In early August I linked to an explicitly antisemitic article in the Berkeley Daily Planet by an Iranian student named Kurosh Arianpour. To her credit, Becky O’Malley, the editor of the Planet, has written a pretty forceful rebuttal, addressed to Arianpour directly.
Not sure what took her so long, however, or what possessed her to print Arianpour’s piece without additional comment in the first place. In an earlier editorial, O’Malley responded to angry readers by emphasizing the importance of free speech — an essential democratic principle, most certainly. But she chose not to acknowledge legitimate concern about Arianpour’s hateful words. Until now.
“There’s a big campaign underway to persuade our advertisers to cancel their ads,” O’Malley tells Arianpour, before she lays into him for his antisemitism. “It threatens to shut down the paper,” she adds. That’s a shame, and it’s wrong. But in terms of foresight and damage control, O’Malley has performed rather poorly. In her missive to Arianpour she imparts some very valid lessons about antisemitism — but one wonders whether she just learned those lessons herself.
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Update: A friend directs my attention to the following sentence by O’Malley:
The very term ‘Jews/Zionists’ is an insult to the memory of Rachel Corrie, who was a Jew…
No, she was not a Jew.
Arianpour wrote that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust more or less deserved it. O’Malley’s response? We mustn’t insult Rachel Corrie. But O’Malley clearly doesn’t know anything about Corrie. My remarks above were too forgiving.
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