The East Bay Express has a long story on the subject; here are two particularly striking excerpts:
A milder but more instructive glimpse of the hatreds that inflame Cal was on display February 10, the day Daniel Pipes lectured at UC Berkeley’s Pimentel Hall. Pipes runs a project called Campus Watch, which through its Web site, CampusWatch.org, monitors Middle Eastern Studies departments at American schools, including Cal. The site keeps dossiers on instructors it believes are biased against the United States, and Pipes writes a steady stream of articles with intentionally provocative headlines such as “When Osama Bin Laden Becomes PC” and “The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!”
Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student organization that sponsored the event, had printed fliers calling Pipes “a member of the presidentially appointed US Institute for Peace and a prize-winning columnist.” His detractors called him something else entirely. “Racist Daniel Pipes to speak at UC Berkeley,” ran an announcement at Indybay.org the day of the lecture, urging readers to protest this visit by a “notable bigot and neo-McCarthyist.”
Outside the hall where [Daniel] Pipes was to speak, you could cut the tension with a knife. Protesters had assembled early: young women wearing the hijab; young men clad in yarmulkes or Muslim skullcaps; and, of course, plenty of Cal sweatshirts. One protester hoisted a sign reading, “Israel: Born of British colonialism. Created through Zionist terrorism. Supported by Western imperialism. Sustained by Israeli militarism.” Another man circulated silently, bearing a small sign that read, “Another Jew opposed to Daniel Pipes.” Female voices ululated.
One flier making the rounds declared, “The neoconservatives and the Jewish Lobby … planned the Iraq wars. … Most of the US media … are Jewish owned.” Meanwhile, the largest sign said, “I Want You! to DIE for Israel. Israel sings: ‘Onward christian soldiers.'” On the reverse side, in an attempted riff on “Pax Americana,” the sign said, “I WANT YOU TO KILL FOR THE AMERA-ISRAELA POX!” Large rakish swastikas replaced the letter “s” in “Israel” on both sides of the sign. The sign-bearer’s Uncle Sam hat was emblazoned with another swastika.
“So what exactly does Daniel Pipes represent to you?” one young protester demanded of a middle-aged man whose point of view she surmised by his refusal to accept a pamphlet. “Are you proud of his racism?”
Two male students, like college guys anywhere, eyed a group of young women whose hair was hidden under the hijab, their blue-jeaned legs and excited voices shivery in the cold. “I wonder how all these women who are supporting the Arabs would feel about being clitorecticized,” one of the guys murmured to his friend. By that, he meant the practice of clitoridectomy, which is followed in some traditional Islamic cultures.
Sophomore Sandra Tahani was one of the women wearing headscarves. “Daniel Pipes is trying to incite pure hatred and racism,” she said with fire in her eyes. “He wants to shut down the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. I’m with Students for Justice in Palestine. I’m with the Muslim Students Association, too. I’m with everyone that stands for justice. I’m an American.” She said her parents are Muslim, although her mother converted from Judaism. “Coming from a Jewish heritage — she has relatives that died in the Holocaust — my mom says the Holocaust is being used to justify the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” Other young women in headscarves clustered around her, their eyes blazing too.
A hush fell over the crowd as four women protesters in black clothing slowly descended into the plaza. Balanced on the shoulders of each was an armchair-sized papier-mâché head complete with hijab and frozen expression of grief. The women’s eyes peered through the gaping papier-mâché mouths. Forming a row, they faced the crowd with gloved hands upraised as if in supplication. A pink-faced man moved somberly from one to the next, symbolically draping limp rag dummies in the shape of dead babies over the waiting arms of each.
“This is worse than the Warsaw ghetto,” muttered a Jewish man in the queue.
As campus police assembled at the entrance to the hall and prepared to open its doors, a kaffiyeh-clad protester hoisted a placard that read: “What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.” The quote was attributed to Mahatma “Ghandi” in 1938, albeit a decade before there was an Israel. A silver-haired man, older than most in the crowd, burst out of the line to confront him.
“Do you know what it’s like to be on a bus, and to see that bus blow up and see heads roll down the street?” the older man shouted, arms wild at his sides. “I’ve seen it — in Israel.”
The sign-bearer stood firm. “Well, they should have been killed,” he yelled, his voice rising. “They should have been killed! They should have been killed because it wasn’t their land! They should have been killed and it should have been more.”
“You don’t know history,” the older man yelled. “You don’t know anything.”
