As you have no doubt figured out by now, I have a mean streak a mile wide. And while I thoroughly enjoy ripping the iridescent wings off of little puppies, torturing goblins by waving silver at them, and depriving monkeys of a valuable source of protein by de-lousing them, the cruel and vindictive thing that I probably most enjoy doing is snarking morons.
Such as Becky O'Malley - publisher of the Berkeley Daily Planet.
[Exposé of the BDP here: http://dpwatchdog.com/ ]
BERKELEY DAILY PLANET
The BDP scrabbles for survival in that narrow hell halfway twixt advertising rag and vanity publication, and, attempting to boost sales, panders shamelessly to the ignorant gut-reaction bleeding hearts and campus anti-Semites in the burg of Berkeley.
Under Becky O'Malley's leadership, the Berkeley Daily Planet has established a pattern of obsessive anti-Israel invective and vitriol. Which, in Berkeley, is ideologically mainstream and reflects a comfortably middle-class weltanschauung.
Par for the course, and perfectly normal. In Berkeley.
RABBINIC UNANIMITY
The reasonable reaction to the anti-Semitism of the Berkeley Daily Planet is perhaps best expressed by a letter recently sent by the East Bay Council of Rabbis.
Quote:
"Those who have voiced their opposition to the Daily Planet’s coverage are entitled to speak and be heard. It is not accurate to label everyone who has disagreed with positions expressed in the Planet as militant right-wingers. "
[End quote]
I usually think of myself as a strident left-winger, in the classic liberal mold. But with the Berkeley Daily Planet's encouragement, I shall also try to think of myself as a militant right-winger.
This may prove extremely difficult - I would far rather be an 'effeminate liberal' than a 'misogynist RW bastard', to quote two terms flung into the discourse on a comment-string recently.
[This post: http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2009/08/get-those-rw-conservative-idiots-fact.html On this blog: http://dovbear.blogspot.com/ This comment string: http://www.haloscan.com/comments/dovbear/1140363519463313055/ ]
The crux of the letter sent by East Bay Council of Rabbis is particularly germane:
Quote:
"At times criticism of Israeli government policies and actions has crossed over into classically anti-Semitic expression when it targets Jewishness itself as a blameworthy status—as did the Kurosh Arianpour commentary the Daily Planet printed some years back. Disseminating hate speech against any ethnic or religious group, while it may be constitutionally legal, is not acceptable when allowed to stand on its own in a community paper and given the appearance of reasonable discourse. Hate speech against any group is unacceptable; in the same vein we would expect that the Planet would refrain from printing racist or homophobic material. The claim of freedom of the press does not excuse journalists from meeting the standards of civil discourse. "
[End quote]
SOURCE: http://dpwatchdog.com/dpnuts.html
What the rabbis wrote really says it all.
But, in case you want to go into further details, do please feel free to browse through the articles at the Berkeley Daily Planet Watchdog (http://dpwatchdog.com/). It's much better than actually wading through the miserable prose of the BDP itself.
[Consider this delightful comment about Becky O'Malley, for instance: "it has come time for her to seriously consider converting to Judaism. It would give her license for her obsession, and it might paradoxically help dissipate some of her inner psychological turmoil." ]
And please also sign this petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/fight-anti-semitic-rhetoric-at-the-berkeley-daily-planet/signatures.html
FYI: The Berkeley Daily Planet's editorial offices are at:
3023A Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
Phone: (510) 841-5600
Fax: (510) 841-5695
Feel free to write them a letter, using very simple words, and remember to complement them on their fearlessness. They like that.
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Crossposted at: http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/
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PERSIMMONS AND YAUCHOI
During the day it rained, albeit not very long. Which meant trying to find an umbrella. Something I haven't needed in months. Autumn is ...
7 comments:
The Daily Planet: 90% local coverage
10% anti-Semitism
How Berkeley can you be?
The "East Bay Council of Rabbis",isn't that just a once a month "lunch and chat" club for the local rabbis? From the tone of the Daily Planet one would think that it was a governing Rabbinic body with some sort of authority like a Modern Sanhedrin. I've come to expect anti-semitic comments and articles in that paper, but not deceptive ones.
R
Becky O'Malley Kills Free Speech
http://www.dpwatchdog.com/freespeech.html
On reading the August 13, 2009 edition of the Berkeley Daily Planet, we were sorely tempted to give it our much-coveted Hate Free Award, that is, until we received a complaint from one of our readers. Now we don’t know what to do.
Here is the problem. In the August 6 edition featured a letter by Hassan Fouda quoting Israeli extremists who made clearly racist remarks about Arabs. No one can deny that there are Israeli extremists. Gratefully, they represent a very small proportion of Israeli society.
F.M. responded with the following letter:
I must take exception to Hassan Fouda's "Propaganda from Kensington" in the August 6th issue of the Daily Planet. It has always perplexed me that Israel is judged only by its worse representatives and that any obscure quote from an obscure figure from history, politics or popular culture can be turned into "evidence" of Israel's inherent immortality. The essence of prejudice is the moving from the specific to the general- and that is precisely what Mr. Fouda does, when he quotes extremists that have been widely condemned and rejected by Israeli society.
