Excerpt:
Gertrude Stein, the controversial modernist author, spent part of her childhood in Oakland, California, a city on the southern border of Berkeley, home of the flagship campus of the University of California system. Returning to Oakland later in life, Stein is supposed to have complained, "there's no there, there," referring to the disappearance of the city as she remembered it. The comment has been turned into a permanent gibe against Oakland, but could equally apply to certain aspects of the Berkeley campus, especially in regard to what one may call "the Berkeley definition of Islamophobia."
In April, Berkeley's Law School, also known as Boalt Hall, cosponsored a conference with the University's Center for Race and Gender (CRG) on "Islamophobia Production and Re-Defining Global 'Security' Agenda for the 21st Century." The event followed a divisive March seminar at the University's Hastings law campus in San Francisco, "Litigating Palestine," which was little more than a forum for anti-Israel bombast. On June 23, America's premier Islamist organization, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), unveiled a report prepared in cooperation with UCB-CRG's Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) titled, "Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States."