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?

So Why Does She Do It?

The Berkeley Daily Planet is a money losing operation. The DP pays its staff about $250,000 per year, payroll comprising about one-third of its expenses. Printing, outside syndication fees (as, for example, for the comic strips), and overhead account for the other two-thirds, for a total annual budget of about $750,000. Advertising covers less than one-third of this, leaving an annual loss of at least $500,000. Indeed, Becky O’Malley has now confirmed that our math is correct in her April 16, 2009 editorial. O'Malley has repeatedly written that she is at her wits ends as to how to cover this deficit. The O'Malleys were very wealthy, netting after taxes something like $20 million from the sale of their software business. However, they have been running the DP since early 2003, and have therefore accumulated start up costs and losses of $3 - 5 million. That would still leave them with about $15 - 17 million, money enough to run the DP (or run the DP into the ground, if you prefer) for many years to come. However, if that $17 million was invested in the same markets as the rest of us, it is likely worth only about $10 - 12 million by now. Nevertheless, with millions left, and being 68 years old, O'Malley could choose to suffer these deficits for the remainder of her life, or close to it, before exhausting all resources. However, what kind of legacy is that to leave her family and the city she says she loves?--just a lot of sturm und drang--that will pass when she passes. The city can wait her out. DPWatchDog.com proposes a better way, namely, to reform the paper, making it into the kind of community asset all Berkeleyans can feel good about, and fell good about financially supporting as well. (All of the forgoing numbers are good faith estimates based upon and extrapolated from information in the DP and other public sources. It involves speculation on our part, but we believe that we are not likely to be far off the mark.)

So why does Becky O'Malley do it? To be sure, she is an extreme ideologue.
Some believe that she is driven by a hatred of all developers, while others believe that it is a hatred of Israel that obsessively drives her toward financial ruin.

We have a different theory. We all know "authors" whose great American novel went unappreciated by the many publishers to whom they applied, and who then, in desperation and delusion, self-publish. We believe that the DP is Becky O'Malley's very own vanity press. Our epiphany came when O'Malley proclaimed to the editor of this website that she believes herself to be a wonderful writer. He could only bite his lip in an effort to be polite.

More often than not, and quite apart from whether we agree or disagree with her, the strands of her arguments might just as well lead through a bowl of angle hair pasta. Try as we might, we fail to follow the strands of thought from one end of her editorials to the other. Hence, we usually focus on fragments of thought rather than a whole that simply is not there. We read her column because we have to in order to properly manage this website, but how many of you can honestly tell us that you have not given up reading her column long ago?

Berkeley Daily Planet reporter Judith Scherr abruptly resigned from the paper last week after a dispute with editor and owner, Becky O’Malley, over journalistic ethics.

“After 2.5 years of being insulted, berated and lied to by the Daily Planet’s executive editor – and having my stories distorted by the deletion of quotes from persons Becky O’Malley hates and the addition of her nasty remarks about such people – I have left the Planet,” Scherr said in an email she sent to friends last Thursday.

O’Malley says Scherr’s accusations are “almost 100% untrue.” “I don't really believe that journalists should sue for libel,” O’Malley said in an email to the Snitch, “but I'm mightily tempted, since these accusations are in fact defamatory on their face.”

In her email to friends last week, Scherr said she’d finally had enough of her boss after O’Malley assigned her a story about complaints over various groups’ endorsement processes in city elections. On Sept. 11, the Daily Planet published a story by Scherr with the headline, “Candidates Question Validity of Club, Union Endorsements.” The story quoted mayoral candidate Shirley Dean and City Council candidate Sophie Hahn grousing about their opponents stacking endorsement meetings of local political organizations with their supporters.

Scherr says that after the story came out, she learned that Hahn herself had been guilty of trying to stack the Wellstone Democratic Club’s endorsement meeting. Scherr said O’Malley knew this, but didn’t disclose the information to Scherr before the reporter wrote the Sept. 11 endorsement piece.

“When she assigned the story, O’Malley had in her possession a flyer written by Sophie Hahn in which Hahn urges her supporters to join the Wellstone Club in order to secure the club’s endorsement and offers to pick up Wellstone membership forms, dues and voter proxies,” Scherr wrote in her email last week.

“I could no longer be part of a newspaper with such a lack of journalistic integrity.”

The Snitch called Scherr to ask her why O’Malley didn’t share the information with her. “I can’t be sure of her motives,” Scherr said. “My assumption is that she’s supporting that person (Hahn).”