The protester gave as good as he got: “You can leave. Get your ass out of here and back to Israel.” Then, equating Israelis with criminals who have broken into someone else’s house, he said homeowners in such an instance have the right to kill. “If you broke into someone’s house and stole something . . . you’d deserve to die! The Jews broke into Palestine and stole the land — so they deserve to die. . . . What’s your address? Why won’t you tell me? Are you afraid? I’ll come break into your house and we’ll see if you try to kill me. It’s natural.” . . .
On the day Pipes made his case in person, no purses or backpacks were allowed into the lecture hall for security reasons. Members of the audience were admonished not to shout, heckle, or hold up signs, at the risk of being escorted out of the building. Campus police patted down each person coming through the door.
The auditorium was full, with protesters occupying several rows on the right flank and scattered throughout the hall. The overhead lights bathed a sea of shining hair, flowing scarves, and skullcaps. One man’s olive-drab yarmulke had the words “Israeli Army” embroidered on it. Campus police studded the aisles, five down each side. Dark-suited bodyguards framed the podium as Pipes, looking formal and disarmingly slight, entered the room to a storm of boos and applause.
“It’s an unfortunate fact of university life that such security is necessary today,” Pipes said. Still, after teaching thousands of students at the University of Chicago and Harvard and delivering nearly a thousand lectures at other universities over the last few years, he could not possibly have been surprised by the response his remarks elicited. Indeed, within moments, the first heckler leapt to his feet and was escorted out. Again and again, as Pipes parsed the difference between mainstream Muslims and “militant Islam,” the auditorium rang with both wild cheers of approval and cries of outrage.
“The same people who support militant Islam,” Pipes ventured in a butter-cookie voice whose softness seemed a calculated counterpoint to its message, “support suicide bombers and Saddam Hussein.”
To the accompaniment of cheers and cries of outrage, a red-haired female protester became especially vocal and was escorted out.
“This is an ideology like fascism and like Marxism that seeks to impose views on its subjects,” Pipes said, calling it a “totalitarian ideology which we must seek to destroy.”
From among the protesters, a voice shouted: “You guys are Nazis!”
“Why was the World Trade Center attacked?” Pipes asked. “What was the reason?”
“Zionism!” someone yelled.
When Pipes proposed that global unrest can be addressed only “when we call it what it is: not a war on terrorism but a war on militant Islam,” a chanting chorus erupted: “Ra-cist! Ra-cist!”
“Let him speak!” came a strangled yell. “Freedom of speech!”
“Ra-cist! Ra-cist!”
“It’s so satisfying to see one’s theoretical points proven so quickly,” Pipes said in his best butter-cookie voice.
When he went on to call for Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s existence, hisses swirled in the hall like steam. “No!” shouted many in the crowd.
“Death to Zionism!” proclaimed a voice.
“I thought this was an institution of higher learning,” Pipes said, baiting his hecklers.
“You racist Jew!” cried the protester who had been hoisting the Gandhi sign.
“Ra-cist! Ra-cist!”
Pipes asked what race had to do with anything: “I haven’t mentioned race.”
He reserved the evening’s harshest criticism for “my colleagues in Middle Eastern studies,” among whom he decried “a significant element of incompetence. The field is adversarial, intolerant, and my colleagues consistently get the facts wrong.” This met with laughter from the crowd, half in gleeful accord and half in derision. By exercising what he called “abusive power over students,” Pipes said Middle Eastern studies instructors “too often coerce students into taking a party line, at the same time intimidating and penalizing those who don’t.”
“End, end the occupation! Free, free Palestine!”
Another sign waved in the air and another protester was escorted out. “Go blow yourself up,” someone yelled at the protester’s departing figure.
“I don’t think my colleagues are doing a good job,” Pipes continued. “If I think my colleagues in Middle Eastern studies aren’t doing a good job, why don’t I have the right to say so? Why do I get called names?”
“Because you’re a racist Jew!”
“These scholars know better,” Pipes continued, “but they’re hiding what they know.”
“Racist Jew!”
“My, my,” he said, looking up with a wry smile from the microphone. “Don’t we have elevated discourse at this university.”
After the lecture, attendees filed out of the hall to discover that the protesters had massed so as to allow only a narrow passage between themselves and a retaining wall. In effect, all those leaving the lecture were forced to walk a gauntlet. Some ducked their heads, others set their jaws in anger, squeezing past the dozens of assembled faces chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as fists pumped the air in unison.
A young woman in a kaffiyeh screamed up at a Jewish student significantly larger than herself. Her lips were wet with fury. “If I don’t agree with you, then you call it anti-Semitism!” she shouted, as friends arrived to support her. The young man was surrounded. “You call it anti-Semitismmm!” she raged. “Why can’t you tolerate anti-Semitismmm?” . . .
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