Thursday, October 08, 2009

BERKELEY DAILY PLANET - QUINTESSENCE OF INDECENCY

Sometimes I wonder whether the Berkeley Daily Planet has any shred of decency left. Is there no depth to which they will not stoop? Then there are times when I read the damn thing, or someone sends me an article, and I must refrain from vomiting.
Today is one such time.
Trust me, you need not know what that odious rag did now.


It still baffles me, after all this time, that the editor of that foul agit-prop pamphlet, Becky O'Malley, considers herself a journalist, a gifted writer, and a decent human being. Fortunately I am not the only person in the Bay Area to be appalled by her chutzpah.


According to the Berkeley Daily Planet Watchdog:
Quote:
'The Berkeley Daily Planet, as we will show, is a font of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel expression. It defends itself from the ugly charge of anti-Semitism by professing, instead, a very strict interpretation of the rights of free speech. However, while we have found all manner of anti-Semitic hate ("free") speech, in a thorough review of all past issues we have found only one expression of hate speech directed at any other group. That other group is police officers. Since Michael and Becky O’Malley bought the paper in early 2003, we have not found one single expression of hate speech directed against gays, Muslims, blacks, or any other ethnic or religious group. ' End quote.

http://dpwatchdog.com/



MS. O'MALLEY AND HER PETULANCE

Chutzpah is not something of which one would normally accuse a person of sterling Wasp background (sarcasm!), but there is sufficient reason to make an exception.

According to the Berkeley Daily Planet Watchdog:
Quote: 'She made her name in Berkeley fighting every form of development and progress. As a member of the Landmarks Commission, in particular, she most vehemently fought against the building if a synagogue, Beth El. The Northern California Jewish Weekly, the "J" reported how she fought the synagogue in this way in its January 19, 2001 issue:
"Although the hearing proceeded, much of the time it was less than orderly. O'Malley continually interrupted, spoke over other commissioners and had to be told repeatedly by Edwards that she was out of order. She passed notes to commissioners who were not disqualified, made faces, shook her head and, at one point, left her seat, walked in front of the commissioners' table and got a speaker's card." '
End quote.

http://www.dpwatchdog.com/3anti-semitism.html

There are several very interesting links about Becky O'Malley and the Berkeley Daily Planet on the website of the Daily Planet Watchdog. It is a much more refreshing read than anything the Daily Planet has published in quite a while.
Please show your support of the exercise of first amendment rights by reading the articles on the website of the Daily Planet Watchdog



PETITION - WE ARE JEWS AND NON-JEWS ...

And, if you are so inclined, I encourage you to sign a petition calling Becky O'Malley and her henchmen to task:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/fight-anti-semitic-rhetoric-at-the-berkeley-daily-planet.html


Please note: previous mentions of the Berkeley Daily Planet by this blogger and other include the following posts: Hate and the Daily Planet; Berkeley Daily Planet - Hatred's Own Propaganda Rag; Berkeley Daily Planet: Anti-Semitic Fishwrap; The Berkeley Daily Planet-The Beginning of the End; Daily Planet Watchdog and the Bitter Bitch.
If you know of any other blog posts about the Berkeley daily Planet that are not mentioned here, feel free to cite them in the comments.


The Berkeley Daily Planet is distributed free (being actually an advertising sheet, albeit one with pretensions) and is worth every penny.

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This article cross-posted on
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/
Feel free to read it twice.
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13 comments:

jonathan becker said...

hiya bad penguin. yeah, berkley is famous all over the world as the last bastion of "white revolutionary" anti- semitism, kudos for fighting the good fight. but that's not really why i'm writing.

i've been enjoying your comments over at dovbear for a few months now and was curious to check out your blog- which does not disappoint, well done- but you don't seem to have an "email the blogger" option so i have to do this in public.

i see in your bio you are "not a red sea pedestrian". this made me so curious i had to write and ask you: how does this work? how does a non-jew know as much as you obviously do about yiddishkeit, inter-jewish politics and yeshiva-speak? i am impressed and a bit humbled. i have a theory- you were adopted into a jewish family but didn't find out you were adopted until well into your baal t'shuva yeshiva studies (if your parents were ffb's you would have known your jewish status) and when you found out you naively told your rosh yeshiva and he suddenly and totally changed the way he related to you, causing you to think "what do i need this for? life is hard enough without 613 enigmatic mitzvot" and embarked on your new life as a...whatever it is that you do here that i like so much.

am i close? moadim l'simcha, anyway, never give up on the humor.

The back of the hill said...

how does a non-jew know as much as you obviously do about yiddishkeit, inter-jewish politics and yeshiva-speak?

Unbridled curiosity. Plus very good familiarity with the Torah, somwhat less so with Tanach, moderate familiarity at best with the Xtian Subsequentia. Followed by lots of subsequent reading, and an interest in languages.

life is hard enough without 613 enigmatic mitzvot

Hence in part the lack of an urge to convert. Plus conversion would require a temporary suspension of both scepticism and cynicism......

The 614th mitzvah is "I reserve the freedom to doubt", the 615 mitzvah is "I may disagree vociferously".

you don't seem to have an "email the blogger" option

It's listed in the occupation part of the profile.

The back of the hill said...

My family background is almost entirely disassociated Calvinist. And most Calvinists (well, other than those wussy Presbyterians) will angrily dissent from other Calvinists, especially ministers and good townspeople. To the point where they split off, form their own sect, and next generation experience a schism of their own.

Plus, Dutch Calvinism was never nearly as enchanted with the hard-core Jesus-leite - that was the bunch that tried to wipe us out for nearly a century (the Dutch-Spanish 80 years war) - as with the Torah.
Hence a superabundance of Tanachic names in the family tree: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Reuben, David, Salomon, Rebekka, Sarah, Tobias, Jozias, Johanan, Jeremias, Selah..... Very few Johns, Bills, or Bobs.

