Zionist censorship at the San Francisco Chronicle-20 February 2006

Zionist censorship at the San Francisco Chronicle
20 February 2006
By Jeffrey Blankfort

I received this today from a concerned anti-zionist Jewish member of my email list who gave me permission to forward this correspondence to the list. The JCRC referred to is the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, the muscular arm of the Organized Jewish Community AKA The Lobby in San Francisco, and a major power behind the scenes. The reason for forwarding this is to point out, as did Jan Bauman, that the JCRC apparently determines whose letters the local newspapers, and particularly the main one, the SF Chronicle, will publish. I should say that I gave up long ago trying to get a letter published in the Chron while a number of extreme right-wing Jews have their opinions regularly published.

At the very beginning of the ISM movement, when the first group of volunteers returned to the Bay Area, the Chron sent a reporter and a photographer to do a story on them and they spent two hours interviewing and photographing them, several of whom were anti-Zionist Jews from the Bay Area. It was a genuine local angle story. At the same time, the SF JCRC, with Walter Shorenstein, the city's largest owner of commercial property, one of the most powerful Democrats in California and a longtime AIPAC board member, accompanying them, paid a visit to the paper's management.. Their complaint to the publisher and managing editor, both of whom are Jewish, was that the paper was showing a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bias and they wanted that stopped. The accusation was, of course, ludicrous, but it served as a warning that even though they were Jews, the editor and publisher had better watch out. The immediate result was predictable: The story on the ISM was killed.

Efforts to arrange interviews for visiting anti-zionist Israeli professors such as Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart have been stymied and reporters who I have spoken with seemed to indicate, without directly saying so, that there was a policy against doing stories about Israeli critics of Israel and I might as well give up. One of my list members, through some pushing, did manage to arrange for Pappe to interview the Chron's Israel-Palestine correspondent who announced in advance, that there would be no follow-up story. It should be clear from this and other similar stories around the country that the The Lobby controls the media, if not through direct ownership which is considerable, than through intimidation.
Source: http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=34073