Heeb finds Chunk the Hollywood lawyer

How could anyone forget Chunk? After Data, Mikey and Mouth, the most memorable of "The Goonies" was Chunk, legendary for his Truffle Shuffle (like the Ickey Shuffle, but better).

His real name was Jeff B. Cohen, and unlike so many child actors, his life wasn't marred by early fame, though he did perform his old dance on the sidelines of Cal football games. He was student body president at Berkeley, and went on to law school at UCLA. Now he's an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills, which is where Heeb magazine solicited the legal queries of a few Hollywood wannabes. The feature is kind of a lame stretch, but I was thrilled to learn what became of Chunk.

What advice would you give a client who was interested in investing in secret pirate treasure? Tempted by Treasure

Dear Tempted by Treasure,
My advice here goes beyond the law. Watch out for blenders, booby traps and the Fratellis. Befriending large monsters can also be helpful.

Friedlander's Pulitzer for Holocaust studies

Saul Friedlånder seems to sit down for a lot of Q&As, but, then again, he deserves the audience. A Holocaust historian at UCLA, Friedlander won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction Monday -- I ordered the two-volume, 1,500-word series "Nazi Germany and the Jews" yesterday -- and The Forward has this interview:

GS: Unlike a number of your colleagues in the field, you put great stock in survivor diaries. What do such sources offer, and what are their potential pitfalls?

SF: You don’t go to diaries for historical exactness. You go to them for the attitudes, the reactions, the fears, the hopes — the life of those that were targeted. If you leave that aside, you come to rely uniquely on German documents. You completely shunt aside the humanity of the Jewish communities that are the face of the story. I wouldn’t turn to the diaries to learn about German policies, but I need to read them to be informed of daily life in the ghettoes. Now, you may tell me that these sources are unreliable, but not more unreliable than Eichmann’s depositions in Jerusalem or the memoirs of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, which are used everywhere. One must, of course, consider Jewish diaries with extreme care and with a totally open critical mind, as one would any other source.

GS: In a review of “The Years of Extermination” that recently appeared in The Washington Post, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” wrote that your book “may prove to be the last major general history of the Holocaust produced by a leading scholar who lived under the Nazis.” This is, of course, interesting at the level of biography, but when it comes to the scholarship itself, is there a tangible difference between Holocaust historians who lived through the experience and those who did not?

SF: There shouldn’t be, but there is. The person who has lived through the events is familiar with nuances that cannot be gotten from administrative documents. The things that are between the lines are more vivid among those who remember. Now, it has been argued that the survivor-historian is more subjective and less scientific, but we are all subjective with regard to this period. So you say where it is you are coming from and do your best, if you are an honest person, to try to restrain your subjectivity.

(skip)

GS: You take your book’s epigraph from the diary of one Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding in “Aryan” Warsaw in 1943. “[People] will ask,” you quote him as saying, “is this the only truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth…. Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.” It seems here that you are trying to sound a note of humility. But am I wrong in sensing a hint of bravado here, too? Do you see yourself as wielding “the mightiest pen”?

SF: I don’t want to underestimate my work. It would, in a way, be grotesque to write and then say, “This is worthless.” But I meant the epigraph very simply and directly: Don’t let us have any illusions. We try, and we have to try, but this is not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth.

A March miracle for the Bruins

The most wonderful time of the year begins now, with the tip-off of the NCAA tournament. The last few years I have taken work off at the start of March Madness to soak in full days of pandemonium. This year is no different. I'm not sure what to expect, no one ever is. But I'm sure there'll be a moment or two as memorable as this one.

My wife and I were cheering so loudly during the Gonzaga-UCLA game two years ago, banging the walls and jumping around like apes for a good 20 minutes, that I seriously expected the cops to show up. They never did, and two days later I was in Oakland watching UCLA eek by Memphis en route to another Final Four.

(Last fall I played poker with Adam Morrison, who was peeling off $100 bills like he was feeding quarters into a pinball machine. I was mature enough not to mention the last game of his college career. Coincidentally, the next morning his season ended when he busted his knee in a game against the Clippers.)

Anyway, enjoy the madness and thank God -- seriously because the tournament starts this year on Maundy Thursday -- that it's March. I'll be back this weekend to wish The God Blog a belated happy birthday.

March Madness began in January

I'm skipping work today for the Pac-10 tournament. So, to remind you how awesome college basketball is, enjoy this display of unreal athleticism, also known as The Dunk of the Year by UCLA's Clutch Westbrook.

On a religious note, there is a short story about UCLA assistant Scott Garson in this week's Jewish Journal and Coach Ben Howland attends my church.

