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Terrorist lecture at UC Berkeley — symptom of a much bigger problem

A recent event hosted by students at UC Berkeley’s law school drew national 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 Oct. 7 attack.

Berkeley’s response was to invoke free speech, insisting that the university must remain content-neutral toward protected expression.

But the deeper threat to academic freedom at Berkeley is not a single student-sponsored event. It is the conduct of faculty who are using departments, speaker series, official academic programming, and university authority to turn anti-Israel activism into institutional practice.

That conduct was recently on display in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department, which sponsored a talk titled “Anti-Zionism Is Not a Luxury.” The event was promoted as one that “articulates and embraces an affirmative anti-Zionism,” calls for “the end of a Zionist world,” and presents anti-Zionism as “a vital necessity of existence.”

Nor was it a one-off for the Rhetoric Department. Since Oct. 7, 2023, it has sponsored or co-sponsored more than a dozen similarly one-sided anti-Israel events, raising an obvious question: Why would a rhetoric department become a reliable sponsor of activist programming?

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........

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