Community forum in jeopardy over charges of anti-Semitism

But since March, that running commentary has been under attack by a small but vociferous group of critics who accuse the paper’s editor, Becky O’Malley, of publishing too many letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel. Those accusations are the basis of a campaign to drive away the paper’s advertisers and a Web site that strongly suggests The Planet and its editor are anti-Semitic.

“We think that Ms. O’Malley is addicted to anti-Israel expression just as an alcoholic is to drinking,” Jim Sinkinson, who has led the campaign to discourage advertisers, wrote in an e-mail message. He is the publisher of Infocom Group, a media relations company. “If she wants to serve and please the East Bay Jewish community, she would be safer avoiding the subject entirely.”

Ms. O’Malley denies any personal or editorial bias, and bristles at the suggestion that she should not publish letters about Israel in a city like Berkeley, which has a sizable Jewish community and a populace — and City Council — that often weigh in on Middle East and international affairs.

“Frankly, the term that crossed my mind was ‘protection racket,’ ” Ms. O’Malley said. “I think that is unusual to say the least that anybody would think that they could dictate a whole area of the world that is simply off limits for discussion.”

Whether right or wrong, Mr. Sinkinson’s campaign has left The Planet — a weekly already hammered by the recession — gasping for breath. Advertising sales revenue is down some 60 percent from last year, Ms. O’Malley says. In October, the paper trimmed its skeleton crew of full-time reporters to one from three, and has begun a fund-raising drive to keep publishing.

Still, she says she has no intention of stopping the publication of submitted letters, citing a commitment to free speech that is a legacy of the city where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s.

“I have the old-fashioned basic liberal thing of believing that the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech,” said Ms. O’Malley, 69, a veteran local journalist who bought the paper in 2002 as a retirement project with her husband, Michael, now 72. “If somebody says something you don’t like, say what you think. And I felt it a privilege here in my middle age to be in a position to make that happen.”

The paper has published unpopular opinions on other subjects, including a commentary from a local activist arguing that the murder of four Oakland police officers — none of whom were black — by an African-American parolee in March was “karmic justice” for past police killings of civilians. But such pieces are in a section of the paper that clearly states they “do not necessarily reflect the views of the Daily Planet.”

Mr. O’Malley, the paper’s publisher, said he thought The Planet’s critics were confusing letters from unaffiliated writers — the paper says it prints anything that is not libelous or obscene, with a preference for local writers — with official editorial positions.

“We publish things from people that we can barely stand to be in the same room with,” he said.

In addition to the letter-writing campaign, the paper has faced online criticism from dpwatchdog.com, a site that contains pages of what it calls anti-Semitic writings published in The Planet. The site’s editor, John Gertz, says his goal is not to close the paper, but “reform” it.

“The object is not to attack the press,” said Mr. Gertz, the president and chief executive of Zorro Productions, which owns the trademark and copyrights on the Zorro franchise. “The object is to turn the press into something responsible.”

Mr. Gertz complains that The Planet does not fact-check reader submissions, something Ms. O’Malley says is well beyond its resources.

“We make a serious effort to get most words spelled right in the headlines, which we don’t always achieve,” Ms. O’Malley said. “And we of course never knowingly print something that we know to be untrue. But, frankly, there are things we don’t know.”

Mr. Sinkinson, whose company publishes The Bulldog Reporter, a media guide, first took aim at The Planet in March, in a letter to advertisers likening the paper to a “publication that praises the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan.”

“In these tough economic times, is it really a good investment to continue advertising in a paper, one of whose main purposes seems to be the defamation of Jews and the state of Israel,” stated the letter, which included a cancellation notice advertisers could send to the paper as well as reader submissions published in The Planet that Mr. Sinkinson described as “hate-speech.” Among those was a letter printed in 2006 from an Iranian student then living in India, Kurosh Arianpour, who suggested that the Jews had brought historical persecution — including that by the Nazis — on themselves.

Mr. Arianpour’s letter brought a sharp rebuke from local civic and Jewish leaders, and two weeks later, a published explanation from Ms. O’Malley, who wrote that the letter’s content was “very nasty” and amounted “to untrue racist generalizations of the worst sort.”

But, she wrote, “I still don’t think that keeping sentiments like this out of The Daily Planet will make him or people like him go away.”

The fight has gotten personal on occasion, with one of Mr. Gertz’s earliest complaints centering on a 2005 letter responding to a letter he had written to The Planet. In that response, a Planet reader said Mr. Gertz wore the “funniest-looking” yarmulke.

On his Web site and in a written report he has assembled, Mr. Gertz has called Ms. O’Malley “brutish,” “a second-rate intellect” and “ungifted” and suggested she may have learned what he calls anti-Semitic views while growing up in a largely non-Jewish community in Pasadena, Calif.

“It never occurred to me, frankly, till somebody submitted the research to us about her background, to begin to ask the question of, well, ‘Maybe she learned this stuff on her daddy’s knee,’ ” Mr. Gertz said. He also attacked a regular Planet contributor as a Stalinist and called The Planet’s readership “aging radicals” who would be “of only marginal interest to most would-be advertisers.”

Wars of words are not uncommon in Berkeley, particularly regarding the Middle East, a contentious topic that the City Council occasionally addresses though it has no sway over foreign policy.

Councilman Kriss Worthington, who condemned the Arianpour letter but was still singled out by Mr. Gertz as a “gullible politician,” said he tried about a decade ago to devise a moderate council policy toward Israel. He failed.

“It was the only council item I ever wrote that got no support from either side,” Mr. Worthington said.

Local Jewish leaders, meanwhile, seem wary of getting involved in the campaign against The Planet. The Anti-Defamation League’s regional director in San Francisco, Jonathan Bernstein, said that while the paper had published some “divisive and hateful” material, Mr. Sinkinson’s and Mr. Gertz’s efforts were their own.

“I don’t think anyone in the organized Jewish community is involved in this in any way,” Mr. Bernstein said.

Both sides met recently to discuss possible resolutions to their dispute, but it was unclear if progress had been made.

Ms. O’Malley said the paper would abide by its mission to publish diverse opinions, trusting what she called “the self-correcting process” of open debate.

She also offered a possible two-entity solution to the conflict, saying of her critics, “They could start their own paper.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company