Antisemitism and the Berkeley Daily Planet : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

Anti-Semitism in the Berkeley Daily Planet

Here’s a pop quiz. From where is this quote taken:

"One should ask why anti-Semitism has persisted throughout the centuries. Let us go back to 539 BC, 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 problem with Egyptians, with Jesus, with Europeans, and in modern times with Germans? The answer, among other things, is their racist attitude that they are the 'Chosen People.' Because of this attitude, they do wrong to other people to the point that others turn against them, namely, become anti-Semite if you will."

(a) Mel Gibson’s drunk driving police report

(b) Mein Kampf

(c) The Hamas Charter

(d) The Berkeley Daily Planet

Sadly, if you guessed (d), The Berkeley Daily Planet (“DP”), you would be correct. This quote, essentially blaming Jews for all that has befallen them, including the Holocaust, appeared in an August 8, 2006 DP Commentary written by Kurosh Arianpour, an Iranian living in India.

The question as to whether the DP is anti-Semitic can be divided into three parts:

First, has the DP published unequivocally anti-Semitic op-eds, cartoons, and letters? Here, the answer is a definite YES.

Second, is the DP in its totality an anti-Semitic newspaper? Here the answer, we believe, is PROBABLY.

Third, is DP owner and executive editor, Becky O’Malley, herself an anti-Semite? VERY POSSIBLY, but possibly not?

Finally, we encourage readers to contact us with well-reasoned and evidenced answers to the three questions cited above to. If your arguments are fair, and backed by the evidence, we will post them. We might even change our own tentative answers above, if swayed by your arguments.

* Has the DP published unequivocally anti-Semitic op-eds and letters?

# ADL: Hard left anti-Semitism way up in Bay Area
# So Few Jews, Such a Big Jewish Problem
# Jews look funny
# Judaism is a gutter religion
# It’s the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), stupid
# Why can’t the Jews just admit that they killed Christ?
# Israelis are Nazis
# Jews are fifth columnists and spies
# The Jews got what they deserved in the Holocaust
# Of the 192 United Nations member states, only Israel has no right to exist
* Is the DP in its totality an anti-Semitic newspaper?
Without any doubt, the DP is Jew obsessed and Israel obsessed. Here is a recently conducted count of Google hits:
Keyword
Hits
Israel

2110
Palestine

1460
Jews

1010
Darfur

162
China

1630
Tibet

291
Burma

144
Zimbabwe

142
Congo

92

* Is DP’s Executive Editor and owner, Becky O’Malley, herself an anti-Semite?

Is DP executive editor and owner, Becky O’Malley, herself an anti-Semite?

A case can be made either way.

O’Malley denies that she is an anti-Semite. This is important. Anti-Semites often admit outright that they hate Jews, as one can readily determine by visiting of the many neo-Nazi Internet sites. O’Malley has also said that she has Jewish friends.

In an October 9, 2008 editorial, O’Malley insisted that “we [the DP] don’t publish unsigned or anti-Semitic letters.” Of course, this is false, but just possibly O’Malley really believes this, and exists in a mental fantasy of self-absolution.

On the other hand, and in utter contradiction to her statement that she would never publish anti-Semitic pieces, O’Malley also believes that hate speech needs to be printed, lest it build pressure underground. This was her defense for publishing the now infamous anti-Semitic screed by Arianpour.

However, it is very troubling that, apart from a diatribe exonerating the killing of Oakland police officers, we have not found a single case where O’Malley has published hate speech directed against any group other than Jews and Israelis. On the contrary, O’Malley wrote on March 26, 2004 that she would decline to publish defenses of Israel if they came from outside of her paper’s distribution area. But a hateful piece of anti-Semitism written from India was given the status of Commentary (and not just a letter to the editor). In her May 14, 2004 editorial O’Malley brags that she refused to publish something she had received that she regarded as Islamophobic, admitting, in effect, that the only allowable target in her newspaper will be Jews and Israelis.

