The Electronic Intifada 6 September 2024
UC Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, right, used an 11 April interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper to lie that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack by his own students.
“I’m a 71-year-old Jewish man. I’ve heard anti-Semitic things throughout my life. But I’ve never seen the anti-Semitism on our campuses that’s been there since October 7,” Erwin Chemerinsky claimed as he spoke on a panel on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month.
The First Amendment lawyer and dean of the University of California Berkeley’s prestigious law school purported to be speaking from personal experience, about an incident that happened when he hosted third-year law students for a dinner at his home.
“Chemerinsky described an anti-Semitic incident he faced in April, which garnered national headlines,” Jewish Insider reported.
“Beforehand, some of them [students] shared a flyer with a caricature of Chemerinsky holding a blood [sic] knife. It read ‘No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves’ – though the dean had never spoken about Israel publicly.”
Chemerinsky claimed that the flyer depicted him with blood on his lips, in addition to blood on the knife and fork.
As reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Chemerinsky told the panel that these “posters were hung around the law school.”
“At the dinner, a student berated him and his wife about the situation in Gaza and refused to leave,” according to Jewish Insider.
But the story Chemerinsky told in Chicago – and has been retelling for months – is replete with distortions, mischaracterizations and outright lies aimed at painting himself – an influential and world-renowned academic and university administrator – as a victim, and his students, who were protesting genocide, as anti-Jewish bigots.
There is no evidence that the flyer he describes and says was posted on bulletin boards around campus ever existed. Chemerinsky has responded to inquiries from The Electronic Intifada, but challenged to produce evidence backing up his claims, was unable to do so.
His lying and misconduct are all the more egregious as one of his aims appears to be to deflect attention and blame from his wife, fellow UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, who is under investigation after she used physical force against a student.
Professor uses force against student
What happened at the 9 April dinner is not the principal topic of this article. The focus, rather, is on the lies Chemerinsky – known on campus by the nickname Chem – is spinning around it. Nonetheless, starting with those events provides the context for Chemerinsky’s dishonesty.
Widely circulated video of the incident shows Chemerinsky and Fisk berating and using physical force against Palestinian American law student Malak Afaneh as she begins to speak.
Afaneh’s intervention was not part of the official program, but intended as a protest, albeit a mild one – a few comments given to fellow students seated at round tables in a garden for a catered dinner.
Holding a microphone, Afaneh manages to give a greeting in Arabic and in English – “peace and blessings upon you all” – and acknowledges that it was also the last night of Ramadan. Within seconds, Chemerinsky begins bellowing at her, “please leave, this is my house!”
Fisk then quickly approaches Afaneh from behind, lays her right hand on Afaneh’s shoulder and grabs the microphone with her left hand. Fisk then places her right arm around Afaneh’s neck.
Afaneh does not fight back, but continues speaking. Fisk then grabs the microphone, which Afaneh is still holding and tries to pull her, presumably towards the exit. After a few more seconds of arguing, Afaneh agrees to leave.
The National Lawyers Guild, the oldest and largest progressive bar association in the United States, defended Afaneh’s right to protest at the dinner and condemned Fisk’s action.“We saw videos where Professor Fisk used physical force against the law student by grabbing the student’s neck and clothing, including her headscarf,” the NLG said. “Physical force in response to the exercise of the right to dissent through speech is never acceptable, and is especially outrageous when condoned by a renowned legal scholar and educator.”
Following a complaint from Afaneh, UC Berkeley has opened an investigation into whether Fisk violated Afaneh’s civil rights. Afaneh is alleging harassment and discrimination based on race and religion.
The incident sparked a debate over whether the students had a First Amendment constitutional right to protest at the dinner.On the one hand, it was held at the Chemerinsky-Fisk home, but on the other hand, it was an official event, paid for by the university (UC Berkeley produced invoices detailing about $20,000 in catering and other expenses billed to the university for the dinners, in response to a public records request from The Electronic Intifada).
But the “free speech” debate is beside the point, because Chemerinsky has portrayed the incident not as some grave violation of his and Fisk’s private property rights, but as part of a vicious anti-Semitic attack on him by his students that is emblematic of a wider problem on university campuses.
