Sometimes First Amendment rights run into community sensitivities like a freight train into a ’73 Buick parked across the tracks.
Case in point: Berkeley Daily Planet editor Becky O’Malley knew she wouldn’t be making everyone in the Jewish community happy by publishing an op-ed submission she admits is “overt anti-Semitism,” but she decided to do it anyway.
The offshoot has been a cavalcade of letters, including one signed by 23 East Bay Jewish community leaders calling for an apology — an apology O’Malley says she owes no one.
The Aug. 8 op-ed was titled “Zionist Crimes in Lebanon,” and penned by Kurosh Arianpour, who claims to be an Iranian student studying in India. Among other charges, he blamed anti-Semitism through the ages — starting with Cyrus the Great in 539 B.C. and up to the Holocaust and present day — on Jewish behavior and Jewish racism. The full text is available online at: www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=08-08-06&storyID=24823.
O’Malley acknowledged that Arianpour’s diatribe is hateful and anti-Jewish, but claimed he represents a disturbingly large pool of educated anti-Semites around the world.
“It’s one thing to have a guy on Telegraph Avenue yell whatever he thinks through his matted beard. It’s quite different to have an intellectual, well-educated person say things like this,” she said.
“Most publications sweep that sort of thing under the rug … I happen to think it’s dangerous to say because we do not like what people have to say we do not have to listen to them.”
Members of the Jewish community, however, feel a respectable paper publishing an anti-Jewish screed is dangerous in its own right, and point to the Seattle Jewish federation shootings as an example of what can happen when an individual influenced by anti-Jewish hysteria decides to take action.
“This wasn’t someone expressing views about the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon conflict, he was espousing virulently anti-Semitic things like what you would have seen in Goebbels’ propaganda,” said Tami Holzman, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional assistant director.
Loren Basch, CEO of the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay and a signatory of the ADL-penned letter urging an O’Malley apology, concurred.
“She has a right to put it in there if she wants to, and she’s exercised that right,” he said.
But, he added, blaming Jews for anti-Semitism “didn’t lead to good things in the past and it won’t lead to good things now.”
A number of Berkeley politicians, including Mayor Tom Bates, have also written critical letters to the paper.
O’Malley took issue with a claim in the Jewish community letter that she had declined a meeting with communal leaders. She acknowledged that she had declined a meeting with the ADL, but said she had never been approached by dozens of Jewish leaders. In an editorial this week, O’Malley wrote that she’d be happy to meet with them, but only in a public forum — which Basch likened to a circus.
She told j., however, that she was open to dialogue and would meet with Jewish leaders in public or private.
“I’m sorry they feel bad, [but] do I think I owe them an apology? No I don’t, actually.
“It’s better for them and better for the whole world if nasty stuff is put on the table so everyone can see it. You come closer to solving the problem if you don’t sweep it under the rug.”