The East Bay Express has a long article on speech and hatred at UC Berkeley, which was once a great center of openness. Excerpt:
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.”
Thoughts on this from David Bernstein:
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Muslim/Palestinian/Campus Left (an odd alliance, to say the least) has managed to make the words “Zionism” and “Zionist” into epithets, so much so that people don’t even know what the word means, they just know it’s something bad. More than once I’ve seen Jewish students quoted as saying things like “I support Israel’s right to exist with secure borders as a Jewish state, but I’m not a Zionist.”
So let’s get things straight: Zionism is the term that describes the movement for a Jewish state in the “Land of Israel”–the area that was once a sovereign Jewish state, but over almost two millenia had been controlled by various other nationalities, including Europeans (Great Britain and also briefly and in part during the Crusades), Mamluks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks. Zionists are those who believe in Zionism.
Nowadays, to say one is a Zionist means nothing more than that one supports the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. One could be a liberal Zionist, who wants Israel to withdraw from the territories and achieve full equality for its Arab citizens, or one can be an illiberal Zionist, and support a vision of “Greater Israel” with a suppressed Arab minority. One can be a secular Zionist, or a religious Zionist. There are Christian Zionists, and even a few Muslim Zionists.
Both full texts are worthwhile.