Chemerinsky turns himself into the victim
Perhaps applying the adage that the best defense is a good offense, Chemerinsky has tried to deflect criticism for his and Fisk’s conduct towards Afaneh by portraying himself as the victim.
Key to this has been the story he told in Chicago about the flyer depicting him holding bloody cutlery and with blood around his lips.
Chemerisnky has been repeating the tale since April on national media, as well as at the recent event during the DNC.
He insists that he and others saw the “bloody” flyer posted on bulletin boards around campus.
In reality, a caricature of Chemerinsky holding a knife and fork with blood on them, but with no blood on his face, was posted very briefly – for less than half an hour – on the Instagram account of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine. But it was quickly removed and never widely disseminated.
Students did not make a printed version of the “bloody” image and post it on bulletin boards around campus, as Chemerinsky insists. Yet as often happens with tales told by Israel or its supporters, lies and exaggerations smearing Palestinians are taken as truth merely by repetition.
It is important that the truth be told about this incident: As a new academic year gets underway, baseless claims about rampant anti-Semitism on American campuses are the pretext for a deepening crackdown aimed at punishing and preventing student protests against Israel’s ongoing American-armed genocide in Gaza.
Chemerinsky’s accusations
Chemerinsky first aired his grievance about the flyer in a statement on the official Berkeley Law School website, right after the incident at the dinner he and Fisk hosted.
“The week before the dinners, there was an awful poster on social media and bulletin boards in the law school building of a caricature of me holding a bloody knife and fork and with blood around my lips, with the words in large letters: ‘No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,’” the statement claims. “I never thought I would see such blatant anti-Semitism, with an image that invokes the horrible anti-Semitic trope of blood libel and that attacks me for no apparent reason other than I am Jewish.”
Chemerinsky places on record that others witnessed the posters too: “Although many complained to me about the posters and how it offended them, I felt that though deeply offensive, they were speech protected by the First Amendment.”
His claims were quoted in The New York Times unchallenged on 12 April.
On 11 April, Chemerinsky received a sympathetic interview on CNN. After airing a clip of the incident with Afaneh at Chemerinsky’s home, host Jake Tapper introduced his guest.
“Dean Chemerinsky, let me also start with the fact that the speaker in that clip is the co-president of a group called Law Students for Justice in Palestine,” Tapper said.
“And that group put this poster out on social media days before the event at your home. The poster was also placed on bulletin boards in the law school building. It depicts a caricature of you holding a bloody knife and fork.”
“The one we’re showing right now doesn’t have the blood on it,” Tapper added tellingly. “Maybe they redid it.”
At no point in the interview did Chemerinsky challenge or correct Tapper’s account, but rather confirmed the claim about the bloody image being posted across campus.
“I found the image of me with a bloody knife and fork deeply offensive. It does raise the anti-Semitic trope of blood libel. But I also took the position that they had the right to put it out in bulletin boards around the school,” Chemerinsky claimed, again insisting that it had been prominently displayed in physical form on campus.
“Many students and staff, Jewish and non-Jewish said that it made them feel unsafe. But I said under the First Amendment, they have the right to put those things on bulletin boards,” the dean added.
CNN claimed that UC Berkeley students had posted on bulletin boards a caricature of law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky holding “a bloody knife and fork,” but acknowledged that the version it showed did not depict any blood.
Two weeks later, Chemerinsky repeated the story in an article he wrote for The Atlantic, asserting once more that, “a group at Berkeley called Law Students for Justice in Palestine put a profoundly disturbing poster on social media and on bulletin boards in the law-school building. No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves, the poster declared in large letters.”
Once again he specified that the flyer “included a caricature of me holding a bloody knife and fork and with what appeared to be blood around my lips – an image that evokes the horrible anti-Semitic blood libel, in which Jews are accused of killing and cannibalizing gentile children.”
“I think if there was a similar poster about a Black dean with exaggerated African features, there would have been a much larger outcry,” Chemerinsky lamented in an interview with The New Yorker published on 19 April.
