isreal and the middle east is a sticky situation, as we all know isreal was created after WWII to help jewish people establish a land and identity for themselves after their persecution, and yet how that situation has developed is less than ideal. it kind of reminds me of bush saying “i have earned political capital and i intend to SPEND it”…that sent shivers down my spine. being granted the opportunity to start afresh, as jews were with israel, or as bush was in the last election, does not mean that that opportunity can be blindly abused.

as for the spiked column that lead to goldsborough’s resignation, i frankly found it laughable that that is the one copley chose to kill…i found it to be completely admirative of jewish voters’ intelligence in elections in being able to separate issue from issue and not just blindly vote for a candidate who supports our “homeland” in favor of displacing others. don’t get me wrong, i hate terrorists, be they palestinian or other, but historically, i don’t find that israel has handled things appropriately. and when they did have a leader, yitzhak rabin, who tried to work towards a middle-east peace, he was assassinated not by a palestinian fanatic but by one of his own people. in the same way that the u.s. has blown all the international goodwill we received after september, 11, israel has blown much of the goodwill that the jewish people received after WWII.

so let’s wake up, open our eyes….goldsborough’s voice of dissent in a blatantly conservative publication will be so sadly missed. whether or not you agreed with him, he provided balance which is what ed and op-ed pages are supposed to do…it is appalling that our one and only newspaper will no longer have that balance.

Now if you’ve got evidence of Goldsborough being truly anti-Semitic let’s see it. Smash - why not post your text from Early Days verbatim? Why only include out of context quotes? Bottom line is the UT didn’t even carry the story of Goldsborough quitting - we have to hear about it here on this blog - ridiculous. Does anyone still consider the UT a reputable “news” paper?

As usual he doesn’t miss an opportunity to either stereotype Jews or Israel. I think that Rabbi Rosenthal got it just right. Goldsborough is an individual who is mean spirited, ideologically anti-Israel, profoundly insensitive to Jewish issues, and one who will not be missed by the Jewish community. —Morris Casuto, Regional Director, Anti-Defamation League.

James O. Goldsborough, a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, wrote on March 3, 2003 that the idea to go to Baghdad is “to serve Jerusalem,” that Bush’s war “has nothing to do with peace and security,” but is the “brainchild of a handful of neo-conservatives … who have argued that Iraq was the main threat to Israel.” The neo-conservatives he mentions - Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, David Wurmser - are all Jews. No mention of the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys. —Anti-Semitism, Pure and Simple by Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League

Unfortunately the Anti-Defamation League site is currently under cyberattack and won’t be viewable for a day or so.

Goldsborough agreed to share the killed column with jewishsightseeing.com, so that the Jewish community could judge for itself. This act doesn’t mitigate his objectionable body of work as a whole.

I’ll admit that the spiked column is milder than many of his previous columns. I’ve read much more virulent columns by Goldsborough, so I guess this was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. As one jewishsightseeing.com reader noted “This column was mild compared to most of his diatribes against Jews.”

You need to be a SDUT subscriber to view his older columns. If you are, read Israeli-fueled war in the Middle East from Jan 24, 2002 to get a feel for this leftist. As another jewishsightseeing.com reader observed “I protest against your bias, distortions, selective quoting, giving a pass to the Arab side despite corruption and terror, and outright lies.”

Sad, really, that again in the realm of politics, we have lots of heat, and precious little light here on San Diego Blog. I had no idea when I posted about this there would be this level of animosity about it. I was simply reminded of Neil Morgan’s firing, and thought it would be of note for the blog because of that.

I can’t decide based on this thread what I feel about Goldsborough’s quitting. Justified? Not? Is he a simpleminded anti-Semite? Is he a misunderstood leftist? Who knows? I can see people hated him, and say he’s an anti-Semite. So how was he a columnist for the SDUT? What kept him there for as long as he was when he was such an odious voice?

You are right - Goldsborough did quit and in his farewell column it sounds like he was getting tired of the job. Certainly Goldsborough is a liberal (and the only one at the UT), but what I don’t understand are claims that he is an anti-Jewish bigot. I’m just asking for a little evidence.

Also, I listened to the These Days you were on with Goldsborough (which I thought you did an excellent job on) and the quotes you selected are taken completely out of context. I wish that KPBS made their archives available for more than a week so I could put a link to the stream. If you have a recording or a transcript, you should put a link to it here so readers can decide for themselves.

Route66,

I’ve been reading his column for the past year at least and nothing has ever jumped out at me as anti-Semitic. He’s a policy analyst who has been published in the moderately conservative Foreign Affairs.

I’m not trying to elevate him on any pedestal but calling someone a Jew-hating bigot is a pretty serious accusation and I think it deserves some evidence.

He’s a nice enough guy, to be sure. But his claim that he is a persecuted “moderate” is ridiculous on its face.

By way of example, here’s a direct quote from his closing remarks:

“I really object to the use of the word “terrorism.” Were the Minutemen in this country terrorists? When you have a foreign country coming over and occupying your country illegally, and you resent that occupation, when you resist it, like the French resisted the Germans – are you a terrorist? Or, are you a freedom fighter? Are you an insurgent? Are you a guerilla?

“What would Americans do, if a foreign country had invaded us, and tried to impose their government on us? And (if) we resisted it – would I be a terrorist? No, I don’t think so. And I don’t regard these people, who are opposing an illegal war, as terrorists either.”

Now, some may consider that a “moderate” position to take on the Iraq War. I don’t.

But let’s keep some perspective here. Goldsborough wasn’t fired. He quit, after one of his columns was spiked. he claims that he was being “punished” by the editors for opposing Bush. I sincerely doubt that is the case.

The chief editor has the final say on what gets published, and what doesn’t. If he found that something Goldsborough wrote was offensive to Jews, then it was his legitimate choice to refuse to run that column.

Goldsbourough didn’t have to quit. He could have submitted his spiked column to any number of publications, including The Nation, that would have been happy to run it. He’s not the first writer to have a column spiked — but most don’t cry like a baby about it, and tear up their contracts.