Public Comment

Because of the holiday break, we have an unusually large number of letters and commentaries this week. Our first thought, to save space, was to run the commentaries on the situation in Palestine and Israel on the web only, leaving only local topics in the print edition. But then one of our advertising sales people relayed the following message from one of her faithful retail advertisers: “Two customers came in the store over the Holiday and BLASTED me for running ads in your paper saying the paper is biased towards Palestine... .”  

That makes it a local story. If Berkeley feelings about the situation in Gaza are so strong that some residents continue to try to shut down the Planet because we're willing to publish all points of view on the topic, it’s a local problem. So we decided to print local commentaries on the topic after all, and for good measure to use a piece by distinguished Berkeley Rabbi Michael Lerner. If the anti-Palestine crowd were to succeed in choking off press criticism of Israel, we’d all be the poorer for it.