The war against the Daily Planet

The Berkeley Daily Planet, my last employer, is not a paper without its faults, though that’s true of every paper where I’ve ever worked. But one of the paper’s greatest strengths has been its willingness to provide a platform for the public to express a dizzying array of viewpoints, some frankly crazy, some devastatingly on point.

Through its op-eds and letters to the editors, all from readers, the Planet offers a unique forum in a very unique community.

Which is why a gang of Zionist thugs—and thugs they are—have terrorized its advertisers through a sophisticated campaign of direct mailings and in-business meetings, all laced with lies and intimidation.

The campaign, coupled with the current economic collapse, have hamstrung the paper, leading directly to the layoff of two of its three reporters [of whom I was one].

As my last major investigative project for the paper, I looked into the attackers and discovered a troubling phenomenon, the Zionist anti-Semite.

Wait, you say, how can a Zionist be an anti-Semite? Simple, I reply, by disparaging the Middle East’s predominate Semitic peoples, the Arabs. If you doubt this, just go to the dictionary and look up the word “Semitic.”Merriam-Webster defines it thusly: “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs b : a descendant of these peoples.”

In a nifty bit of semantic subversion, “anti-Semitism” has become the term for what would be better called, depending on its context, either anti-Jewish racism or anti-Zionism, two very different creatures which the Zionists insist are identical and have become so in everyday discourse.

One of the leaders of the campaign against the paper is Jim Sinkinson, a public relations guru who makes a handsome living teaching PR types the finer arts of spinning the media. In his other incarnation, Sinkinson is the voice of FLAME, a San Francisco-based outfit which pitches the Zionist message under the tutelage of Daniel Pipes, a professional Zionist who leads the campaign to purge campuses of faculty who criticize the policies of the Israeli government.

According to a Feb. 27, 2001,  Village Voice article by Cynthia Cotts, FLAME founder Gerardo Joffee once told a reporter, “All Arab Muslims may not be a bunch of fanatics, but I’ve never met one who isn’t.”

FLAME’s website also carried a Joffee piece endorsing a hoary quotation from Winston Churchill: “How dreadful are the curses Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!. . .Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. . .“[n]o stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Anti-Semitism, anyone? And what about the role Islamic culture played in preserving the works of the ancient Greek philosophers? In advancing medicine? In mathematics, including algebra [an Arabic term] and Arabic numerals?

And lest we forget, Jews were the first folk slaughtered in the First Crusade, an in Europe. And when Jerusalem was captured by the Crusaders, Jews were slaughtered right along with Muslims. No wonder Jewish soldiers later volunteered to fight with Saladin.

Yet Sinkinson and his ilk endorse the likes of John Hagee, the Dispensationalist Texas pastor who has raised millions for their cause. Not because he loves Jews, but because he believes all Jews have to be forced to return to Israel so that all but the 144,000 who embrace the “true Messiah” will be slaughtered so the Second Coming can occur. And Hitler? Hagee says he was a hound sent by God to bring about the return of the Jews to that oh-so-bloody “holy” land.

But a sizeable minority of Jews are opposed to what is commonly defined as Zionism, the imperial drive to reclaim what they perceive as the one-time boundaries of ancient Israel, a process which the more extreme of its proponents, including those who now run the Israeli government, seem to equate with ethnic cleansing. But to the militant Zionists, of course, these are self-hating Jews. . .

I focus here on Sinkinson because he’s the best-financed of the lot. There are others, and I did a lot of research on them while I was with the Daily Planet, and you can find my work here.

I’m writing this now because of a peculiarly noxious article which appeared last Friday in the New York Times which conveniently omitted a few facts, including the performances of two of that paper’s editors at a recent PR forum sponsored by Sinkinson.

The Daily Planet is a small paper, and the only locally owned publication in the Berkeley area. While Executive Editor Becky O’Malley vows to keep up the fight, the Zionists have done it heavy damage. What has happened to the Planet is a stark warning to other media of what awaits them if they accept significant numbers of letters and op-eds critical of Israel policies. Sadly, the only mainstream media mention of the campaign is the Times’ sad story of Nov. 27. My articles of June 4 were ignored. Hopefully, the campaign’s latest incarnation will gather some more attention. Why are the American media so silent now, if not for fear that the same thing could happen to them?

I’ll devote some more space in later updates to the campaign and what it means for that dying beast we once called “the free press.”

And for the Daily Planet‘s response to the Times article, see here.