He also claimed, as the magazine recounts, that the flyer “was essential context for understanding what happened later in his garden” – the incident involving Afaneh.
At that point, the outcry had already included uncritical coverage of his claims in multiple major media outlets including Fox News, NBC and local television news. But for the publicity hungry Chemerinsky, none of this was enough.
The story even made its way into the allegedly left-wing and pro-Palestinian magazine The Nation, in a 19 April article by Sasha Abramsky, headlined “A Protest in Berkeley Escalated Into Antisemitism.”
Echoing Chemerinsky, Abramsky claims that activists “put up posters at the law school that showed a vicious caricature of the dean holding up a bloodied knife and fork.”
Lying and denying genocide
Before looking at the evidence regarding the “bloody” flyer Chemerinsky falsely claims was posted on campus bulletin boards, it is important to examine his repeated assertions that the only reason students wanted to protest at the dinner in his garden is that he is Jewish, and thus that the protests were inherently illegitimate and anti-Semitic.
“I’ve said nothing in support of what Netanyahu is doing in Israel,” Chemerinsky said in his 11 April CNN interview with Jake Tapper. “I’ve actually said nothing in any public forum about what’s going on with regard to Gaza. The students weren’t attacking me for anything that I had said.”
But that is a lie. Chemerinsky has spoken publicly about Gaza and has emphatically denied that Israel is perpetrating genocide there.
In a 17 January discussion on the YouTube channel “America at a Crossroads,” talk show host Larry Mantle asked Chemerinsky if Israel’s military attack on Gaza met the international legal definition of genocide.
“I don’t think it meets the legal definition of genocide,” Chemerinsky responded. “I would very much express concerns about what Israel is doing in Gaza. I would also express that I’m uncomfortable judging it because I don’t know enough about the military situation.”
Just nine days later, the International Court of Justice in The Hague would rule as plausible South Africa’s accusation that Israel is perpetrating genocide, and would order Tel Aviv to halt all genocidal acts against Palestinians.
Months into the genocide and when South Africa’s landmark case had already been a major focus of global attention, Chemerinsky’s claim of ignorance about the realities on the ground, while nonetheless confidently denying the existence of a genocide, hardly qualifies as saying “nothing,” let alone a position of impartiality.
Chemerinsky’s lie that he had remained mute on the topic is just one indication of his lack of credibility.
Promoting student internships with Israel’s apartheid regime
When Chemerinsky announced that he would be hosting large group dinners for law students at his home, paid for by the law school, on the evenings of 9, 10 and 11 April, students opposed to the genocide saw it as an opportunity to highlight the university’s deep ties to Israel, Malak Afaneh, the president of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, told The Electronic Intifada.
She cited Chemerinsky’s denial of the genocide in Gaza as one of several motivating factors.
Students had been waging a long-running campaign calling on the University of California system, of which Berkeley is part, to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights.
Like on other campuses, such protests were intensifying amid the horrifying Washington-backed Israeli slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. The protests included calls for ending ties with Israeli academic institutions that are providing propaganda cover and support to the genocide.
The law school Chemerinsky heads, for instance, hosts the Helen Diller Institute, which defines its mission to include “elevating the discourse on Israel” and promoting “civil discourse on the subject of Israel” by among other things hosting faculty from Israeli universities that have long been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.
The institute is financed by a host of pro-Israel foundations.
Its eponymous donor, the Helen Diller Family Foundation, has been a funder of Canary Mission, the extreme Zionist organization that aims to tarnish the reputations of campus Palestine activists to prevent them from being hired after graduation.
A taste of how the Helen Diller Institute is “elevating” discourse on Israel came from its faculty co-director Ron Hassner, who asserted in December in an article posted on the institution’s website that any student adopting the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is actually supporting “the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis.”
That this slogan can and does mean ending Israel’s brutal system of apartheid and settler-colonialism, and giving everyone equal rights regardless of their religion or ethnicity, is something Hassner does not consider – hardly an example of the “civil discourse” and critical thinking the institute claims to foster.
