Peyrin Kao, a University of California Berkeley student and now lecturer, graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2021 and decided he wanted to stay at the school. If he wanted to promote his political beliefs to students paying $320,000 a year to be there, he graduated too late. Because either due to concern about political blowback if they continued to violate Supreme Court rulings on discrimination or because leaders realized they've lost their way, his desire to make sure his students knew Jews are bad and Hamas terrorists are right was met with resistance.
Don't like my framing of that issue? Then you see the real point. The power dynamic between you and I is nonexistent. If you don't like what I write, you don't read it. Students are already at Berkeley, they can't just close a browser tab and something that agrees with their political beliefs, like the New York Times. The power dynamic between he and students is real so the risk of disagreeing with him is high, no matter who well the student can code a Fibonacci sequence generator.
Image credit: Peyrin Kao
His students, whether they agreed with him or not, had no choice but to endure what the school - and this is Berkeley, a bastion of left-wing sentiment even for California - deemed harassment and an uncomfortable environment.
What was Kao going to do to a student who noted that Palestine has never been a country, but could have been one on eight different occasions in nearly 80 years, yet in every case, including 1948 when the United Nations created a Palestine at the same time as they restored Israel, religious dictatorships refused Palestinians any agency?(1)
No one was stupid enough to challenge him. So they did the Gen Z thing and put it on YouTube. He got lots of cheering, these are left-wing students at a school considered left-wing even for a left-wing state - but the school didn't accept the cheering as justification for the behavior.
Social justice evangelicals naturally trotted out students who support his efforts, and faculty members also, ironically believing their side won't engage in the "icy chill effect" even though Jewish faculty is down near handicapped people and Republicans in college faculty representation; you only get hired if it's not visible and you don't bring it up.
In 2025, if you lose 20 pounds and I notice, I assume you either exercised and dieted or got that American invention, a prediabetes diagnosis, and therefore GLP-1 injections paid for by insurance. I would never assume a young Asian-American computer science student is on a 'hunger strike' because he doesn't believe terrorism exists unless it's happening by a democracy.
He made sure every student knew, as did everyone else teaching. He talked about his diet to criticize Israel (claiming Hamas terrorists in IDF custody only get 250 calories a day) non-stop. Even juice cleanse people and vegans think he talked about his crash diet too much.
So Berkeley suspended him after exhausting all other options. With a Republican in the White House, it's a bad time to be antisemitic and they didn't want justification for pulling federal funding to be Title VI (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) or Title IX (the Education Amendments of 1972) - because they would lose in court.
You can claim 'does not reflect the beliefs of my employer' on Twitter all you want, but you can't be a racist, a homophobe, or an antisemite in your workplace and claim free speech.
But what do you think? Are schools overreacting to Trump the way businesses reacted to Biden and created DEI and mandatory vaccines programs? Because they got a back-channel 'or else'? message?
NOTE:
(1) He declared moral high ground in his computer science classroom about a country he has never been to that has been in conflict for 5,000 years - Egyptians Kemetists colonized Israel before Roman Animists before Byzantines before...well, let's list the rest for him:
A Muslim country took it from the Eastern Orthodox Byzantines. Then five succeeding Muslim nations went to war with each other and conquered and colonized it. Then Catholics conquered it, then another Muslim country took it back, then another Muslim took it from them, then the Mongols took it, then another Muslim country conquered it, then Protestants.
None of the fights were over "Palestine", they were overwhelmingly about the religious symbolism of Jerusalem - and marginalizing Jews. Even that name was chosen by the Romans to punish Jews. Peleshet is the Hebrew name for Philistines, the 'sea people' enemies of the Israelites who are the inspiration for the modern anti-semitic "from the river to the sea" chant about extinction of Israel. To Romans that translated as Palestine.
When American orator Mark Twain traveled there in the 19th century he remarked at how bleak and barren it was, with the only life being where Jews had bought land and created farms.
Only after Germans murdered 6,000,000, aided and abetted by nearly every country in Europe, did the newly-formed United Nations (shamed when it was revealed that the British had capped immigration to land that Jews owned in the region to 15,000 per year at the insistence of Muslim dictators who controlled the oil Britain needed) return Israel to nation status. And they created a country of Palestine for the first time.
Those same Arab dictators denied the existence of both. Fellow Muslims complied and went into Arab ghettos. Israel fought. And won. Numerous wars. Often against five countries. Surrounded by a religious super-majority which today numbers over 400,000,000.
Why do American and European progressives insist the next-to-last conquerors are natives while the rest, including Israelies, are ignored? It makes no sense. If your Dutch family lived below New Amsterdam when the British captured the colony that became New Jersey, do you still claim right of return and vow to bomb people living there until you get it back?
Of course not. And New Jersey is the amount of space we are talking about. Except with a history of conquest extending back thousands of years longer than the 17th century. Palestinians could have their own country tomorrow. They just have to start loving their children more than the Arab countries controlling them hate Israel.
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