Understanding the college spiritual journey

Speaking of the Pew Forum, the religious research center's home page features a lengthy Q&A with a leader of UCLA's "Spirituality in Higher Education," which I wrote about for the fall cover of UCLA Magazine.

The study found that nearly three-of-four students who are now juniors agreed that "most people can grow spiritually without being religious." That's up 12 percent from when these students were freshmen.

I think you have to realize that we have, on the one hand, the students' individual faiths and practices, and on the other hand, their viewpoints about students who might follow a different faith or no faith. To us, this is a positive finding in the sense that students display a good deal of tolerance for differing approaches to religion and spirituality on the part of their peers. In other words, they're not imposing their own standards upon their fellow beings.

Does that mean that they're seeing the world in more relative terms and in less absolute terms?

Yes, I would say so, and this is consistent with the finding that their tendency to embrace an ecumenical worldview also increases during college.

This would seem to be bad news for many organized religions, especially the ones making truth claims.

Not necessarily. We have organizations like the National Council of Churches and other worldwide religious organizations that try to think about how to enhance understanding across different religions and faiths. Looking ahead to the condition of the world down the road, one would hope that this kind of understanding and tolerance would increase with time. That, of course, may not fit certain belief systems, but I think, on balance, that it's reassuring to see that the college experience is associated with an increase in this kind of tolerance and understanding of the other.

Bob Knight's foul mouth

I saw this compilation of great Bob Knight moments on Sportscenter last night. My in-laws are Hoosiers, but I'm a Bruin, and therefore have no place in my heart for other college basketball programs. Knight was a great coach, always good for a laugh ("that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse") and, more than any other college coach in history, a win. But he lacked the character -- most people do -- granted the Wizard of Westwood, "the greatest coach of the 20th century" and a mighty fine Christian too.

The montage left out a few choice soundbites from Knight's career, some of which were included in this Sportscenter Top 10 from when he got his 800th win. My favorite is No. 8, when he referred in a press conference to journalism as "one or two steps above prostitution."

A suspension of disbelief

Also from UCLA, "End of Faith" author Sam Harris, who has quietly been pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at my alma mater, reports in the January issue of Annals of Neurology that fMRIs show clear differences in areas of the brain involved in belief, disbelief and uncertainty.

Noting that uncertainty differs from both belief and disbelief by not allowing us to settle upon "a specific, actionable interpretation of the world," the authors suggest that the basal ganglia may play a role in mediating the cognitive and behavioral differences between decision and indecision.

Taken together, these data offer insight into the way in which our brains work to form beliefs about the world.

"What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust," Harris said. "While evaluating mathematical, ethical or factual statements requires very different kinds of processing, accepting or rejecting these statements seems to rely upon a more primitive process that may be content-neutral. I think that it has long been assumed that believing that two plus two equals four and believing that George Bush is President of the United States have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question."

Undie Run: What have we done?

That is a photo from LAist of last night's Undie Run at UCLA. It's been a "tradition" for Bruins to drop down to their drawers and jog off studying at midnight the Wednesday of finals week since spring 2002. And, as my wife just noted, this giant display of debauchery was, gulp, started by a few Christians.

Why one UCLA soldier went to war

Lt. Mark Daily was the first UCLA alum to be killed in Iraq. (A plaque was recently hung in his honor in front of the Student Activities Center off of Bruin Plaza.) His death touched thousands upon thousands not simply because he was young and it was tragic, but because of the writings he left behind and a story in the LA Times that was e-mailed around the world.

One recipient was Christopher Hitchens, the atheist superstar and author who Daily credited with convincing him of the moral imperative of the war. In this month's Vanity Fair, Hitchens describes feeling ill upon learning this and seeking out Daily's family to clear his conscience.

In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E. H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who didn't straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily killed by the Ba'thist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine, which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and fatally postponed the time of reckoning?

These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me, the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again, not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn't stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness. Here's an excerpt from his "Why I Joined" statement:

Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).… Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.

'Like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight'

So USC is threatening to leave the crumbling Coliseum for the beautiful Rose Bowl unless they are offered a more favorable deal. I pray the Trojans do not come to call Pasadena home; that is our house, even if we couldn't beat hapless Notre Dame there. Weighing in on the likelihood of this happening, Bill Plaschke nails it with an apocalyptic analogy:

Hearing USC's threat to move its football team from the Coliseum to the Rose Bowl is like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight.

You walk past, you shake your head, you know it's baloney.

But later that night, if only for a moment, you quietly check your watch.