The institute also sponsors several study abroad programs for Berkeley students to travel to Israel, as well as Syria’s occupied Golan Heights, which Israel – in violation of international law – purports to have annexed.
Berkeley students are also offered the opportunity to become “Israel Government Fellows,” an internship the Helen Diller Institute says was established “in cooperation with the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel.”
The program offers students the opportunity to “gain invaluable hands-on work experience, together with insight into Israeli society and public administration, while providing vital service to government ministries” – in other words to directly serve in a foreign regime committing multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Such study abroad programs are necessarily risky and exclusionary for students of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim ancestry or faith due to Israel’s systematic discrimination, mistreatment and denial of entry to such students regardless of their country of citizenship.
Chemerinsky, whom The New York Times described in 2022 as “Jewish and a Zionist,” has for years personally expressed positions in opposition to student activism for Palestinian liberation.
In late October 2023, after genocide scholars had already rung the alarm bells about the slaughter in Gaza, Chemerinsky took to the pages of The Los Angeles Times to complain about what he claimed were students seeking “the elimination of the Jewish state.”
Chemerinsky asserted that “There has been enough silence and enough tolerance of anti-Semitism on college campuses.”
“I call on my fellow university administrators to speak out and denounce the celebrations of Hamas and the blatant anti-Semitism that is being voiced,” he added, in a gross mischaracterization of the protests to end the genocide, which he refused to acknowledge and would later openly deny.
These are recent examples of how Chemerinsky has consistently equated political activism to end Israel’s racist subjugation of Palestinians with anti-Jewish bigotry.
It is a cynical manipulation used by Israel and its lobby to delegitimize protests against Israel’s crimes and to pre-empt discussion of Israel’s fundamentally discriminatory nature as a “Jewish state” founded through ethnic cleansing and maintained by apartheid and now genocide – a long-standing reality acknowledged even by such mainstream and liberal human rights organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own B’Tselem.
In 2022, Chemerinsky promoted a video that, in his words, “explains why singling out the state of Israel for special condemnation, or questioning the very legitimacy of its existence, is considered by many Jewish students to be a form of anti-Semitism.”
In the eyes of UC Berkeley students, Chemerinsky, as a university official, as a partisan advocate of Israel and as a genocide denier, was a perfectly legitimate target for protest at the university-sponsored dinners he was hosting.
There is no evidence it had anything to do with his being Jewish.
The truth about the “bloody” flyer
On 27 March, Chemerinsky sent out an email inviting third-year law students to sign up for one of the upcoming dinners at his home.
Afaneh told The Electronic Intifada that a few days later, on 1 April, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine posted on its Instagram account the caricature image of Chemerinsky holding a bloody knife and fork, with the words “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”
The image never showed any blood around Chemerinsky’s lips or elsewhere on his face – contrary to his repeated claims.
“There’s been so many disruptions of, for example, Biden events, Kamala Harris events, where they paint them with red eyes or blood on them to show that as Americans our tax dollars go to funding a genocide,” Afaneh said, explaining why she saw no problem with depicting blood on this image as well.
“If this had been a Muslim dean, I would have done exactly the same thing and put blood on the poster,” Afaneh said.
Nonetheless, within 10 minutes of posting it online, some members of the group pushed back, worried that the image could still be used to smear the students as anti-Semites.
“Most people who messaged me didn’t think it was anti-Semitic. But they were afraid of the professional or academic repercussions,” Afaneh said.
“People were just scared,” Afaneh said, as they feared possible sanctions from the administration.
Within about half an hour, Afaneh removed the original image from Instagram and replaced it with the one that is still posted on the group’s account. It shows the caricature of Chemerinsky with the knife and fork, but with no blood – the same image that CNN showed when Jake Tapper interviewed Chemerinsky.
After posting and then quickly removing a caricature of Chemerinsky that depicted blood on the knife and fork, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine replaced it with this image.
That the original image was only posted briefly is confirmed by The Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing, pro-Israel outlet that ran a 2 April story with the headline, “Berkeley Student Group Shares Blood Libel Cartoon Targeting Law School Dean.”
