Jewish students and community members are flabbergasted over a commentary by a San Jose State junior that appeared in the university’s Spartan Daily.
The piece claimed the Mossad was to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and advocated the atomic destruction of Israel.
“When statements come out that infringe on other people’s right to live and to have an op-ed piece based on a hoax which has spread rampantly around the Internet is irresponsible,” said Arlene Miller, executive director of the Hillel of Silicon Valley. “They need to take some responsibility for what they print in their paper.”
The commentary, which appeared as a “viewpoint” on Monday’s letters to the editor page, carried the headline “Patterns in the Sept. 11 attacks point to Israeli Mossad.”
“The Mossad and Zionists are behind the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, past and future,” wrote the piece’s author, Romeo Bonet, an SJSU junior. “They are capable because they have access to the United States, have money and have blue eyes. The money the United States pays them exceeds $8 trillion a year. They spy on us as we speak.”
Bonet also claims “Israel started to lose world sympathy after the Intifada, and they want to gain it back. By doing this, they’ve won,” “Israel, the Mossad and Zionists always use names such as Mohammed whenever they want to frame Arabs or Muslims” and “The five Zionist journalists were awake waiting for the attacks with cameras turned to CNN, BIOS to Israel Fox. They control most media.”
What’s more, after implicating Israel as the evil force behind the terrorist attacks, Bonet wrote, “Whoever is responsible should be destroyed, and regardless of what country is behind it, I believe we should use atomic bombs.”
Attempts to reach Bonet were unsuccessful.
Critics of Bonet’s long letter-commentary claim it is riddled with factual errors and based on a blame-the-Jews myth generated by state-controlled Arab media following Sept. 11.
“This takes the prize,” said Yitzhak Santis, Peninsula director of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “It’s a conspiracy theory. It looks like he got it from the Internet. It was originated by a Hezbollah TV station and picked up by Pakistani media.”
Santis added that similar rumors generated by Arab media claim 4,000 Jews who worked in the Twin Towers received mysterious phone calls on the morning of Sept. 11 warning them to take the day off.
What’s more, Santis and others could only shake their heads at Bonet’s claim that the United States is pumping $8 trillion a year to Israel. In actuality, this figure is several times higher than America’s entire budget, and several thousand times higher than the actual aid to Israel, which is around $3 billion. Less significantly, Bonet also refers to F-16 fighter jets as “American tanks.”
Michelle Jew, the Spartan Daily’s executive editor, said the paper’s opinion page serves as a bulletin board for all students, regardless of their political views. She does not regret publishing the letter, nor missing its glaring factual errors.
“I didn’t make the errors in the letter. I didn’t write the letter. We have a total of eight editors on this paper and 12 to 14 reporters. We don’t have time to sort through every letter and fact-check them. We’re bogged down as it is,” she said. “I feel the opinion-page letters are a forum for students. This person has an opinion. I don’t agree with him, but that’s his opinion.”
Jew said her paper would print any letter, regardless of how offensive or extreme its content may be. When asked if the Spartan Daily would publish a letter advocating the re-institution of American slavery, she replied, “I would print it.”
Santis, who is also the JCRC’s Middle East affairs director, said just because the paper has the right to print a letter doesn’t mean it’s obligated to.
“They certainly have the right to print whatever they want; nobody should deny anyone the right to print whatever garbage they want,” he said. But the Spartan Daily needs to ask, “How do they want to be viewed? And how do they want to be used?”
The Spartan Daily angered Silicon Valley-area Jews last year when it printed a full-page ad from Holocaust denier Bradley Smith. At the time, the paper defended its right to publish the ad, which had been rejected by a number of campus newspapers.
Jew said the paper has received numerous angry phone calls, and several Hillel student leaders submitted a rebuttal to Bonet’s letter on Tuesday.
“For Bonet, these evil conspirators are ‘Zionists,’ by which he really means the eternal bogeyman that small and fearful minds over the centuries have turned into enemies of mankind: the Jews,” the rebuttal says. “Bonet’s hatred against Israel and the Jews is dangerous and horrific. That it found its way into a supposedly enlightened university newspaper compounds the evil. After the horror of September 11, haven’t we had enough of hate?”
Hillel’s Miller is hoping to organize a meeting with the paper’s senior editorial board and faculty advisers, along with Jewish student leaders, Santis and Jon Friedenberg, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose.
“A little bit of awareness and education needs to take place,” she said. “It needs to come at this meeting.”