious Berkeley tradition, bringing political agendas into the classroom. And since Berkeley always wants everything in the world to be about Berkeley, Berkeley wants the Israel-Palestine conflict to be about Berkeley."

Student Daniel Frankenstein recalls being heckled and called a "conservative Zionist bastard" when he ran for student-body president last year. "One girl working on my campaign was followed around by someone who kept asking her, 'Are you a Jewgirl? Frankenstein's a Jew, so isn't everyone who's working for him a Jew?'" he said. Incidents such as these have convinced Frankenstein, who is graduating this month and taking a government job in Washington, DC, that "it is really socially acceptable to be anti-Semitic on the Berkeley campus."

Perhaps they should institute an annual Kristallnacht, maybe during Homecoming, I'm sure that the smug little fascists would like that.

We shouldn't be too surprised, the Nazis were National Socialists, weren't they?

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