Noura Erakat |
Writing for Campus Watch at American Thinker, Stephen Schwartz reports on a recent conference at the Hastings School of Law. True to form, participants represented an intellectual homogeneity that would have once been thought scandalous but which is now a route to scandal. Here are his opening paragraphs:
The University of California’s Hastings College of the Law recently demonstrated its utility in the “lawfare” offensive against Israel by hosting a conference on March 25-26, 2011, titled, “Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?” The event drew about 75 law students, faculty members, and pro-Arab activists. Police were present at the entrances to the building, as well as at the door of a second room where the proceedings were visible on video, and a large sign warned that disruptive individuals would be excluded.
Hastings was to officially cosponsor the conference, with a welcoming address by its dean, Frank Wu. But both were canceled after local Jewish leaders expressed their objections to the one-sided character of the conference in a meeting with Wu and other Hastings officials.
Hastings faculty opposed the decision to withdraw sponsorship, and law professor George Bisharat, who set up the conference, told Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle that “opponents had wrongly accused the conference of ‘Israeli-bashing.’” In fact, that’s exactly what took place at the conference. The anti-Israeli rhetoric of the participants was notably extreme, and even bizarre.
