by Chip Johnson
SAN FRANCSCO CHRONICLE
The fallout from an opinion piece published in Berkeley’s twice-weekly community newspaper has mushroomed well beyond the confines of the nation’s first designated Nuclear-Free Zone.
And while it is not unusual for the Berkeley Daily Planet’s executive editor and owner Becky O’Malley to publish controversial, far-flung opinion pieces and wacko reader responses, the decision to run a commentary headlined “Zionist Crimes in Lebanon” is being questioned by scores of critics.
The article, which appeared as commentary on the opinion pages of the newspaper’s Aug. 8 edition, was more an attack on Jewish people than a logical argument against Israel’s massive military response to the continuing rocket attacks from Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.
After reducing mainstream America’s interests to stories about same-sex marriage and actor Mel Gibson’s drunken driving arrest, author Kurosh Arianpour launched a historical assault against Jews.
“Let us go back to 539 B.C., when Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, went to Babylonia and liberated Jews. One can ask why Jews were enslaved by Babylonians. Also, one can ask why Jews had problems with Egyptians, with Jesus, with Europeans, and in modern times with Germans?” wrote Arianpour, a former Berkeley resident who is a student in India.
The newspaper’s critics, and there are plenty of them, aren’t too interested in Arianpour’s historical view.
What more than two dozen rabbis and Jewish community groups and scores of Bay Area residents really want to know is why in the heck would the paper print such an inflammatory, hateful piece in a newspaper that makes its mark with stories about Berkeley land-use and City Hall politics? It’s a reasonable question.
The Anti-Defamation League’s Northern California chapter sent O’Malley a letter demanding a public apology for the article. It carries the signatures of more than a half-dozen elected officials from the East Bay, including the mayors of Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville.
The letter described the author’s words as “a racist attack on all people of Jewish descent when he asserted that Jews have been the cause of every tragedy that has befallen them — from slavery in Egypt to the Holocaust.
“We are not surprised when hate-mongers make such statements or when neo-Nazi publications print them. Vulgar and hate-filled statements are written all the time — editors choose whether or not to publish them. We were, however, surprised, to find them in a Berkeley ‘community’ newspaper since racism of any kind violates all that our city and region stands for,” it read.
Jonathan Bernstein, the group’s regional director, said that while the organization overlooks such screeds published on the Internet and in white supremacist publications, this time the message was being presented as valid commentary in a general-interest community newspaper.
“We have to look at who the message is reaching, and in this case it was reaching a lot of people — and because of that, it was worthy of a response,” Bernstein said. “We wanted to show that it was offensive to the entire community, not just the Jewish community, and I think we succeeded in doing that,” he said.
Mission accomplished.
While there has been some discussion about a meeting to hash it out (O’Malley said she offered; an ADL representative said she refused), the 66-year-old former software developer believes she need not apologize for doing her job: presenting a diversity of ideas in a public forum to be discussed, criticized, condemned, whatever moves the newspapers readers.
That is the newspaper’s forte, she said, and harks back to a time when newspapers were the primary forum for public debate.
“Putting things out in the light of day gives people who can make a counterargument the chance to respond in a straightforward way,” O’Malley said. “Those kinds of things are said behind closed doors all the time.”
As a matter of policy, the paper will not accept unsigned commentaries, pieces accusing private citizens of misdeeds or the use of unnecessarily obscene language. “Everything else is fair game, and we seldom turn anything away,” she told me in an interview this week.
Whether you agree or disagree with her editorial policy — and some readers do agree — O’Malley has at least been consistent and even-handed in the publication of mean-spirited, racist comments in the paper, which circulates free and publishes about 22,000 copies for each edition.
“All kinds of racist nonsense gets printed in the Planet — and for good reason — since racist thinking pervades American culture,” wrote Joanna Graham, a reader who defended O’Malley’s decision. In the past three weeks, O’Malley has published several other letters on the subject, including one from a long list of rabbis and Jewish community leaders.
O’Malley herself didn’t think much of the article either, but she said she made the decision to run it because it carried a different viewpoint that was worth airing in a public forum.
“It was a piece of crap, but it was representative of a lot of people around the world who make no distinctions between the foreign policy of Israel and the Jewish people of the world,” she said. “I want to hear everyone’s voice. It makes for a more interesting paper and a more social dialogue.”
There are ways to discuss any issue in any nation in the world in the editorial pages of newspapers, but surrendering editorial judgment for the sake of stirring a heated public debate can backfire, as it did in this case. Instead of arguing the merits of a laughable article, people are questioning the judgment of an editor who would publish it.
Uncle Sam and Il Duce
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