The Daily Californian, the University of California, Berkeley’s student newspaper, has offered a monstrously anti-Semitic cartoon of famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz that would have fit perfectly in any issue of Nazi Germany’s Der Sturmer.
The drawing showed Dershowitz’s head fitting through a stock emblazoned “The liberal case for Israel” (the title of the speech Dershowitz gave on campus on October 16), while on the other side of the stock the palm of his hand held an IDF soldier standing with his rifle drawn with a bloody, prostrate Palestinian lying in front of him as blood dripped down toward Dershowitz’s shoe, which was crushing another Palestinian.
In September, Dershowitz said he was considering suing the university because they were refusing to let him speak on campus. He said the school prevented him from speaking on Israel because he did not give the school eight-week advance notice.
Dershowitz noted that the school usually waived the stipulation for speakers who were invited by a department, but those speakers tended to be anti-Israel, liberals and radicals.
Days later, Dershowitz said he had been permitted to speak, but added that the sponsors of his visit, the Chabad Jewish Student Center and the pro-Israel student club Tikvah, had been turned down by several departments as possible sponsors of his speech. He said he was attempting to discover if those departments had sponsored anti-Israel speakers before. He stated, “If they have, that presents a serious constitutional question for Berkeley. If a department has a policy of never sponsoring a speaker, that would be one thing. But if there’s content discrimination, that would be illegal under the First Amendment.”
Shortly after Dershowitz’s speech on October 16, a flyer on the law school bulletin board was found with a swastika drawn over Dershowitz’s face:
