Posted By James Besser
Behind the Almontaser Stories / Larry Cohler-Esses, Editor at Large
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for The Nation Magazine denouncing inaccurate smear campaigns against Muslims, Arabs and critics of Israel as a kind of “new McCarthyism”---for which I was strongly criticized in some corners of the Jewish community.
This week I am under attack from another sector of the community, charged with practicing what I so recently denounced. The charge comes from my Page One story on Debbie Almontaser---one of those I cited in my Nation article as a victim of the New McCarthyism.
My story -- headlined “Ex-Arab School Head Rapped for Rally Partners” --highlights the identity or backgrounds of several speakers at a rally in support of Almontaser, who resigned under fire last August as leader of a new dual language Arabic-English public school in Brooklyn. The story implies that these supporters’ backgrounds stand in contrast to Almontaser’s own moderate public positions. It includes the attack of a critic who asks: “Now that [Jewish Week readers] know who the supporters of this school are, are they happy? Are they comfortable?”
The three speakers at Almontaser’s support rally who came under attack were part of a total of nine or 10 who appeared there, including a labor leader, a prominent Manhattan rabbi, an academic and the chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee (all also cited high up in the article). One of those angry about my highlighting the other speakers and their backgrounds asked: “Are you sure this is not tainted by neo-McCarthyism?”
I think the best way to answer this is to relate how the news judgments in this story came about. In this case, this includes how those news judgments interacted with personal feelings I had come to develop about the issues and people involved in this story.
Almontaser resigned last August under fire as founding head of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in Brooklyn. The new public middle school, which opened in September, offers a dual language, dual culture English-Arabic college prep curriculum. One of some 60 dual language public school programs in the city, it aims to draw in students from Arab and non-Arab backgrounds. But from its inception a group of critics has attacked the school and Almontaser herself for, they say, harboring a covert extremist and Islamist agenda.
None of this had any effect until Almontaser granted an interview to The New York Post last August. Almontaser was asked then about her association with T-shirts for local Arab American teen-age girls bearing the message “Intifada NYC.” The T-shirts were produced by Arab Women in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a group that shared office space with a separate, unrelated group on whose board Almontaser sat. Almontaser was quoted explaining that the root meaning of the word intifada---“shaking off”---had different meanings in different contexts; voicing her understanding that the word “is developing a negative connotation” due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and stating her belief that neither the T-shirts nor the girls wearing them meant to extol violence.
Right-wing media outlets slammed Almontaser for not having simply condemned the T-shirts. So did Stop the Madrassa, the group that charged the school and Almontaser with seeking to instill extremism in students. In her suit last week, Almontaser alleged that the Department of Education had illegally forced her to resign as interim principal in the face of this pressure and was now refusing to consider her application for the post of permanent principal.
At the time of her resignation, I wrote a story detailing how this was but the latest episode in a months-long smear campaign by forces opposed to the school who sought to portray Almontaser as an extremist. I detailed specific distortions and falsehoods they had put out about her in the months preceding the ill-fated Post interview. The story reviewed Almontaser’s long history of commitment to nonviolence and interfaith work with Jews and Christians.
The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater New York and Rabbi Michael Paley, who works for UJA-Federation, were among those who attested to this.
This story and another that followed led Almontaser and her attorney, Alan Levine, to offer me an exclusive interview with her shortly before they filed suit. During this interview, Almontaser reiterated her view that the Post reporter had sought to impose an inappropriate litmus test by asking her about AWAAM’s T-shirts: “I said [to The Post] this organization and its T-shirt have nothing to do with me or the school,” she said.
I also discovered then that I shared a rare common point of personal background with Levine. We had both, it turned out, done civil rights work in Mississippi many years ago and even shared some common acquaintances from that era, an intense and vivid period in both our lives. On top of this, it turned out that Levine’s spouse was Donna Nevel, the person who first recruited me to come to New York and work in Jewish journalism after I finished graduate school in Illinois in 1982. Nevel, with whom I had had no contact for many years, is one of the organizers of the community group defending Almontaser and KGIA.
On a personal level, I liked these people and what they were trying to achieve. I also disliked what I had, through my reporting, found to be the falsehoods, distortions and guilt-by-association charges that school critics had launched against Almontaser.
Because of this, my heart sank when I attended the support rally for Almontaser.
The lead speaker, with Almontaser at her side, was Mona Eldahry, who was introduced as executive director of AWAAM, the group that produced the T-shirts and---equally relevant---the group Almontaser had repeatedly stressed she had nothing to do with. Eldahry praised Almontaser in her speech for having refused to condemn the T-shirts or her organization.
