UC Berkeley officials today condemned university lecturer Hatem Bazian for retweeting cartoons the school determined had “crossed the line” into anti-Semitism. Bazian apologized and said “the image is offensive and does not represent my views or the anti-racist work that I do.”
The cartoons originally were tweeted by a user named Ron Hughes on July 31 and then retweeted by Bazian, a lecturer in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies department.
One cartoon shows a Jewish man raising his arms in celebration above the caption: “I can now kill, rape, smuggle organs & steal the land of Palestinians.”
The other shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, wearing a kippah, saying he has just converted his nation to Judaism: “Donald Tlump: Now my nukes are legal & I can annex South Korea & you need to start paying me 34 billion a year in welfare.”
UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof cited the University of California Regents’ Principles Against Intolerance in attacking the tweet, which he said had since been deleted.
“While we do not believe that all criticism of Israel’s governmental policies is inherently anti-Semitic, the social media posts in question clearly crossed the line, and we are pleased they have been deleted,” Mogulof said.
Bazian said in an email that he was not careful enough in reading the text in the Kim Jong-Un cartoon and said “as a Palestinian, my issue is with Zionism … and not with Judaism or Jews.”
“The image in the tweet and the framing relative to Judaism and conversion was wrong and offensive and not something that reflects my position, be it in the past or the present,” Bazian told J. “In the future, I will make sure to include that retweets don’t represent an agreement or support for the ideas that are shared and only my own postings reflect my positions on issues.”
Tikvah: Students for Israel, a UC Berkeley campus group, condemned the tweet in a Facebook post. StandWithUs, a Los Angeles-based Israel education organization, called it “blatant anti-Semitism.”
“While this incident is deeply disturbing, it is unfortunately not shocking. This professor has a long history of promoting bigotry. I’m glad the UC Berkeley administration spoke out now,” said Noa Raman, Pacific Northwest campus director for StandWithUs. “I hope this is just the beginning of them standing up against the hate Jewish students and others face on campus.”
omg…this man has a history of jew hate comments
the man is a jew hater
he is another academic fraud and has no biz being paid for by the tax payers of this great state
his apology is not accepted
his resignation would be appreciated
I don’t think any of this is anti-semitic. It is anti politics of Israel.
“I just converted all of North Korea to Judaism”- what do you think that has to do with Israel? Just curious.
That line by itself isn’t anti-Semitic. The anti-Israel part is in the next line, which is the point of the thing — “Now my nukes are legal & I can annex South Korea & you need to start paying me 34 billion a year in welfare.”
If publicly mocking the Jewish people is ok with you, then you are likely an anti-Semite, too
So apparently you must think that criticizing political policy of Israel, or the United States regarding Israel, is ipso facto anti-Semitic.
Because now every North Korean will be planting trees in Israel! lol
Because it implies that NK, a brutal and murderous dictatorship, is somehow comparable to Israel, which is completely preposterous and doesn’t tell the real story. It’s dangerous because morons are more likely to believe it when they read such things.
Would you call it anti-semitic if he had told a student audience to go and count all the Jewish names on campus buildings? That’s what he reportedly did several years ago. This is the same guy who called for an intifada in the US.
The professor says that he does not have a problem with Jews, just Zionism. Sorry, professor, but when you deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination in the homeland where we are an indigenous people, when you oppose the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, you have a problem with Jews. You don’t get to decide what is Jew hatred and what is offensive to Jews. Like any other minority group, we Jews get to decide that.
He’s so full of crap, because his tweets were specifically antisemitic & he only “apologized” because he got caught.
Hatem Bazian has a well documented history of Jew-hate (It doesn’t stop groups like Jewish Voice for Peace from working with him, interestingly enough)
From Canary Mission https://canarymission.org/professors/hatem-bazian/:
“As a graduate student at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the 1980’s, Bazian fomented an anti-Semitic environment that persists at SFSU until today.
Bazian served as president of SFSU Associated Students, the Student Union Governing Board and GUPS.
As president, Bazian waged a “campaign” against Hillel and blocked the appointment of a Jewish student to SFSU’s Student Judicial Council “on grounds that the individual supported the state of Israel and was therefore, by definition, a racist.”
In 1994, Bazian organized a press conference to support an anti-Semitic mural that depicted Malcolm X’s face surrounded by dollar signs, stars of David, skulls and crossbones and the words “African blood.” Jewish students were forcibly excluded from the event.
