SFSU UPDATE: Karen Alexander writes in The New Republic about the growth of antisemitism at SFSU and Berkeley. Excerpt:
ProPalestinian activism certainly isn’t confined to SFSU and UC Berkeley. But on most campuses the protesters–while often hyperbolic–have been careful to avoid explicit anti-Semitism and threats of violence. When students at Harvard and MIT circulated a petition calling on their universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel, for instance, they were careful to call “the recent attacks on Israeli citizens unacceptable and abhorrent.” But in the Bay Area anti-Israel activism has a far more militant and far less liberal flavor. That’s not because UC Berkeley and SFSU have unusually large or radical Arab populations; it’s because they are home to a deep wellspring of free-floating, hard-left authoritarianism. And unfortunately for Goldstein, today’s left-wing authoritarians have set their sights on Israel.
I have hopes that this will lead to closer scrutiny about what’s going on at SFSU and Berkeley. Despite the attention generated by the Blogosphere, there’s a real tendency among mainstream media to ignore this sort of thing. Compare the relative lack of attention to posters claiming that Jews eat gentile children (mentioned again in this article) to the New York Times reporting of anti-Muslim remarks by a Baptist preacher.
UPDATE: On the Baptist preacher angle, reader Bill Sommerfeld writes:
So one thing the NY Times article conveniently omitted is that Vines is making hay from a traditional (but apparently controversial) Muslim belief that Muhammed married his youngest wife when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was 9. (This was one of many aspects of Muhammed’s life which was parodied in “The Satanic Verses”).
A Google search for “muhammed aisha wife age” turns up a fair number of polemics on the subject, as well as other references where it’s mentioned in passing as context for other Muslim practices.
Um, okay.
ANOTHER UPDATE: InstaPundit intern Kevin Deenihan, whose own blog has been covering these Bay Area shenanigans for some time, blogs some corrections to Alexander’s piece.
STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Gary Farber has comments. So does Meryl Yourish, who got the ball rolling on this story to begin with.