The editors of the Justice have received a couple of anonymous notes this semester that echo an attitude expressed in similarly anonymous notes sent to them last semester. The four notes seem to have been written by different people, and this concerns me. I don't think the notes represent a "trend." But they do reveal what I would call an "illiberal tendency" among some members of the Brandeis community-along with a fundamental misunderstanding about what a newspaper is, how its editorial pages are not the same thing as its "news" and what its function is in a free society. I devote my column this week, therefore, to educating what I hope is a handful of readers.

    A newspaper has not committed a journalistic lapse when it reports on an event that you wish had not happened or runs an editorial that you disagree with. The Justice did not "go far beyond legitimate bounds" or "glorify the terror of civilians" when it reported on Max Blumenthal's visit to our campus last month and then ran two editorials about Blumenthal's work-one that was critical of Blumenthal and another that defended his ideas.

    It was also not "disgusting" of the editors to run two guest editorials last semester in which Brandeis students offered what I would consider to be flawed, but nevertheless refreshing (and possibly even necessary) alternatives to the understanding of "social justice" that has come to dominate the culture on this campus. The reader who wrote that the Justice should have "refused to publish" those editorials is just plain wrong, and his or her time would have been better spent crafting a response that the editors could have run on the editorial pages of a later issue, rather than anonymously calling for censorship.

    The first obligation of a newspaper is to inform citizens about their community-who its members are, what they are doing and why, how and when they are doing it. There are students on this campus who believe the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians in Israel amounts to "apartheid." Because of their belief, these students recently participated in a national, week-long protest that uses the word "apartheid" to describe the Israeli government's policies. That participation involved bringing a controversial journalist to Brandeis who spoke, then, about his book in which, I am told, he compares the situation in modern-day Israel to the situation in Nazi Germany (full disclosure: I have not read Blumenthal's book).
    There are also students on this campus who believe it is hyperbolic, inaccurate, dangerous and even bigoted to use the word "apartheid" to describe the complex political and cultural situation on the ground in modern-day Israel. These students are well aware of the national movement that uses that word, and they believe the Brandeis students who participated in Israel Apartheid Week are uninformed. These students insist that "all citizens of Israel are fully equal under the law," and that Israel is "the exact opposite of the institutional discriminatory system of actual apartheid that was in effect in South Africa."

   I know this, because I read those quotes in the Justice's coverage of the Max Blumenthal visit. I have spoken with the editors of the Justice about the article they ran on Blumenthal's talk. One reader wrote with dismay about the "many articles" the Justice's reporters wrote about the activities of Israel Apartheid Week, insisting that "this should be fixed." Actually, there was just one article-in the March 4 edition. And I believe there really should have been two.

The editors tell me that because of deadline restraints and a staff shortage, they elected to collapse the coverage of Blumenthal's visit into an article that examined the controversy surrounding the very idea of an "Israel Apartheid Week." I thought their reporter produced a very balanced piece on the national movement and its manifestation on our campus. I would have liked to have read more, however, about the actual reaction to Blumenthal's talk-after the fact. But because the article was already running long, that reaction got short shrift.
I believe the reader who lamented the "many articles" in the Justice about Israel Apartheid Week may have been unaware of the difference between news and editorials. He or she spoke of the biased "wording of articles" in the paper and insisted that the Justice had an obligation to be "neutral." While there was only one news article about the protest week-and its language was quite objective-there were two editorials, and understandably, the writers of those editorials did not use disinterested language. This brings me, then, to the second obligation of a newspaper in a free society.

A newspaper should stimulate respectful conversation among the members of a community about the ideas that animate that community. To that end, the Justice published an editorial by Associate Editor Glen Chesir '15 (who has a regular column in the paper), criticizing Israel Apartheid Week and the greater Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (March 11). Chesir provoked readers to consider the extent to which the inflammatory language and actions of these movements inhibit the peace process.

The following week (March 18), the editors published a guest editorial from Prof. Harry Mairson (COSI), in which Mairson called attention to the numerous centers on our campus that are "devoted to institutionally supporting Israel." He suggested that the contrarian sentiments of Max Blumenthal were a necessary ingredient in any meaningful dialogue about the difficult situation in Israel.

To have a productive conversation, in other words, people have to be willing to hear and consider ideas that make them uncomfortable. This is precisely the attitude that a good newspaper tries to cultivate.
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