Ori Herschmann, a senior at UC-Berkeley, says that he has seen sidewalk graffiti on campus at UC-Berkeley that said: “Death to Israel” and “Kill all the Jews.” Herschmann, who serves in student government, adds that “a lot of students find swastikas and come to me. [They see them] on dorms, on bathroom stalls, just random places on campus.” But that is not what is most striking about Emily Shire’s story at The Daily Beast. What’s most striking is how the administration reacted to Shire’s questions about the incidents.

First, Dan Mogulof, an assistant vice chancellor in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, claimed the administration had “not heard any reports” of anti-Semitic graffiti. Then, after conceding that the administration had heard such reports, Moguluf said that the “graffiti was technically off-campus,” because it was all the way across the street. That does not cover, in any case, the graffiti found in a campus bathroom in March that said, “Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber.”

Mogulof also suggested that Jewish students shouldn’t get so hot and bothered by swastikas and were likely inflating the incidents to damage other student groups. He has seen it “happen on more than one occasion that a group of students with a very specific political agenda will be on the lookout for any specific rhetoric that they can use to . . . damage the standing of another student group.”

Then finally, Mogulof insinuated that the reporter was interested only in anti-Jewish prejudice: “Berkeley’s Muslim population has also faced discrimination,” but “I assume you’re not interested in [those] incidents.”

How strange, as Shire reports, that Jewish students feel that Berkeley, that enemy of prejudice in all its forms, does not take anti-Semitism seriously,