Bazian also reportedly assaulted the offices of SFSU’s student newspaper for being a “haven for Jewish spies.”
Under Bazian’s leadership, GUPS rejected an invitation from SFSU’s Jewish Student Action Committee to forge a “peace treaty” during the first intifada.
After graduating from SFSU, Bazian continued his studies at UC Berkeley, where he headed the campus MSA and founded SJP in 2001.
At a July 2014 anti-Israel rally, surrounded by current GUPS SFSU members, Bazian accused Israel of committing “genocide”
Calling for an American “Intifada”
At an April 2004 rally held in San Francisco in support of the Iraqi insurgency, Bazian called for an “intifada” [violent uprising] in the United States.
Bazian asked the crowd: “Are you angry? Are you angry? Are you angry? Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?… and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know…they’re gonna say it’s some Palestinian being too radical, well you haven’t seen radicalism yet!”
During a 2014 anti-Israel rally, Bazian stated that “we need to give them [the U.S. political leadership] [a] genetic mutation and constitute a Palestinian spine for them… we need to harass them.”
In 2011, Bazian headlined a national speaking tour called “Never Again for Anyone” — launched on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The tour was organized by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) and AMP.
According to an official statement by IJAN, the goal of the tour was to reveal how Zionists “exploited Nazism” and the genocide of European Jewry to build a Jewish state.
Another goal of the tour was to analogize Zionists with Nazis by comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.
During a 2016 talk to promote his book — “Palestine… It Is Something Colonial” — Bazian argued that European Zionists “partnered with anti-Semites rather than actually challenging the basic assumption of anti-Semitism” by fleeing Europe and founding a Jewish state.”
Just another in a long line of anti-semitic statements by this clown. When will UCB fire this guy?
Don’t hold your breath….. UCB is rotten to the core with anti-Semitism
Sounds like this Bazian clown belongs in Pyongyang!
Such BS they spew that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism, and the idiotic MSM and leftist pacifists let them get away with such nonsense all routinely. Let’s hope and pray Donald Trump’s brave and historic move, and gift to the Jewish people, despite all those leftist Jews who foolishly demonize him, will wake up more peple to the fact that you can’t separate Israel from Judaism. Reform and Conservative Jews need to relearn this important fact and help stop helping opponents of Israel spread vicious and vile hate like this. For far too long, too many have sat by quietly as lie after lie has been spread bringing to mind the old adage that if you repeat lies often enough, you can make them true. Let’s review the undisputed facts. The Holy Books, even the Quran, explicitly say the land of Israel was meant for the Jews. Jerusalem has only been the capital of 1 state in all recorded history, Israel. Modern Israel is just a fraction of Biblical Israel and even a fraction of the land originally promised back to Jews by the Mandate of Palestine. A major chunk, unjustly I may add, was cut off and given to Jordan. They don’t deserve more and the oldest ancestral, legal, and moral claims to all of Palestine, a name originally given by Roman conquerers to the native Jewish population of the area has been hijacked by a mythological “Palestinian” people of almost entirely Arab Muslims. There was never an independent state of Palestine, let alone one made up of Arabs who have tenuous and relatively short links to the land at best. You can look back on the official census stats to find the claims of today’s Pal refugees are greatly inflated too and pictures show how barren the land was in 1968 as compared to today, when it has flourished and been built up by Jewish innovation. Yet, the world which is so singularly fixated with these supposedly oppressed Muslim Jihadists conveniently overlooks that more Jews from Arab lands were dispossessed and thrown out of their homes than any of the so-called Palestinian refugees. 1 UN resolution singles out Israel in a showing that can aptly be described as blatant anti-Semitism, selective moral outrage, revisionist history, and double standard hypocrisy. Israel has made more than enough concessions and what has been received in return? More terror tunnels, more rockets, more weapon shipments to terrrorists, bus rammings, stabbings, intifadas and the constant targeting of innocent civilians since Israel’s official rebirth in 1948. Well, enough is finally enough. Jerusalem will never again be divided and not another inch of the ancestral, historic, and continuously Jewish represented homeland should ever be ceded. Those hoping for the destruction of the sole, tiny Jewish state, in a sea of Muslim ones, will be sorely disappointed time and time again. It is written and so it shall be. 🙂
Our tax dollars at work
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e9e96ae058778f06a639ea75fdeffc378d2513bda5fd7c4a9933634c74d47ccb.png