Friedlander's Holocaust memories

Saul Friedlånder, whom some have called a genius, has written an acclaimed two-volume tome on the Holocaust. It's a personal story for Friedlander, and one I'm eager to read, whenever I can carve out the time for some 1,360 pages.

Recently honored with Germany's highest literary award, the Holocaust orphan and UCLA professor was interviewed in Frankfurt by the LA Weekly. Not that revealing, but nonetheless:

You went from fighting with the Irgun [a quasi-terrorist Zionist paramilitary group] to joining the Israeli movement Peace Now. Many Germans feel inhibited when discussing Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians, while others believe that embracing Palestinian rights masks a latent anti-Semitism. What’s your take?

What you’re talking about is more pronounced in Great Britain or France than in Germany. Criticism is legitimate. But what bothers me at times is a shrillness that gives you a feeling that it is not only based on an analysis of policy but on some deeper emotions — I don’t want to say hatred — which comes through acceptable political pretext.

What did the fall of the Berlin Wall add to Holocaust research?

A lot. The opening of Soviet archives gave us an enormous amount of new material because they were keeping for themselves a lot of German documents. Of course, it also exposed the tendency to say, “Look, we spoke enough about Nazis, now let’s see about the second barbarian system in the world, communism and communist dictatorship.” They are so concentrated on their own dictatorship experience that the past before that is already ancient history. It is often a kind of unintentional layering of the other past. So the answer is that you have to study this and you have to study that. You can’t replace one with the other.

I hear people say that if fascism ever came back to Germany, it would target the Muslims and not the Jews. Do you agree?

Well, it will not come again to Germany. Of that, I am almost sure. But it’s true there’s a kind of xenophobia and hatred, possibly more in the former East Germany than in the West, of minorities coming in, mainly from Turkey.

Do you think the U.S. is embracing fascism?

No. That’s Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America, where Lindbergh was a metaphor, I think, for President Bush. I like Roth a lot and I am critical of the U.S. as well, but that’s much too overstated.

For more from the LA Weekly's Holocaust files, there is a story in the paper this week about accusations that famed Los Angeles author Charles Bukowski was a Nazi. Sunday, LA Times book editor David L. Ulin says he was just a bad writer.

God's not dead, but is religion?

My copy of UCLA Magazine, with my story about the intersection of God and grades on the cover, finally arrived in the mail today. Flipping through my story -- the first thing all journalists do is turn to their story -- I noticed a nugget from a sidebar that was worth discussion.

"The prediction made by some intellectuals at the end of the Second World War that by the year 2000 religion will have withered and only be a matter of personal interest to some folks -- like some folks are Dodger fans and others are Orthodox Jews -- that hypothesis has been thoroughly falsified," claims Scott Bartchy, UCLA history professor and director of the College of Letters & Science's interdepartmental Center for the Study of Religion. "The role of religion is enormous in current events."

Forty-plus years ago, Time magazine asked whether God is dead? As Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani noted three years ago in an award-winning story that pre-dated the divine presidential election of 2004, the answer has been a resounding no.

Standing around the watercooler or in line at Starbucks these days, conversation is just as likely to turn to early Christianity and whether the apostles spoke "street Aramaic" or a more formal version of the near-dead language, as it is to whether Tony and Carmella Soprano can repair their failing marriage.

A few channels away from HBO -- on CNN, FoxNews or even Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" -- and in the newspaper each morning, competing factions wrestle with some of life's most basic questions, including what a family is, what marriage is, what it means to be "under God," and whether life may be manufactured artificially. In one way or another, God's name is invoked in the battle to answer each of those questions.

God is in high-demand -- in politics, music, court, film, books, even to a certain extent in fashion with "What Would Jesus Wear?" accessories, and the increasingly popular "Jesus is My Homeboy" T-shirts. About 40 percent of Americans today say they have attended services at a house of worship in the last week.

Well, I'll forgive her for neglecting to mention the popularity and influence of The God Blog (three years before it went live) but, certainly, it seems that Nietzsche was wrong. Do you agree?

The intersection of God and grades

In the latest addition of UCLA Magazine, which went online today and should be in the mail for alumni, I have a cover story about the intersection of spirituality and scholarship.

I've written here that religion gets passing grades on college campuses, even secular ones like my alma mater. In this article, I focused on four students -- a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu and a Muslim -- and told their stories through the findings of the largest national study of college student spirituality.

Brandon Kuiper arrived at UCLA with a strong Christian faith and an inquisitive scientific mind. He didn't believe in evolution, but he was intent on studying neuroscience. Something was bound to give, but the biggest spiritual crisis in Kuiper's 20 years came not from South Campus but from studying the philosophy of Voltaire and Hobbes and Kant and Freud.

