Inflammatory Flyers (And a Goodbye)

A day and a half ago, I posted in a note on Facebook announcing the launch of this blog that I hoped nothing in Berkeley would ever happen again that prompted me to write here. Though I knew this was a hopeless hope, even I didn’t anticipate returning so soon. To jack a line from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (and, by extension, The Verve), “so it goes.”

This morning on Sproul Plaza, I was unsurprised to find flyers being distributed advertising a teach-in scheduled for this evening (co-sponsored by the Berkeley Stop The War Coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Muslim Students Administration), offering a clinic on “racism, Islamophobia, and US imperialism,” in reaction to the evidently not-so-distant memory of the scuffle on the balcony overlooking the Pep Love concert on Nov. 13. Admittedly, I am ill-informed on many of the modern world’s most pertinent issues. I am willing to concede, too, that the larger causes and consequences of the “fight” (I use quotation marks because I maintain that paraplegic lepers could have staged a more harmful fistfight) may elude me. That said, I nonetheless fail to see how US foreign policy is responsible for “blows” exchanged between two college-aged men. Further, for the record, I would like to state that I do not in any regard fear Muslims – not the 1,000,000,000+ who have no interest in doing me any wrong, and least of all the relative handful who would like to see me dead. I would like to believe that all my friends share these sentiments.

More inflammatory statements than these were issued on the back of the flier, authored by the Campus Antiwar Network and reproduced below:

At around 6pm last Thursday (11/13) [sic], three Palestinian students (1 male, 2 female) were beaten up on the UC Berkeley campus by members of a right-wing Zionist group, the Zionist Freedom Alliance. A second incident occurred the following night in which another Palestinian student was attacked by unknown assailants on campus.

My first complaint is an admittedly petty one, though I believe it legitimate: is it wrong of me to think that, in the interest of public safety, anyone distributing literature publicly should be able to tell the difference in the time lapse between one week and three?

Dispensing with the levity and skipping an umpteenth recap of the correct chronology of the scuffle (succinctly documented in Archive post #2), the author’s condemnation of “this despicable act of racist violence” is an exemplar of the Berkeley hogwash that birthed this bounteous font of vitriol in the first place.

To begin with, the inference cannot help but be drawn from this piece that it is because the “fight” (as represented by the members of BSTW, SJP, MSA, and CAN) was directed against Palestinians – especially given that two of them were female – that action need be taken! I am shamelessly adamant in my position that violence against a white man is no less blameworthy than violence against a “noticeably ethnic” woman! Further, the imagery conjured in the first sentence lies uncomfortably closer to describing hired goons waiting in an alley with baseball bats to mutilate their targets than it does to the tiff I witnessed. Finally, the direct juxtaposition of the phrase “Zionist Freedom Alliance” and the report of the “second incident” clearly insinuates that organization’s participation in the “attack.” I am in no position to judge whether or not any of the three of these points were intentional, but regardless, the author should have been aware that it was his/her responsibility as a distributor of public literature to be more careful.

An addendum: I believe the time has come to publically make the distinction between blind hatred of members of ethnic minorities and unshakable hatred of assholes. To state this as clearly as I am able: the former is called racism, and is both dimwitted and illogical in addition to being morally reprehensible, while the latter, to me, qualifies as both rational and laudable behavior. In a truly progressive and tolerant society, people would acknowledge both the existence of races within humanity and the complete irrelevance of a person’s race to their character. This is to say, that an asshole’s skin tone has no bearing on his being an asshole; neither can it make him any more or less of one.

In light of the events that took place on the evening of Nov. 13, I resent Husam Zakharia for giving in to his intense hatred of Gabe Weiner and for popping Gabe in the face. I begrudgingly applaud his ability not only to get away with it, but even to turn it into a hate crime going the other way.

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On a personal note, I was dumbstruck today to hear of the death of Dan Kliman, which occurred under stupefyingly freakish circumstances. He was a giant in Bay Area Zionism and an even better man. He was also 38 years old. Any death that takes place full decades before its time, as this one did, is tragic; in this case, I feel the world was particularly wronged. Dan was a kind, intelligent, and funny man, and one who took upon himself the unenviable chore of proving that advocacy of traditional liberal causes – most notably gay rights – and of Israel are not mutually exclusive. I feel particularly sorry that he was taken from us only as I was getting to know him better personally. I am consoled by the knowledge that his memory will continue to inspire myself and everyone else who knew him to stand up for what’s right – under any circumstances and in gleeful defiance of what anyone else may consider "odds."

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing.