Did Security Remove the Wrong Person at UC Berkeley Law?

​An odd fellows coalition of left-wing supporters of Israel and Palestinians succeeded in forcing an Israeli lawmaker to retreat to Zoom to complete his remarks before the UC Berkeley School of Law.
 
The target was Simcha Rothman, a controversial right-wing member of Israel’s Parliament, who was invited to the law school as a guest of the conservative Federalist Society. Rothman had become a partisan lightning rod in Israel when he proposed a bill to give the Knesset greater oversight over Israel’s judicial system.
 
When Rothman tried to speak at Berkeley, he was hit with a barrage of criticism in Hebrew from members of UnXeptable, a group of liberal Israelis expats. He was next interrupted by a group of pro-Palestinian hecklers. The two groups turned on each other, heckling and jeering across the room. Rothman was rushed out of the room by security. Those who had reserved tickets to attend the event had to go home and watch Rothman on Zoom, losing a chance for personal interaction with the speaker.
 
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school, is no stranger to such controversies. In April, we reported on his ejection of protestors who mistakenly had imagined they had a right to disrupt a private dinner in the dean’s home. Dean Chemerinsky told the media that any students who were part of the disruption of Rothman’s talk would be punished. “It cannot be in an academic institution that we only hear those messages that aren’t shouted down,” he wrote.
 
We applaud Dean Chemerinsky’s willingness to deal with such a mess afterwards. But we respectfully suggest that campus security would be better used to remove the disruptors rather than the disrupted from the room. That is really the only way the heckler’s veto is going to stop.