O'Malley denies concealing the information from Scherr. In fact, she says she told Scherr all about Hahn and her Wellstone Club efforts. O'Malley writes to us: "How did Judith miss all this? You tell me. It was openly discussed out loud in our very small newsroom in addition to whatever was said specifically to her." O'Malley added that she hadn't ever seen or spoken to Hahn before the flap over the endorsements.

O’Malley and her husband, Michael, bought the community paper in 2003. It had originally been launched in 1999 as a free daily, but now only publishes once a week.

Before buying the Daily Planet, O’Malley was a well-known activist in town who served on the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The paper’s news coverage and editorial pages often reflect O’Malley’s anti-development sensibilities.

Scherr had been editor under the Daily Planet’s previous ownership, but left before the paper was sold. The O’Malleys initially lured Scherr back to be editor again, but Scherr changed her mind before the paper re-launched under the new ownership. According to a story in the Daily Californian at the time, Scherr “had initially been skeptical that Becky O'Malley would be able to separate her political philosophy from the paper's content.”

But Scherr says she eventually wound up returning to the Daily Planet as a reporter because she missed working in the newspaper business. She also acknowledged that for the most part she worked without interference from O’Malley.

O’Malley says she is contemplating writing a rebuttal to Scherr’s claims with the “correct facts.” If she does, we’ll link to it here.

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.

A reporter for the Berkeley Daily Planet resigned last week, claiming that the political views of the executive editor are influencing the paper's content.

In an e-mail addressed to friends, former reporter Judith Scherr accused Planet Executive Editor Becky O'Malley of shaping articles around her own political views.

"I could no longer be part of a newspaper with such a lack of journalistic integrity," said Scherr in the e-mail.

In an interview, Scherr said that her articles have been altered to reflect what she claimed were O'Malley's political biases for more than two years.

"Sometimes I believed that stories were being pitched to me because she wanted to highlight someone that she was supporting," Scherr said. "She would add little things to stories that made people either look good or look bad according to how she felt about them without telling me."

Scherr said the final straw came after she was assigned to write a story that she claimed was influenced by O'Malley's alleged bias.

The story, published on Sept. 11, concerned mayoral candidate Shirley Dean and District 5 City Council candidate Sophie Hahn.

Scherr said she was unaware that Hahn had packed an endorsement meeting with supporters, which she said O'Malley had known about when assigning the story.

"I was pretty upset because that meant that when the editor assigned the story, she had this piece of information that totally contradicted what would have been an important part of the story," Scherr said in an interview.

However, O'Malley said Scherr was informed of Hahn's plan to pack the meeting before beginning to report.

"I think she's lying and I don't really know what her problem is," O'Malley said. "It's very, very strange-she complains that she missed one crucial fact which she believes it was my job as an editor to tell her. I cannot image how she missed it because everyone else in the newsroom heard it. I'm sorry poor Judith seems to have taken this turn, it's very unprofessional."

O'Malley said Scherr had never complained about any politicizing of any of her articles.

However, Scherr said she frequently battled O'Malley during the editing process.

"I did all the time," Scherr said. "Sometimes I would be in the office and see the changes and then confront her about it. I had to pick and choose my fights, but I brought that up to her many times."

Although such alleged conflicts of interest happened at papers of all sizes, Neil Henry, interim dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, said it is more likely to occur in smaller papers.

"You may find more of it in small papers because they're very small operations and they're often keenly tied to local business and political interests," he said.

Henry said the alleged bias is problematic because it compromises a journalist's ability to serve the public.

"You want your journalists to be beholden to the public and the public interest," he said. "When a publisher has people working on a staff who just follow the party line, they aren't really serving the public's interest."

O'Malley said the Planet received a recorded voice mail from an unknown source threatening to expose Scherr's e-mail.

"It was a little bit scary-it was a recorded message on the voice mail saying that they sent (Scherr's) letter to all print media so your days are numbered," she said. "It's frightening and it's threatening to all of us."

According to Henry, Scherr's allegations are evidence of difficult times for the Planet, which stopped publication in 2002 and reopened in 2003 under the leadership of O'Malley and her husband. The paper scaled back its production to one day a week in April 2008.

"It's very sad when these things happen, particularly at a newspaper like the (Berkeley) Daily Planet that's just struggling to survive," Henry said. "There's so many stresses on that newspaper for survival in the digital age, so I'm not surprised that these things are happening."

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