I knew that Eldahry’s role as lead speaker on Almontaser’s behalf with Almontaser next to her ran up against Almontaser’s repeated emphasis previously that she had nothing to do with AWAAM. Whatever the situation before, she did now, and this change was news.
The news impact was similar when City Council Member Charles Barron stepped up to the microphone. Almontaser’s history---one she herself stresses---reflects a consistent commitment to nonviolence in confronting racial and social issues.
In contrast, Barron, after the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man in Queens, advocated protest marches and prayer—first: “Then, if they don’t respond to none of that, then don’t ask our people to be peaceful while they are being murdered,” he declared to hundreds at a protest rally last November. “We are not the only ones that can bleed.”
Barron is most famous lately for pushing for naming a street in Brooklyn after Sonny Carson, the late self-described “anti-white” activist involved in the CrownHeights riots and the protests against Korean owned stores in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Of less, but not no significance: I knew a young woman who spoke at the rally from the Council on American Islamic Relations would be of interest to Jewish Week readers. Some non-government investigators, such as Steven Emerson, have accused CAIR of having ties to terrorist groups. Former FBI counter-terrorism investigators have been quoted challenging this. At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department named CAIR as an unindicted conspirator in its recent---failed---prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation for allegedly supporting Hamas.
There was no way the issue of these speakers’ backgrounds could be kept out of a news story. At the very least, Stop the Madrassa would have something to say about how these speakers clashed with Almontaser’s public stand. And since in this case, they were speaking up for Almontaser with her at their side at a rally she endorsed with her presence, I would be obliged to quote the group.
Nevertheless, in my initial draft, I wrote about all this deep down in the body of the story. My lead angle was about Almontaser’s suit and some of the contents of the complaint. But when I turned my story in, Rob Goldblum, the paper’s managing editor, pointed to the section on the speakers and said no---this belongs at the top. Basically, he effectively ruled this, not the suit---whose imminent filing and basic outline had been previously announced and reported----is the story, at least for our readers.
I didn't like this instruction. At the same time, with the clock ticking relentlessly toward deadline, I could not think of one quick knockout response to show he was wrong----by which I mean wrong in his news judgment. Almontaser had made her lack of any connection to the T-shirt people a central point in her position that the Post was wrong to even be asking her about the shirts. Now the leader of the T-shirt people was her lead speaker. This was the "new" in the word "news," independent of whether one thought the T-shirt's message or AWAAM itself was right or wrong in its stance.
Throw in Charles Barron and the woman from CAIR, and the angle Rob favored was reinforced.
Rob Goldblum and I have a long relationship as editor and writer, one in which there is both trust and freedom to challenge and dispute. Yet I could not rebut him. In the rushed and frazzled way in which thought occurs as deadline looms, I concluded that I might well not like Rob’s instruction simply because I DID like Almontaser and did not much care for Stop the Madrassa’s distortions of her record.
I thought: this is what editors are for---to provide the distance from a story that a writer can lose.
Rob's job is to know his publication's readers and what is, or should be, important to them. It's true this can easily turn into simply pandering to their fears. But in this case, the news judgment criteria for Rob's position were pretty solid.
Therefore, my resistance to pandering here would consist of making sure I did not portray the presence of AWAAM or CAIR at this rally one dimensionally, as self-evident evils (as say, The New York Post might). In the space I had (a very big constraint), the best way to do this was by giving good play to the strong responses of Levine, Almontaser's attorney: that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater New York had actually offered AWAAM a mini-grant of $500 in 2005---a kind of heksher that, he argued, tied JCRC more closely than Almontaser to AWAAM; and that CAIR-NY's chief counsel is a mayoral appointee.
I was not sure what to do about Charles Barron. But Almontaser’s supporters challenge why any of this is relevant to the news. "Does the fact that Charles Baron and speakers from AWAAM and CAIR spoke at her conference cast any doubt in your mind on the facts of her case?” asked one. “If not, why mention them? Because your readers would be interested? How about if one of the speakers was gay?”
If Almontaser was presenting herself as an anti-gay rights advocate who had never had anything to do with gay people, such a speaker at her rally would, indeed, be newsworthy.
In short, there is a big difference between noting the way in which some speakers standing with Almontaser at her own rally stepped on her message; and say, charging---as one of her opponents did---that a member of KGIA’s advisory committee was a speaker at a Muslim youth camp, where another person also spoke who was accused in unidentified “court papers” of helping yet a third person make backup copies of a fundraising site for terrorism. The latter is, to my mind, guilt by association. The former is reporting.
Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker famously wrote about journalists being seducers and betrayers, as a matter of necessity. She spoke about this as a conscious art good journalists cultivated. I never accepted this. But I certainly experienced a deep divergence in this story between my sense of connection and sympathy on a personal level with one side and my professional obligation.