Should we be as quick to judge the people of Gaza, who have elected a government whose very charter includes this incitement to genocide? "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."? Should we be as quick to judge the people of Gaza who have elected a government that categorically rejects peace "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."?
I urge people of conscience and Mr. Fouda to look beyond the extremists on both sides, to reject those that reject compromise, and to embrace the true peacemakers on both sides of this conflict. This is the path of justice and of lasting peace.
Faith Meltzer
El Cerrito
The problem is that high-minded free speech advocate, Becky O’Malley, deleted the words in bold print, and did so without the permission of the author. O’Malley was perfectly willing to print hate speech uttered by extremist Jews the week before, even though such people are on the extreme fringe of Israeli society and have the whole body of Israeli law stacked against them, but she deletes hate speech by Palestinians, even though that hate speech forms part of the very charter of the main Palestinian political party, Hamas, and is proudly displayed on Hamas’ own website. Moreover, this is the only known example of O’Malley editing a letter. What could have possessed her? We can only believe her hatred of Israel has trumped her alleged love of free speech. It is never a level playing field at the Berkeley Daily Planet.
A very strange incident indeed.
At a picnic last week, Becky O'Malley, the Berkeley Daily Planet's "grande dame" spent hours whining about how the planet was losing advertisers and losing money.
Get a clue Becky. Choices have consequences. Publish a quality paper- you'll get advertisers. Continue on your current path, you'll get deeper and deeper in debt. You're a clever little debutante, Becky....what will you choose?
The Daily Planet has tried everything in order to become solvent--everything, that is, but the obvious: REFORM.
The Berkeley Daily Planet has tried to sell subscriptions. Not many takers. Pretending to be a church, they have been reduced to begging for love offerings. Not a lot of takers there either. They announced that they would become a formal non-profit so that folks could at least tax deduct these love offerings to the vastly wealthy Becky O’Malley. But that didn’t pan out either.
In her May 21, 2009 editorial O’Malley announced her new plan. Over the summer of 2009 the Berkeley Daily Planet will pare back its print run (advertisers will love that) and try to charge $2.00 a copy. She actually does not call this a charge, but a “donation,” maintaining the religious schtick. O’Malley says that if only 5,000 people “donate” (i.e., pony up) each week the Berkeley Daily Planet can stay in business. Are there 5,000 aging radicals in Berkeley? Perhaps. Are there 5,000 aging radicals in Berkeley who are willing to pay $2.00 a week for the Berkeley Daily Planet? We will see.
Although the Daily Planet does appear to be in a death spiral, it is premature to announce its death. There may still be time for O’Malley to turn things around through a process of reform. Sadly, the Berkeley Daily Planet for the moment has chosen instead to lash out at the messenger (DPWatchDog.com). We are hoping that O’Malley soon recognizes the futility of this strategy. If she does reform, it can be a win-win for almost everyone. Berkeleyans can have a fine and informative local newspaper that does not set the town's residents at each other’s throats, while local businesses can have a newspaper that they can proudly identify with and support with their ad spends. The only loser will be DPWatchDog.com, which will have nothing left to do, and will have to fold. We at DPWatchDog.com are willing to make that sacrifice.
In its December 3, 2009 edition, the Berkeley Daily Planet revisited the theme of the Zionist Jews as Nazis. In the past we learned from the Daily Planet that Jews deserved what they got in the Holocaust, and we have also learned that Israelis are the new Nazis. Now we learn from a paranoid conspiracy theory by Jack Jersawitz that Jews were in league with Hitler in designing and executing the Final Solution. Some passages:
What I always find interesting is that in being attacked for your [Daily Planet critics’] Zionism, i.e., Jewish nationalist adherents to the idea of a Jewish State whose ideas—those of Jewish Zionist nationalism, not of all Jews—are akin to the ideas of Adolph Hitler and his organizer of the solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’ Adolph Eichmann with whom you Zionists collaborated in sending the bulk of Hungary’s Jews to the gas chambers in exchange for allowing your relatives and a few rich Jews to leave and go to Palestine as the basis for a Zionist state . . .
Indeed, anyone who digs into that history must realize, the Holocaust on which Zionism bases its accusations of anti-Semitism was in fact as much a product of Zionist collaboration, similar to the Vichy French collaboration, which served, save for one or two heroic exceptions, to cause Jews to go quietly and peacefully to their deaths instead of fight as at Warsaw.
This is indistinguishable from the type of rants that can found on neo-Nazi websites. O’Malley shuns pro-Israel submissions if they come from out of the area of Berkeley. But anti-Semitic pieces seem to be welcome from every corner of the earth. The author of the above lives in Atlanta.
Is it hyperbole to say shame on the Berkeley Daily Planet for publishing this?
http://www.dpwatchdog.com/zionists.html
http://dpwatchdog.com/sad.html
The Daily Planet announced today that it is ceasing print operations, effective February 25It will apparently continue on, at least for a while, as some kind of online echo chamber for Marxist and jihadi opinion, devoid of reportage.
We mourn its loss. A good local paper could have been a great civic asset. Regrettably, Daily Planet Executive Editor and Owner, Becky O’Malley, could never bring herself to represent the public good. Instead, she insisted on using her newspaper for the relentless dissemination of hatred and misinformation, enslaving it to her bitter prejudices and personal vendettas.
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