Tuesday, February 23, 2010
At JTA, Ben Harris takes a look at some of the back and forth over the goings on at UC Irvine:
The current drama playing out at the University of California, Irvine is shaping up to be nearly note-for-note identical to the one we witnessed in 2008. Then, as now, harshly anti-Israel speakers sparked the Zionist Organization of America to issue condemnatory press releases and appeal to the United States government for an investigation (the results of which, it should be noted, determined no dereliction of duty on the part of the university). Students stood up and said the portrayal of their campus as an anti-Semitic inferno were overblown, which was followed by other students who said quite the opposite....
Read it all, but here's some meat, focusing on Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who's busy making excuses:
...Chemerinsky is misleading about what Drake has done. He has denounced hate speech. He did it for me personally two years ago when I cornered him in a D.C. convention center. But so far as I'm aware, he has NOT done it "when anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli sentiments have been expressed." He has done it when critics demanded it. And he has not "expressly proclaimed the inappropriateness of such speech." He has expressed his opposition to hate-speech in general, without "expressly" referring to any speech in particular...
There's more reason to mistrust Chemerinsky's judgment of such things. Chemerinsky was the guy who represented Rachel Corrie's family against Caterpillar. For this alone I've heard him described as a "moral reprobate," which sounds about right. I certainly wouldn't be much interested in his ability to make sound judgments with regard to what's going on at Irvine.