"I was reading that stuff and I thought, ‘This makes so much sense.' I had to stop and evaluate why I am a Christian and what I believe," he recalls. "I remember thinking, ‘What if I've been wrong all along?' "

(skip)

There's certainly no shortage of seekers. A study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found that three-fourths of freshmen are "searching for meaning/purpose in life" and that half are either "seeking" or "doubting" their spiritual understanding of the world. Forty percent said it was very important they follow a set of religious teachings.

"It is the nature of the beast of people that age. It's just part of being a college student," says Alexander Astin, co-leader of the "Spirituality in Higher Education" study and an emeritus professor of higher education. "College students are on a developmental adventure."

My favorite vignette was that of Marco Gonzalez, a Mexico Jew who arrived at UCLA with little understanding of his heritage. That led him to the Chabad House (I guess all their outreach on campus does attract some students).

On a Wednesday night, Gonzalez enters the upstairs classroom at Chabad and pulls out his textbook, Jewish Essentials: A Spiritual Guide to Jewish Life & Living.

"In the last couple of classes, we learned about the paramount importance of the Torah," Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, the Chabad campus co-director, says. "The Torah was received at Mt. Sinai, and the next holiday we celebrate, Shavuot, reminds us of that. That is very nice, but we have to make it practical and real ... We have to learn ways to make it real in our daily lives."

Tonight Gonzalez and three other students learn about the mezuzah (a sacred parchment hung on door posts to make holy the room inside) and tefillin (the boxes containing passages of the Torah and the leather straps Orthodox Jews use for prayer).

On college-ruled paper, Gonzalez takes detailed notes. "I want to be able to pass on these traditions to my children," he says. "I want to know what I'm talking about, so that when they have questions I don't have to say, ‘Ask a rabbi.' "

Gonzalez departs about 9:30 and heads straight to Powell to finish studying for a midterm the next day on international relations of the Middle East. But he doesn't mind staying up late and getting up early if it means not missing the time at Chabad.

"I would rather go to Chabad and learn it and enjoy it there, and just put in some extra time into my classes," Gonzalez says. "I've been taking the class at Chabad, and it's almost like having another class for school. But it's a more important subject. It is the subject of our lives."

The art for this story is amazing, and, to be honest, does a good job embarrassing my reporting. Let's hope the Bruins football team doesn't add insult tomorrow.

His Eminence, President-for-Life Bush

When I was a student at UCLA, I wrote a story about the former co-director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program who had just been convicted of running one of the largest LSD labs in American history. It turned out, he was hired by the university despite serious previous drug run-ins.
In that article, I quoted Mark Kleiman, then the director of the program and a public policy professor, declining to comment about his former colleague. Nowadays, though, Kleiman has plenty to say on the blog he contributes to, The Reality-Based Community. He's a bit liberal for my leanings, but always a good read. This one from last week is worth a look:

Boy oh boy, did I ever get this one wrong!

No hoax: Family Security Matters, a front group for Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, really did run a piece by a failed philosopher called Philip Atkinson calling for a genocidal campaign in Iraq followed by the use of the victorious army to establish George W. Bush as President-for-Life with dictatorial powers. (Full text at the jump; has to be read to be believed.)

When this first came out, I was pretty sure I smelled a parody, but it turns out the guy was completely serious.

The argument of the piece, to give it an unduly generous label, calls for a diagnosis rather than a refutation. No wonder FSM "disappeared" not only the article (which has even been wiped from the cache) but the author, who has gone from "Contributing Editor" to "unperson" in record time. Winston Smith of the Ministry of Truth would be proud.

Presumably the scrubbing means that some semi-grownup somewhere in Gaffney's operation noticed that Atkinson had finally parted company with even the neocon substitute for reality.

Ain't anti-Semitism great?

Dog bites man -- that's what I thought when I saw this headline in today's Ventura County Star: "Anti-Defamation League official decries anti-Semitism."

I e-mailed the story to a former colleague and he made these comparisons:

"NAACP leader says lynching is bad."

"Dodgers don't like Giants very much."

"Hell hot, heaven not."

It is possible, though, to be a non-loathing Jew who thinks anti-Semitism has to an extent helped the Jewish community. UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh made that case last month in the Wall Street Journal.

Modest amounts of anti-Semitic speech and unfair criticism of Israel, it seems to me, can strengthen American Jews' self-identity as Jews, and thus indirectly both support the preservation of the American Jewish community as a community, and strengthen support for Israel. Feeling embattled as a group tends to strengthen group solidarity. Hearing unfair criticisms for Israel tends to strengthen the sense that Israel is unfairly embattled and deserves more support. Feeling some fear of anti-Semitism reminds American Jews of the value of preserving American Jewish institutions. And it reminds American Jews of the value of protecting Israel, in case one day American Jews may need refuge somewhere just as European Jews once did. ("Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.")