She once called Benyamin Netanyhau “odious” and encouraged her readers to heckle such figures when they come to Berkeley (October 5, 2004). At the time, Netanyahu was a former prime minister of Israel. He headed then (as now) the Likud party, roughly equivalent to the American Republican Party. The Likud, under Menachem Begin, negotiated the Camp David Accords which returned all of Sinai to Egypt, and Begin received a Nobel Peace Prize for this. As Prime Minister, Netanyahu tended to talk to the right, but govern from the middle, being responsible for returning sovereignty to Palestinians in parts of the West Bank, and he is known to have secretly offered the entire Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a peace treaty. As of this writing, Netanyahu has just returned to power, but it is too early to say how he will govern. “Odious” is a word normally reserved for figures like David Duke, Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, or Slobodan Milochwitz, not for the duly elected head of a vibrant democracy such as Israel. When Netanyahu came to Berkeley to speak pro-Palestinians “hecklers” made it so dangerous that his talk had to be cancelled, a clear case in which hate speech was allowed to trump free speech. O’Malley was unbothered.

On May 19, 2004 the East Bay Express ran a front page article, entitled, “Berkeley Intifada: As students embrace the Palestinian cause, UC Berkeley has lost whatever reputation it may once have had for tolerance.” The article documented cases of anti-Semitism on the UC Berkeley campus. O‘Malley immediately rushed to print two front page stories attempting to counter this claim. The first appeared on May 25, 2004, under the headline “UC Lecturer’s ‘Intifada’ Comment Brings Death Threats.” This article gave a clean bill of health to an Arab professor who called for an intifada in and against the United States. The DP accepted at face value his claims that he had received 1000 critical emails, 9 voice mail death threats, and had been mistreated by Bill O’Reilly. Oddly, the reporter never asked to see the emails, never listened to the death threats or checked with the police department to determine whether a proper report had been filed (who among us would not report 9 death threats to the police), or even viewed the O’Reilly show. Then on June 8, 2004 a front page article appeared which examined the thesis directly as to whether there is anti-Semitism on the UC Berkeley campus. The clear slant was to argue that there is no such thing, though the DP found that there is anti-Arab discrimination. To make its case, the DP selectively interviewed an atypical Jew who happened to be prominent in the pro-Palestinian cause. Obviously, such a person would feel no anti-Semitism coming from her Arab colleagues.

In her March 26, 2004 editorial, O’Malley condemns Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders. She goes on to say that she had received many letters in support of Israel from outside the East Bay but she would not publish them for that reason. She did admit to receiving a few letters in support of Israel’s policy of killing Hamas leaders from the Berkeley area that she said she would publish. But then, true to form, she never did. Refusing to publish letters from out of the area would be a reasonable policy, except that it only seems to apply to Israel’s supporters. Please recall that the most infamous anti-Semitic screed published by the DP was penned by an “Iranian student living in India.” More recently, an anti-Israel article by Annette Herskovits (February 12, 2009) elicited a veritable storm of letters in support. These letters came from all over the country (so much for that O’Malley argument that she only publishing local writers), were very similar in content, and were obviously the result of an orchestrated campaign. Nevertheless, there they all are in print anyway. Two articulate Berkeleyans have shown us pro-Israel articles that were submitted to the DP but rejected.

In an April 11, 2006 editorial O’Malley wrote that she publishes a handful of pro-Israel writers, but she is afraid that they are boring her audience. Apparently, she doesn’t find her stable of pro-Palestinian writers boring at all.

