Bill Maher, UC Berkeley and free speech

UC Berkeley’s recent decision to honor Bill Maher as a commencement speaker has drawn protest from thousands of students who say Maher’s comments about Muslims and jokes about beating women are racist and misogynistic. In response, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has defended the university’s invitation, citing Maher’s free speech rights. Others, including Daniel Maelin an article in the Hill last week, accused Berkeley students of hypocrisy, suggesting that the “same students [who] often advocate hate speech,” especially anti-Semitism, are “skilled at using political correctness to silence voices they disagree with.” 

Both positions rely on oversimplification and, in Mael’s case, gross distortion of the facts. 

{mosads}First, nobody disputes Maher’s right to speak as a guest at UC Berkeley’s campus, no matter what he intends to say. While many have framed this as an issue of free speech, students calling for the cancellation of Maher’s commencement address have repeatedly suggested that UC Berkeley follow Brandeis’s lead in clarifying that Maher is welcome to speak at an alternate forum. 

Maher has a long history of making statements demonizing Arabs and Muslims such as “Talk to women who’ve ever dated an Arab man, the results are not good” and “Islam is the only religion that acts like the mafia that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing.” He has repeatedly trivialized violence against women; for example, tweeting “Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who’s trying to kill u – u can only hold her wrists so long before you have to slap her.” 

While Chancellor Dirks “looks forward to welcoming Maher to the Berkeley campus,” hundreds of Muslim, Arab, and female graduates who want to skip out on Maher’s particular brand of humor will have to miss the singular occasion meant to honor their achievements. Mael suggests Maher would be “silenced” without the opportunity to speak to Berkeley graduates in exchange for an honorarium. This creative definition of silencing conveniently forgets that Maher reaches millions of viewers through his personal TV show. 

When a student group invited Louis Farrakhan to speak, the UC Berkeley administration decried this choice as “distressing in the extreme” due to his “long history of racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic speech.” In contrast, the same administration’s actual decision to invite Maher to give a university-wide commencement address and its silence in response to his Islamophobia and misogyny are blatant hypocrisy. 

In light of UC Berkeley’s dismal record in responding to sexual assaults on campus, for which it currently faces a Title IX suit alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination law, the administration’s disregard of widespread student concern over Maher is unsurprising. But the school’s fervor in defending Maher is striking considering its own record of silencing pro-Palestine student activism on campus and its tepid response to challenges to Arab and Muslim students’ speech rights on campus, as detailed in a letter from the Center for Constitutional Rights. 

Mael, too, seems less interested in understanding student opposition to Maher than in attacking pro-Palestinian students, but even that he gets wrong. When accusing UC Berkeley of “institutionalized anti-Semitism,” he refers to allegations that have been dismissed both in federal court and by the U.S. Department of Education. If experienced federal civil rights investigators failed to find evidence of a hostile climate at UC Berkeley, Mael, a staff writer for the Franklin Center, a right-wing Koch funded news group, is hardly better positioned to do so from his perch in Massachusetts. 

To be clear, Students for Justice in Palestine stands against all forms of discrimination, including anti-Semitism, though Mael in his vendetta against the organization disregards this fact. While Mael repeatedly and wrongly conflates criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism, SJP’s work is directed at the Israeli government’s well-documented human rights abuses, and we reject the idea that such policies are representative of all Jewish people. 

Mael accuses Berkeley students of “selective outrage” by claiming that they remained silent when a Berkeley professor allegedly “called for the murder of innocent Israelis.” But Mael’s dizzying spin on the term “intifada,” which translates to “shaking off” (of military occupation), is equivalent to saying that black South Africans calling for freedom from apartheid were advocating the murder of white South Africans. 

When saying that “the organizers of the petition are themselves guilty” of anti-Semitism, Mael doesn’t actually trouble himself to back up this assertion. He just assumes that readers will make the same racist logical leaps that he has – lumping Arabs, Muslims, and pro-Palestine activists into a monolithic group and charging them all with reckless religious hatred. In doing this, he makes a noxious Islamophobic generalization worthy of Bill Maher. These comments are not only insulting but harmful; they promote prejudicial stereotypes in a climate of state and social  discrimination against Arabs and Muslims. 

On his show, Maher reassured students that he doesn’t want to “turn what should be a day about the graduates into something else” and that “My speech is going to be about you.” For the many Muslim graduates and women at UC Berkeley, this is exactly what they’re afraid of. 

Jagadeesan is a third year student at UC Berkeley and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.