The back of the hill said...

For further explanation...

Attitude towards religion and a verbose description of the 'schismetism' of the Dutch Calvinists:
http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2009/08/i-despise-protestants.html
Long technical rant

Family and personal background:
http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2008/04/this-bloggers-what-and-why.html
Get out of Hell free card

It doesn't say it all. But it clarifies some things.

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The back of the hill said...

The Chinese comment above is pest-control spam. Which is unusual, as most spammatic comments (which I usually do not publish) are Japanese pornography and perversion. Not that I'm opposed to the Japanese world of fetish, neurosis, and oddity, heavens no! But it does get kinda dull when that it the ONLY weird reading matter offered.

Sofar I have allowed cheesecake spam (original flavour and chocolate), car rentals, lodgments, and handbags. All from Taiwan. If you have termites, white ants, destructive moths, fire ants, and fleas infesting your cheesecake, rental car, lodgment, or handbag, then do please click on the business links above. They will be delighted to assist you.

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Dan - Israeli Uncensored News said...

he-he, sort of Haaretz here in Israel

Anonymous said...

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

Anonymous said...

A Challenge for your readers

The 64 dollar Challenge
In the January 14, 2010 issue Terry Fletcher, claiming to be Jewish and anti-Israel, writes in part as follows:

In that light, I would also like to respond to the letter signed by Jonathan Bernstein of the Anti-Defamation League and others the week before, which states of Becky O’Malley that “she has never, to our knowledge, published any hate speech directed at other [non-Jewish] minorities.” I can only conclude that the signatories of that letter do not regularly read the Planet, or that their sensitivity to what constitutes hate speech directed a non-Jews is lacking. Over the years, I have read many letters to the Planet that have expressed anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and misogynist viewpoints. In fact many of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim letters are submitted by self-described Israel supporters, a prime example being a particularly hateful op-ed the Planet published on Oct. 15, 2009. (This is only one example out of many.)

He ends his piece with a joke. At least we think it is a joke:

In my opinion, neither that op-ed nor the infamous Arianpour one merited publication. I support Becky O’Malley’s efforts to consider the effects of what she prints and to take into account the detrimental effects of spreading hatred and prejudice in our community.

We concede that Fletcher has a point about the October 15, 2009 article. It was a “pro-Israel” piece which at its best was illiterate. O’Malley routinely rejects articulate and well reasoned pro-Israel letters. Without any doubt whatsoever in our minds, this was published by O’Malley explicitly to embarrass the pro-Israel community. See here.

Here is the $64 challenge

DPWatchDog will pay $64 to the first person who sends in a Daily Planet letter, commentary or article that contains hate speech directed against blacks, Latinos, gays, immigrants, Asians, or women, and we will continue to pay for each one that we receive that was printed in 2003-2009, O’Malley’s reign of terror. How’s that for a fun treasure hunt.

This is a not a trivial challenge. It has been our contention that the Daily Planet publishes hate speech directed against Jews, or as a stalking horse, Israel. This does not appear to be not in dispute. We have therefore concluded that the Daily Planet is in its totality probably anti-Semitic. However, we have also acknowledged that if the Daily Planet also publishes hate speech directed against, for example, gays, blacks, Latinos, Asians, or women then perhaps the paper is just generally hateful for the sake of free speech and not specifically anti-Semitic. Fletcher says that there are plenty of such pieces, and says that the ADL, et al. are mistaken probably because they do not read the Daily Planet. We don’t know about the ADL but we can tell you that we have not only read the Daily Planet, but have scoured every issue since the day O’Malley first went to print. All we could find was one hate filled tome praising the murder of Oakland police officers and one letter which in passing called two city council members, one black (Daryl Moore) and the other white (Gordon Wozniak), “monkeys”. Were it just Moore, we might think racism, but we have to give the writer some benefit of the doubt since the other “monkey” was white.

One further caveat. We have left out of our challenge Arabs and Muslims. “Islamaphobia” has been used by the Daily Planet to describe virtually anything that is pro-Israel. So, to avoid splitting hairs on this, we leave it aside for the moment from our challenge, but encourage our readers to submit examples of alleged anti-Arab or anti-Muslim hate speech. We’ll report back if there is anything out there.

So, if Fletcher is right that the Daily Planet is filled with hate directed at blacks, gays, women, Latinos, or Asians DPWatchDog stands to lose a fortune. Send in your examples and drain our coffers.

http://dpwatchdog.com/64dollar.html

Anonymous said...

Ding Dong, the Witch is dead

http://dpwatchdog.com/sad.html

The Daily Planet announced today that it is ceasing print operations, effective February 25. It 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.

Anonymous said...

The DP was just Becky's vanity project -- civic manipulation instead of gardening or ceramics. And it reflected her own personality -- strident, shrill and very, very unappealing. It shows what happens when someone with more money than talent decides to overreach, something like those rich republican ladies who want to buy themselves an election. Time to let go, Becky dear, and move on to another hobby, hopefully one that doesn't scare the horses.

DEATH BY NOODLES said...

All of you would probably like Steffy's latest on the Berkeley Daily Planet:
http://infectiousasian.blogspot.com/2010/03/berkeley-daily-planet-deservedly-dead.html

Here's an amusing quote: "I get the impression that the hothouse atmosphere of a college town leads to brain fever among the longtime residents. Especially those with no claim to any perspicacity or intellect."

I guess Becky O'Malley must've been feverish for quite a while. And I've heard that one of the contributing factors was that her bookkeeper cheated her - perhaps she should've been running a business instead of encouraging social discord and senseless hatred.

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