A U.C. Berkeley student has accused a Near Eastern Studies lecturer of promoting The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in class.

See the story here:
http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=12327

Six years ago, The International Jew, Henry Ford's literary version of the Protocols, was distributed at U.C. Berkeley conference organized by another Near Eastern Studies lecturer.

You can see the article I wrote on this subject in 1997 here: http://archive.dailycal.org/archive/03.20.97/oped/miller.html

And the response, here:
http://archive.dailycal.org/archive/04.01.97/oped/letters.html

The conference was organized by Hatem Bazian, a graduate student in Near Eastern Studies.

The story gets more interesting. The student making the accusation allegedly dressed up as a suicide bomber and spat on a student during a pro-Palestinian rally last fall. The student said that she felt threatened when physically restrained from walking through Sproul Plaza.

Students dressed as suicide bombers are not a new phenomenon at U.C. Berkeley. On March 1996, Muslim students dressed as suicide bombers to demonstrate their support for a string of Hamas suicide bombings which killed sixty people in Israel in the previous two weeks. Hatem Bazian appeared on television as a spokesperson for the organizers.

Spitting allegations aren't new, either. In 1998, Near Eastern Studies Professor Hamid Algar allegedly told Armenian students that there should have been a genocide of Armenians during World War I. The Armenians also alleged that Professor Algar spit on them, although the latter claim was not found to be supported by evidence according to a U.C. Berkeley panel which reviewed the incident.

You can read about this story at:
http://archive.dailycal.org/archive/1999/2/24/decision.html