“The graphic, which was posted on Monday, was deleted approximately half an hour later, but The Washington Free Beacon obtained a screenshot,” the publication states. “Shortly after, the cartoon was reposted, but without blood covering the utensils.”
The article also includes a screenshot of the “bloody” image. Notably, the Free Beacon article makes no mention of any flyer posted on bulletin boards, referring only to the post on Instagram. It also makes no mention of blood around the lips.
According to a search by The Electronic Intifada, the few instances in which the image appeared online link back to the article in The Washington Free Beacon. That story appears to be the source of much of the right-wing outrage about the incident.
Aside from this, the image does not appear ever to have been widely disseminated online, especially not by supporters of Palestinian rights.
And in flat contradiction to Chemerinsky’s repeated claims, members of LSJP never printed and posted the image with the bloody knife and fork on bulletin boards. Afaneh confirmed this to The Electronic Intifada after canvassing other members of the group in order to be certain.
They did post flyers with the newer image, the one that does not depict any blood.
Chemerinsky can’t back up accusations
The Electronic Intifada exchanged several emails with Chemerinsky in an attempt to obtain details and evidence substantiating his repeated claims that the poster depicting him covered in blood had been widely disseminated, specifically on bulletin boards on campus.
Following Chemerinsky’s vague response to an initial inquiry, The Electronic Intifada followed up with highly specific questions: “Are you saying that they put up the poster on bulletin boards with the bloody knife/lips? Did you personally see this? If so, where exactly did you personally see the image with the blood on it? Did you retain any copies of either the physical or online poster with the blood on it?”
The follow-up inquiry also asked Chemerinsky whether the incident had been reported to campus police or to any civil rights organization.
Chemerinsky wrote back: “Yes, I saw the posters with the blood and yes, I can send it to you. I did not report it to campus police. I do not know if others reported it.”
However Chemerinsky did not send an image of any flyer posted on a bulletin board on campus. All he sent was exactly the same screenshot of the short-lived Instagram post that had been reproduced in The Washington Free Beacon.
Email sent by UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky shows only a screenshot of an image briefly posted on Instagram, not a flyer he claims was posted on campus bulletin boards.
Chemerinsky did not respond to a further follow-up inquiry, requesting among other things “an example of a location where you personally saw the poster with the blood on a bulletin board” and asking for “any photos of the bulletin boards with this poster on it.”
In short, Chemerinsky was unable or unwilling to back up his repeated claims that the “bloody” image had been posted on bulletin boards on campus.
The most generous explanation is that Chemerinsky confused the image with the blood, with the one without the blood, but this is no excuse for his repeated and insistent false and damaging accusations against his own students.
Although there’s absolutely no evidence of any anti-Semitic intent on the part of the students, and depictions of blood or even the use of fake blood are commonplace in antiwar and anti-genocide protests, Chemerinsky has insisted that it was the blood, specifically, that in his mind made the poster virulently anti-Semitic and objectionable.
It is at best highly irresponsible, and at worst deliberately and maliciously dishonest to claim that there was blood depicted on the posters he saw on campus while being unable to provide any evidence to support it.
There is also no excuse for inventing the additional detail that the original image had also depicted him with blood around his lips, another of Chemerinsky’s completely false claims.
As a law professor, as a dean responsible for the welfare of students, it is solely Chemerinsky’s responsibility to ensure that his public statements are truthful. And yet he has lied repeatedly about the events leading up to the incident at his and Catherine Fisk’s home on 9 April, bringing additional national attention and opprobrium on his students.
He has used the false story of a bloody image of himself posted on bulletin boards to smear his own students, to solicit sympathy, to distract from the physical force Fisk initiated against Afaneh, and to delegitimize protests against the American-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky should cease and desist from his lies, retract his false claims and apologize to his students, as well as be held properly accountable for his egregious dishonesty and misconduct.
Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.
Comments
The dean's insistence he saw
Permalink Tim replied on
The dean's insistence he saw blood reminds me of the play MacBeth when the king keeps seeing blood on his hands when there isn't any. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he is not lying. Guilt can play tricks on the mind.
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