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 Berkeley area.  However, anti-Semitic pieces seem to be welcome from every corner of the earth.  The author of the above lives in Atlanta, Georgia. 

This anti-Semitic canard prompted Community leaders to respond with this letter to the Daily Planet, published in its December 23, 2009 edition:

Editors, Daily Planet:

In its Dec. 3, edition, the Berkeley Daily Planet published a letter from an Atlanta man who egregiously claimed that Zionist Jews conspired with Eichmann and Hitler in the Final Solution. In the letter, he stated, “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.”

This type of repellent fiction may be commonplace on neo–Nazi websites where Jews are often blame for their own victimization, but any responsible newspaper would reject this erroneous and inflammatory statement.

However, the Daily Planet has a history of making Jews scapegoats. Israelis and their American Jewish supporters have more than once been compared to Nazis. Local American Jews have been called spies and fifth columnists for Israel. A writer once gloated that she was lucky that she did not marry a Jew. In 2006, the Daily Planet printed a letter from India which claimed that the Jews got what they deserved in the Holocaust and then repeated numerous anti-Semitic canards. Many of us communicated to the Daily Planet our rejection of this hatred at that time.

No one is saying the paper does not have a right to print viewpoints that are critical of Israel. We are saying that it has a responsibility to our community to not print anti-Semitic falsehoods. We understand that Daily Planet Executive Editor Becky O’Malley professes free speech “absolutism” as her reason for publishing these anti-Semitic calumnies. However, she has recently stated that she would never publish junk science that might harm the public good (e.g., that the swine flu vaccine is dangerous), and she has never, to our knowledge, published any hate speech directed at other minorities. Is it too much to ask that she likewise desist from publishing false, hateful speech directed at Jews?

Again, what we are requesting is not a call for censorship. Rather, we are requesting that the publisher and editor of the paper exercise substantially more responsibility in what they print and cease publishing dishonest and hate-filled speech against Jews in general and against Israel in particular, where nearly half the Jews on earth reside.

Jonathan Bernstein, Regional Director, Anti-Defamation League
Gordon Wozniak, Berkeley City Council
Rabbi James Brandt, Executive Director, CEO of the Jewish Community Federation of the East Bay
Rabbi Ferenc Raj, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple Beth El
Rabbi Jane Litman, Western Regional Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

For Becky O'Malley's response to this article, see here.