The anti-Israel protest group Code Pink took credit after an event about the future of journalism with Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, was canceled at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“After mounting pressure from a Code Pink letter campaign, students and community members in Los Angeles, the Burkle Center of International Relations has canceled Bari Weiss’s lecture, which was scheduled for next week,” the group stated of the lecture in a series named for Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002.
Code Pink had previously urged people to tell the public school to cancel Weiss’s talk. “She has a history of flagrant xenophobic remarks about Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs, and prides herself on her extreme views,” the group said.
Steve Lurie, associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety at UCLA, told JNS that “the decision not to move forward with the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture was made by the speaker’s team, not UCLA.”
“The university was ready to implement a comprehensive security plan for this event, developed in coordination with campus safety and external law enforcement partners,” Lurie told JNS. “UCLA remains committed to supporting public programming which represents a wide range of viewpoints, with safety planning tailored to each event.”
The founder and editor of the Free Press, Weiss took over the senior role at CBS in October after Paramount, the channel’s parent, bought her publication.
A spokesman for CBS told JNS that “we always follow our security team’s guidance.”
“This situation is no different,” the spokesman said. “We are working with the university to reschedule for a different date.”
A source familiar with the incident told JNS that the source heard that CBS withdrew due to security costs and that UCLA had told CBS that it would handle security and was confident that the event would proceed smoothly. Students were reportedly planning to protest the event, and some staff at the UCLA center, which co-sponsored the event, opposed the speech, according to news reports.
Margaret Peters, the associate director of the Burkle Center, told the Daily Bruin, a student paper, that “to invite somebody who is working against that mission in highly powerful places just seems like anathema in the university mission.”
The student paper reported that Peters “plans to resign as associate director of the Burkle Center if it follows through with the event in any capacity” and that she said that “she believes Weiss has used the guise of free speech to attack people on the left whose opinions she does not agree with, and having her speak at a signatory lecture would legitimize these actions.”
Peters told JNS that she is “not sure whether the talk is still moving forward in any capacity” and that her position on Weiss “has little to do with her views on the situation in Israel-Palestine or her religion.”
“My views on her are based on her decades of bad-faith attacks on academic freedom, her attacks on editorial independence at CBS and ideological policing at both the Free Press and the University of Austin,” Peters told JNS. (Weiss is a cofounder of the University of Austin.)
Peters said that she wasn’t involved in discussions about whether the event would proceed.
“Public universities have an obligation to ensure there is a vigorous marketplace of ideas on campus, even under the threat of protests by extremist groups,” the American Jewish Committee stated, of the event cancellation. “Freedom of speech cannot be limited to those who share a particular point of view.”
David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles and scholar-in-residence at the Maimonides Fund, stated that it is a “disgrace” that Weiss’s event was canceled “on a campus that desperately needs to hear her.”
Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl and a computer science professor at UCLA, stated that “there’s lots of hateful noise out there.”
“First, UCLA has not canceled Bari Weiss. It was Bari’s/CBS security team who asked for postponement due to insufficient safety measures,” he wrote. “Second, UCLA is still considering inviting Bari to deliver the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, in person, at a later date. Let’s hope it happens soon.”
