October 7 From the Perspective of UC Berkeley Gender and Women's Studies Department

Well, I guess no discussion on the topic of what Hamas did to Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 would be complete without knowing what the UC Berkeley Gender and Women’s Studies crowd thinks about it all. They are holding an event scheduled for February 11, 2025 to discuss that very topic. It is entitled: Part II: Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine.

According to Jewish News in Northern California and the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the initial description of the event by the organizers described the reports of atrocities committed on October 7 as fabrications by Israel. That description has now reportedly been removed. The initial description was pointed out by UC Berkeley law professor, Steven Solomon, and kudos to him for doing so.

“A now-removed description of an upcoming event at UC Berkeley accused Israel of fabricating reports of widespread sexual assault on Oct. 7, 2023, to support its war against Hamas.”

“On Thursday, Cal administration reviewed whether the event constituted the “use of the classroom for political advocacy,” in violation of school policy, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor of communications, told J. in an email on Friday”

In case you are wondering (like me) what Part 1 was all about, after checking back, I think I found it. Part 1 apparently took place back on March 6, 2024 (after the October 7, 2023 massacre). Here is the announcement for that one.

Even without going back and researching the panel speakers of both events, there is one name (from Part 1) that I instantly recognized. That would be the venenous San Francisco State University professor, Rabab Abdulhadi, a Palestinian woman with a long track record on this site. Among other transgressions, she has served as the mentor for the SFSU General Union of Palestinian Students, who in recent years, have openly expressed their desire to kill Israeli soldiers and “colonizers”. 

All that aside, one can only be stunned by the obvious hypocrisy of the event organizers. Not only do they deny what has been documented by the video cameras worn by the terrorists themselves (I suggest someone at UCB hold a screening of those videos captured by Israel forces and what the IDF documented when they found the results of Hamas’ handiwork), they conveniently ignore how women and homosexuals are treated by the Palestinians? How can people who call themselves feminists ignore and/or deny the mass rapes that occurred on October 7, 2023, and which have continued to be perpetrated on female hostages to this day? How can they ignore how homosexuals have been thrown off Gaza rooftops (back when rooftops still existed in Gaza)? This is the same intellectual perversion that accuses Israel of “pink-washing” when the Jewish state points out that gays have full rights in Israel as opposed to its neighbors.

I vividly recall attending a Muslim Student Union event at UC Irvine in 2014 where the speaker, Loubna Qutami of the Palestinian Policy Network,  showed a video documenting the issue of Palestinian domestic/sexual violence. During the Q&A, I asked her if this was a problem in neighboring Arab countries as well. She replied in the affirmative, but she explained it all away as a result of all the years of Western colonialism, just as she laid the blame for Palestinian domestic violence on the Israelis.

One can only wonder how these one-sided events as put on by the UCB Gender and Women  Studies Department can be called scholarly inquiry. Why are they not talking about what happens to their own women and gays?

And going back to the boffo statement by UCB’s Dan Mogulof about the use of the classroom for political advocacy, this has been going on daily at UCB for years, if not decades. Whatever “policy” they claim to have is just a scrap of paper for their files in case they are investigated.

This is the intellectual bankruptcy at UC Berkeley as represented by “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine”.