"Irvine 10" guilty

From JTA:

A California jury found 10 Muslim students guilty of misdemeanors for disrupting a 2010 campus speech by Israel's ambassador to the United States.

In an incident that drew national attention, 11 Muslim students stood one by one and interrupted a February 2010 speech by Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine. Oren twice walked off the stage as students shouted "mass murderer!" and "war criminal!" before they were hauled out of the room by campus police. A planned Q&A session after the address was dropped.

The Orange County jury on Aug. 23 found 10 of the students guilty of two misdemeanor charges for conspiring to disrupt and then disrupting the speech. Charges against an eleventh student were dropped last month.

The 10 students were sentenced by Superior Court Judge Peter Wilson to 56 hours of community service and three years of probation, though the probation will be reduced to one year if the defendants complete their community service by Jan. 31 of next year.

According to The Orange County Register, Wilson said that jail time was not warranted because the students were "motivated by their beliefs and did not disrupt for the sake of disrupting."

The Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine, which organized the heckling, was suspended for a year by the school for violating its code of conduct, but four months later the suspension was changed to probation on appeal.

The Volokh Conspiracy discusses the case:

The relevant statute, Cal. Penal Code § 403, says: “Every person who, without authority of law, willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character ... is guilty of a misdemeanor.” In re Kay (1970) held that, to be convicted under the statute, the prosecution must show “that the defendant [1] substantially impaired the conduct of the meeting by intentionally committing acts [2] in violation of implicit customs or usages or of explicit rules for governance of the meeting, of which he knew, or as a reasonable man should have known,” and [3] “the defendant’s activity itself — and not the content of the activity’s expression — substantially impairs the effective conduct of a meeting.”

Legal nerds or nerd wannabes can read more there.

Benny Morris in Londonistan By Melanie Phillips

The Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris is currently spending time in Britain doing research for a new book. Morris has earned the unusual distinction of becoming a target of ire from both sides of the political divide. Once excoriated as a ‘New Historian’ for allegedly distorting the early history of Israel, in recent years he has become a hate-figure for the left. This is because, since the 2000 intifada, he has come to believe that the single most important reason for the Middle East impasse is that there is no Palestinian ‘partner for peace’, and that instead the Palestinians show by every word and deed that they want to wipe Israel off the map.

He remains committed to a ‘two-state solution’; he still believes the Israeli ‘settlements’ are an obstacle to peace (although not the obstacle, which is Palestinian rejectionism); in no way can he be described a man of ‘the right’. Maybe it is for that reason that he sustains such vicious abuse from the left; nothing drives them more crazy than being confronted by an apostate upon whom they cannot pin the lazy label that automatically consigns him or her to exile beyond the pale.

Whatever; the fact remains that Morris displays considerable courage by bluntly and implacably telling the brutal truth as he sees it – that there is no real difference between Abbas and the Hamas, and that a Palestinian state that doesn’t accept Israel’s right to exist will be a staging post for the elimination of Israel. To those on the left – including Jews – this is a heresy that is simply impossible to acknowledge without provoking in themselves an existential political and moral meltdown. And the fact that one of their own is voicing it means that he must therefore be banished to the third circle of hell, aka ‘the right’.

Last year, the Israel Society at Cambridge University cravenlycancelled a proposed talk by Morris after a Facebook campaign whipped up complaints against him of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism.’

Last week, on his way to speak at the London School of Economics, Morris encountered even more graphically the reality of Londonistan (he has written about this himself here).  Walking with his wife and London host down Kingsway towards the LSE, he was accosted by a group of young keffiyah-ed Muslims and others who, recognising him, started hurling abuse. Shouting and screaming in his face that he was a ‘fascist’, ‘murderer’ and other insults, they swarmed round him until he reached the LSE. The police were called, but when they arrived the thugs had melted away.

In the LSE itself, by all accounts, his lecture received an orderly reception even if some of the questioning was hostile. But when he finished, he was unceremoniously bundled away through the back of the building past the garbage cans, out of fears for his safety if he left the building in the normal manner.

Apparently, Morris has never encountered such a reception in Israel, home to millions of Arabs at the very heart of this dispute. No, he has to come to Britain to experience the pathological hatred and bigotry towards Israel that is now on open display in the streets of London, where a professor of history who commits the crime of telling the truth has to be bundled away through the trash cans for his own safety from the howling mob.

Accosted on Kingsway, by Benny Morris

Last week I had a rather ambivalent experience at the London School of Economics which may point to something beyond the personal—indeed, about where Britain, and possibly Western Europe as a whole, are heading.

I was invited to lecture on the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A few hours earlier, a fire had broken out in a nearby building and Kingsway was sealed off, so the taxi dropped me off a few blocks away. As I walked down Kingsway, a major London thoroughfare, a small mob—I don't think any other word is appropriate—of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of "fascist," "racist," "England should never have allowed you in," "you shouldn't be allowed to speak." Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English. Violence was thick in the air though none was actually used. Passersby looked on in astonishment, and perhaps shame, but it seemed the sight of angry bearded, caftaned Muslims was sufficient to deter any intervention. To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin—though on Kingsway no one, to the best of my recall, screamed the word "Jew."

In the lecture hall, after a cup of tea, the session, with an audience of some 350 students and others, passed remarkably smoothly. Entry required tickets, which were freely dispensed upon the provision of name and address. The LSE had beefed up security and several bobbies stood outside the building confronting the dozen or so demonstrators who held aloft placards stating "Benni Morris is a Fascist," "Go home," etc. Inside, in the lecture hall, surprisingly, there was absolute silence during my talk; you could have heard a pin drop. The Q and A session afterwards was by and large civilized, though several Muslim participants, including girls with scarves, displayed anger and dismissiveness. One asserted: "You are not an historian"; another, more delicately, suggested that the lecturer "professes to be a serious historian." However, the overwhleming majority of the audience was respectful and, in my view, appreciative (to judge by the volume of clapping at the end of the lecture and at the end of the Q and A), but a small minority jeered and clapped loudly when anti-Zionist questions or points were raised.

The manner of our exit from the lecture hall was also noteworthy. The chairman asked the audience to stay in their seats until the group on stage departed. I was ushered by the security team down an elevator and through a narrow basement passage full of kitchen stores and out a side entrance. Like an American president in a B-rated thriller.

Another disconcerting element in what went on in the lecture hall was the hosting LSE professor's brief introductory remarks, which failed completely to note the harrassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) of the lecturer on Kingsway, or to criticize them in any way. My assumption was that some were LSE students.

There was a sense that the chairman was deliberately displaying caution in view of the world in which he lives. Which brings me back to what happened on Kingsway.

Uncurbed, Muslim intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear (perhaps a corner was turned with the Muslim reactions around the world to the "Mohammed cartoons" and the responses in the West to these reactions.) Which, if true, is a sad indication of what is happening in the historic mother of democracies and may point to what is happening, and will increasingly happen, in Western Europe in general in the coming decades. (A video of the LSE talk is on the website. A Muslim cameraman also made a video of the mob scene on Kingsway and posted it on the web—but appears to have thought better of it and subsequently removed it.)