Here’s a must-read, in-depth article in the alternative weekly East Bay Express, about the sad and scary transformation of Berkeley California, from the birthplace of the Free Speech movement to an epicenter of hatred, antisemitism, and jihad ideology: Berkeley Intifada. (Hat tip: DP111.)

“The politicization of this university began forty years ago, and what has emerged at Berkeley is a working relationship between the leftists and the Islamists,” he continued. “The left has been looking for a revolutionary movement for quite some time. So here come these people and they’re actually doing it.” Pipes was careful to remind his listener that the revolution in question entails “the blowing up of buildings.”

UC Berkeley has attracted the scrutiny of Campus Watch more than once; a page on CampusWatch.org is devoted entirely to articles concerning Cal and its faculty. Hatem Bazian recently earned himself a place on its home page for comments he made at an April 10 San Francisco antiwar rally. “Are you angry?” Bazian asked the Civic Center crowd. “Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq. … How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? … It’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that changes fundamentally the political dynamics in here. … They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical. Well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet!” Waving signs bearing slogans such as “Support armed resistance in Iraq” and “Support Our Mutineers,” the crowd cheered his speech; he has been defending his statements in forums such as The O’Reilly Factor ever since. Bazian, who can recall being stripped naked at the Israeli border and being humiliated at Israeli checkpoints, takes palpable pride in pointing out that the vast majority of Cal students fighting for Palestine have never been there and are not even Muslim. “It’s not unique that white students would support a Muslim issue,” he mused in an interview shortly after the Pipes lecture. “Young people simply see that there is an injustice being perpetrated, and they rally around it. Look at the civil rights movement in the ‘60s — the lunch-counter protest was led by university students.”

Unsurprisingly, there’s no love lost between Bazian and Pipes. “The quote-unquote scholarly Daniel Pipes belongs to a think tank — which is an oxymoron in terms of him,” Bazian said. “He just wants attention, bringing his circus around. You know what they say: People with small intellects go after those with large intellects.”

Pipes’ organization has directed even heavier scrutiny upon Cal’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In 1998, the Saudi Arabia-based Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Foundation gave the school $5 million to establish the Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Program in Arab and Islamic Studies. Named for Saudi Arabia’s second deputy prime minister, it comprises a visiting professorship, visiting scholars, a graduate fellows program, a research fund, an outreach fund, and a luxe new facility in Stephens Hall. Presented with the donation by Prince Faisal bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud in November of that year, Chancellor Robert Berdahl declared the university “delighted to accept this gift from our friends in Saudi Arabia.”

You really need to read the whole thing. I have a feeling the author, Anneli Rufus, got some of her background material right here at LGF.