First, I want to repeat an important phrase: MODEST AMOUNTS. Second, I want to ask that comments to this blog post not be anti-Semitic, unless, of course, you are Sacha Baron Cohen or the guys at Heeb.

American Jews war-weary

I've been at The Jewish Journal for two months now, and it seems everybody I meet with or talk to has recently spoken with my colleague Tom Tugend. If you'll allow me the hyperbole, Tom is to Los Angeles Jewry what Jack Smith was to the greater LA region -- a fountain of institutional knowledge, a reporter who knows all and is respected, if not admired, by most. Here is an example from last week.

Born in Germany in 1925, where he remained until immigrating to the U.S. in 1939, Tom has fought in three wars -- World War II, Israel's War of Independence and the Korean War. I was born six decades later in San Diego, where I remained until shipping off to UCLA. I've never gone to war, though I did get in a fight in fifth grade. (I won.)

Tom and I have an average age of someone suffering a mid-life crisis and last week teamed up for this story about the first anniversary of Israel's war with Hezbollah.

This week, as we mark the first anniversary of the war, Israel's security appears no more certain than it was. With Hamas' recent expulsion of Fatah from the Gaza Strip and with the three Israeli soldiers still captive, expectations are cresting about the likelihood of another war.

(skip)

But if this summer's flare-ups burn into a full conflagration, would the American Jewish community respond as resoundingly as it did last summer? Would there be countless missions to Israel and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid? Or would American Jewry be overwhelmed by war weariness?

"There is a dispiriting sense of fatigue and apprehension, as if we were confronted by a 'No Exit' sign," said Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom. "Day by day, events are becoming more complex and frustrating, and neither the left nor the right has any answers. We are looking for someone to lead us out of our malaise.

"What do you do in a world gone wild?" Schulweis said. "What are our sources of faith in an insane world? In such a world, optimism is a struggle, but in Judaism, we have to believe in the potential of humanity, in the capacity of people to change in this life, not an otherworldly life."

The righteousness of prancing in your underpants

This post has very little to do with religion, save maybe what it says about the vulnerability of college students to be sucked into a clearly odd movement.

See, five years ago, I was a sophomore at UCLA when my friends and I began running around Westwood in our underwear. We called this finals week act of rebellion "Undie Run." Some of my roommates hoped to start a tradition, but I don't think anyone believed it would actually happen.

Wow. Were we wrong. Two weeks ago, what was once a 13-man jog up and down Glenrock Avenue was 8,000 to 9,000 students running from the apartments to Powell Library.

Last fall, I wrote about the origins of Undie Run and my astonishment at seeing what it had become. LAist has some insane photos from the spring run; they might not be appropriate for work.

(Pictured in the cowboy hat and bikini briefs is a former roommate, Mark Chipello.)

Muslim run-down at UC Irvine

Just when it seems religious tension at UC Irvine can't get any higher ...

Last week, the Muslim Student Union held a series of rallies centered around the theme "Israel: Apartheid Resurrected," and on Monday night, Yasser Ahmed claims he was followed by an unmarked sedan as he drove a moving truck from a parking lot to UCI's Free Speech Zone. From the LA Times:

Ahmed, 21, said he got out of the truck, walked to the car and asked the driver why he was following him. The driver did not respond, Ahmed said, and he tried to snap a photo of the license plate with his cellphone camera. At that point, Ahmed said, the car nudged him with its front bumper and he got out of the way. He was not injured.

The man behind the wheel drove off but was stopped almost immediately by a campus police officer, who had responded to cries for help from Ahmed and other students. The driver identified himself as an FBI agent "who was doing surveillance," Henisey said.

On Friday, Ahmed, an economics major and lifelong Orange County resident, said he was still reeling.

"He didn't open his window and didn't let me know who he was. He never said anything," Ahmed said. "All he had to say was that he was FBI or law enforcement and this wouldn't have happened. I was frightened. He pushed me with the car, which had tinted windows and then tried to drive away. What's one supposed to think?"

The incident, which is under investigation, comes a year after an FBI agent was quoted telling a Newport Beach business group that the bureau was "monitoring" Muslims at UCI and USC.

In other anti-Israel campus news: This morning at UCLA, "a diverse group of Southern California activists, both secular and from all religions, and including Arabs and Israelis" will host an event called Israel, Zionism and Apartheid.