Canary Mission

Safety concerns have escalated after two weeks of increasing student activity around the Israel-Hamas war, with heightened occurrences of antisemitism and Islamophobia during recent demonstrations on campus.

Berkeley Law is under investigation by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over the administration’s response to a bylaw banning Zionist speakers passed in August by the Law Students for Justice in Palestine, or LSJP, and several other law student organizations.

This institute now gives the highest recognition to a group that champions Islamophobic hatred, misogyny and the suppression of political speech.

It signals power and privilege to presume that individuals are “terrorists” without first asking what forces them to resort to protests. To individuals who seek to teach us oppressors’ morals, we respectfully say we do not take orders from colonizers.

The campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace held a protest Friday on the edge of Sproul Plaza in opposition to the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

If the signatories of the previous op-ed and others who support their views want nothing to do with Israel, that is their prerogative. But there is no reason why the University of California should permit them to foist their politics and discriminatory attitudes on the rest of the university.

UC Berkeley faculty members have quite rightly taken the UC administration to task for a recent statement, signed by all the system’s chancellors, that condemns Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS. The statement was issued in the name of protecting academic freedom when, in our own view, the only freedom under threat is the bedrock right of faculty and students to engage in political speech.

City Councilmember Cheryl Davila appointed campus Near Eastern studies and Asian American studies lecturer Hatem Bazian — who has faced controversy in the past — to the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission.

Jaclyn Safier, president of the Helen Diller Family Foundation, has been a member of the campus Board of Visitors, which advises the administration, since 2015.