The headlines that O’Malley chooses sometimes speak volumes about her prejudices. In the August 8, 2006 edition there appear two op-eds. The first, written by Howard Glickman, argues persuasively (though not without some misstatements of fact) that O’Malley has uncritically embraced Hizbollah propaganda. This was not an unfair thesis. Glickman goes on to point out that O’Malley appeared to know little about the American Revolution when she insisted that, like Hizbollah, American troops hid among civilians (they did not), and that the British did not, however, bombard civilians (they did). Somehow, O’Malley chose the curious headline for this article, “Criticizing Israel = Anti-Semitism.” This would seem an odd choice, since Glickman did not accuse O’Malley or the DP of anti-Semitism. In fact, the term appears nowhere in Glickman’s article. It was merely a point-by-point refutation of O’Malley’s recent anti-Israel editorial. O’Malley’s headline is apparently meant to dismiss the author by this logic: All of Israel’s supporters believe that anyone who criticizes anything about Israel must be driven by anti-Semitism (totally untrue). Reasonable people know that criticism of Israel is not always anti-Semitic. Therefore, anyone who criticizes someone who criticizes Israel must be a paranoid Zionist, and reasonable people should not listen to him or her. O’Malley thus inoculates herself. After a number of people pointed this out to O’Malley she answered that it was all a mistake, that this headline was actually meant for some different article. However, no such article to which it might reasonably have been applied was published by the DP in that issue or in any immediately preceding or later issue. Would O’Malley lie to us?

The following headline graced an anti-Israel article in the September 23, 2005 issue: “A Scholar Asks: Who Speaks for the Jews.” The fine print at the end of the article indicated that the author, H. Scott Prosteman has a master’s degree. A master’s degree does not usually qualify one to be deemed a scholar in bold print (all but one person in this office has at least that), except if that person happens to take an anti-Israel stance in the pages of the DP.

O’Malley’s editorial of May 4, 2004 cunningly and falsely linked Israel to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Here is the passage (the brackets are O’Malley’s):

Seymour Hersch in the May 10 New Yorker articlequotes a February report on the allegations of torture in an Iraq prison: ‘I suspect,’ [General] Taquba concluded, that [army intelligence officers] Pappas, Jordan, [and CAIC International, Inc. employees] Stephanowicz and Israel ‘were either directly or indirectly responsible for the use at Abu Ghraib.’

This was a very odd choice for a quote from Seymour Hirsch’s very long article. We urge the reader to look at the original 10 page article and attempt to figure out why O’Malley chose this short passage, from all others:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact

We submit that it may have been only because a casual reader might assume from this passage that Israel was somehow tied up in this mess. Reading the full article, you will find that the Israel referred to is one, John Israel, that is, someone who just happened to bear the last name of “Israel.” We believe that it is possible that a blind hatred of Israel might have caused O’Malley to go this far.

Does all of this add up to a charge of anti-Semitism? If an irrational and unyielding hatred of Israel is anti-Semitic, then possibly O’Malley is guilty. But let’s give O’Malley the last word. In her July 20, 2004 editorial she wrote a love note to Israel:

For most of us around here, Israel is not ‘everyone else.’ Our expectations are simply higher for Israel, and that’s a mark of respect for Israel’s history and its meaning for Jews, and not disrespect or anti-Semitic prejudice. Why do some of us criticize Israel? For the same reason we tell our kids when we think they’ve made a mistake: because we care about you.

O’Malley loves Israel just like it were her own child, and like an overbearing parent expects only perfection from it. Such mothers usually protect their children from bullies. However, in her case, O’Malley is eager to ignore even the worst possible behavior from Israel’s neighbors, such as honor killings, the indiscriminate bombings of civilians in Israel, human shields, the killing of gays and Christians, kleptocracy from Fatah, theocracy from Hamas, the stoning of rape victims ostensibly for causing their own rapes, summary executions of “collaborators,” and on and on. From this, it might reasonably be surmised that O’Malley is actually a racist. Taken to its fair conclusion, O’Malley is arguing that Jews must act at all times in a fashion that is demonstrably superior to those pathetic little brown people that surround Israel, from whom every manner of benighted behavior is merely to be expected.

So, what is Becky O’Malley: an anti-Semite, an anti-Arab racist, both or neither?

Cleveland Indy Media Center