Genocide, Protest, and Property

Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s self-centered complaint is abysmal.

A few days ago, on 9^th April, a group of protesters disrupted a dinner at the house of the Dean of the Berkeley School of Law. The protesters, led by Berkely law student Malak Afaneh, tried to draw attention to Israel’s ongoing Gaza Genocide and, in particular, the use of starvation as a weapon against its blockaded Palestinian victims.

That made perfect, if appropriately jarring, sense at a dinner. The host, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, and his wife – also a law professor – Catherine Fisk, managed not to see the point. Where they could have listened and learned, an altercation and even a bit of a scuffle ensued. (Interestingly, as so often now, the old in their high dudgeon showed less physical self-control than the young). Then the protesters left.

The details and the wider backdrop of the incident are all over the American media, and I won’t rehash them here. Suffice it to say that Dean Chemerinsky’s response strikes me as petty in its self-pity. Instead of acknowledging the simple fact that genocide trumps your right to party, Chemerinsky has chosen to cast himself as a victim, releasing a long – and I believe – fundamentally undignified declaration (easily Google-able; I find it distasteful to link it here) depicting himself as a generous host badly rewarded for kindly opening his home. History will not be kind to so much whiny navel-gazing.