The University of California, Berkeley, has long enjoyed a paradoxical reputation. Widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest research universities, it has also long been known as headquarters to the some of the dimmest bulbs on the West Coast. Over the past month, the dim bulbs have once again gotten the upper hand. Seizing on September 11 as yet another opportunity to engage in the narcissistic politics of group victimization — that’s right, according to Berkeley’s young protesters, they are the real victims — student protesters, with the aid of the usual cast of sinister "community members," are seeking to turn Berkeley into the center of a new anti-war movement .

Their efforts have led to no end of foolishness. People with an apparently healthy self-regard have stood in front of hundreds of perfect strangers and asserted that the war in Afghanistan is no different from (and, in fact, is the continuation of) the imperial conflicts of the nineteenth-century. Others, such as Berkeley City Councilwoman Dona Spring, have charged that, by pursuing retaliation for September 11, the US has somehow itself become a "terrorist." Many more seem to be convinced that the present conflict is equivalent to every instance of rape, genocide and racism in Western history.

But of all the bad ideas advertised by the new anti-war movement, one in particular stands out: that the protesters are champions of Free Speech. Faced with mounting criticism for their wild stance, many in the movement have turned to this claim as a means of deflecting that criticism back on to their opponents. It’s a simple strategy. By posing as defenders of Free Speech, the protesters claim to be performing a vital civic duty: Free Speech, after all, is one of the highest of democratic values. Raising their voices against the war, they assert, is thus itself an act of resistance to terrorism and the first line of defense against an oppressive and ultimately authoritarian consensus. Even when it’s not made explicit (though it usually is), the implication is clear enough. If the protesters are protecting Free Speech against the threat posed to it by the public’s almost unanimous support for the war, then those who criticize the protesters must be ... well, terrorists.

It’s a charge that is rich in irony and nowhere more so than at Berkeley. Thirty years ago, Berkeley hosted the Free Speech Movement. It has come to form, over the years, an enduring part of our civic identity. In recent years, however, free speech has had a checkered history at Berkeley. Just like campuses nationwide, in the 1980s and 1990s the University increasingly submitted to pressure from student groups to institute speech codes. For the first time, speech that was offensive to groups deemed "sensitive" could be prosecuted; its perpetrators censured or even expelled.

Things took a turn for the worse earlier this year with the Horowitz Affair. In March, conservative journalist and agent provocateur David Horowitz placed an ad in the Berkeley student paper, The Daily Californian, entitled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks — and Racist Too." While calculated to annoy those on campus who put their grievances before their wits, the ad mainly consisted of sensible critiques of the reparations movement. Horowitz, who is himself a Berkeley alumnus and former radical, should have known better. Within hours of the paper’s appearance, copies were seized and minority student groups had expressed their "outrage." Worse, the editorial staff of the Daily Cal immediately caved-in to student pressure and pulled the ad. And the next day, Daniel Hernandez, the paper’s Senior Editor, followed-up by issuing a front page apology. While claiming that "the standard approval or rejection process was not carried through" in the case of Horowtiz’ ad, Hernandez recognized that the Daily Cal had become "an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry" and dutifully offered his regrets. Rather than confront what they found objectionable in Horowitz’ ad head-on, in other words, Hernandez and his supporters decided that it would just be easier to silence him.

What happened in the Horowitz Affair is only too typical. Since September 11, those participating in the new anti-war movement (many of whom were also involved in the protests against Horowitz) have sought time and again to silence their critics. At one protest I attended, someone cut the cord to the microphone being used by a small group of counter-protesters interested in showing their support for the Bush administration’s war against terrorism. At other protests, the demonstrators have surrounded the few people in attendance brave enough to disagree with them and, like the worst kind of school yard bully, shouted them down within an inch of their faces.

But the worst episode of all occurred in the week following the first terrorist attacks. On September 18, the Daily Cal ran a cartoon by Berkeley alumnus Darrin Bell. The cartoon depicted two men with long beards, turbans and robes, standing bemused on a huge hand with talons amid the flames of hell, a flight manual by their side. The caption read: "We made it to Paradise! Now we will meet Allah, and be fed grapes, and be serviced by 70 virgin women, and ..." The reader is left to infer the terrorists’ thoughts once they realized the full extent of their mistake.

What followed the cartoon’s appearance was an almost exact repeat of student response to the Horowitz ad. Within hours of the first issue’s release, papers were seized and a large group of irate students had invaded the editorial offices of the Daily Cal. There, they demanded that the cartoon be pulled and that the Daily Cal issue a front page apology for encouraging racism against Arab-Americans. To its credit, the Daily Cal, now under the editorial leadership of Janny Hu, would not back down. Instead, its editors waited until an adequate number of police were assembled and threw out the disgruntled students. That evening, several of them, still not satisfied with the damage they had caused, hacked on to the paper’s web site and posted a bogus apology for the cartoon.

The story, sadly, does not end there. A few days later, three student senators at Berkeley submitted a bill demanding an apology from the newspaper. Should the newspaper once again refuse, the senators warned, the student senate would have no choice but to raise the rent on its offices — that is, throw the paper off campus and onto the street. The story made national news. Unable to withstand the barrage of criticism invited by their strong-arm tactics, the students senators quickly climbed down. After removing the objectionable provisions, the student senate agreed instead to censure the paper for its alleged "insensitivity." With this, the senators compounded absurdity with cowardice.

Such outrages are now becoming routine. Even as this story goes to press, members of Berkeley’s anti-war movement are perpetrating new ones. On Wednesday, October 24, a group of activists seized the print run of the Daily Cal from distribution points around campus and replaced it with fliers demanding a student boycott of the paper. The reason? That day, theDaily Cal had published an advertisement sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute calling on the US to "end states who sponsor terrorism." According to the activists’ flier, the Rand Institute ad was "hate speech" and thus not defensible on First Amendment grounds. As theDaily Cal’s staff pointed out in a Thursday editorial, however, "according to the Supreme Court, the only hate speech that might be unconstitutional is speech aimed at directly provoking immediate violence against a particular person based on race, gender or sexual orientation." Needless to say, the Rand Institute ad did none of these things.

Faced with all this, it’s a little difficult to take the protesters seriously when they whine about the civil liberties they haven’t lost. After all, there they are, protesting. No one is trying to stop them. In fact, I have yet to hear a single person urge that the protesters be shut up, arrested, or otherwise silenced, though the protesters have regularly done exactly that to those who disagree with them. After years of getting their way by force, those who have joined the new anti-war movement have apparently forgotten how to engage in civilized debate. As a result, they view any criticism as an attempt to deprive them of the right to speak. But if free speech is involved here at all, it’s only in the sense that the protesters would prefer if their opponents didn’t exercise theirs.

The Free Speech argument, in short, is in the end just the latest attempt on the part of the radical left to stop the mouths of their opponents. What they don’t understand and won’t admit is that they are not the only ones who enjoy this freedom. Just as the protesters have a right to criticize the war in Afghanistan, we have the right to disagree with them. The one entails the other: that’s just how free speech works.

That any of this needs to be explained is itself remarkable. After years of heavy-handed intimidation, the campus left is amazed to discover that there is anyone still standing to disagree with them. Fortunately for those of us who do, the particular brand of stupidity endorsed by the protesters can flourish — and has flourished — only in a climate in which their opponents are fearful of the consequences of speaking out. That climate, along with so much else, died on September 11.