Public radio station fires editor who dared to speak out about Israel’s ‘brutal military occupation’

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Ugly news about the American discourse, and the role of the Israel lobby inside liberal institutions. A longtime editor at a public radio station in Baltimore has been fired in part because he questioned US pandering to Israel. David Zurawik reports in the Baltimore Sun:

Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM, has been dropped by the public radio station after more than nine years on the job there.

Khalid, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, had been on probation in February for comments he posted on the Facebook page of a friend questioning the influence of Israel on American politics.

“I, for one, have had enough of this pandering before the Israeli regime,” he wrote. “The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”

Neither Khalid nor the radio station could be reached for comment by the Sun.

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Americans will have to develop a samizdat discourse, or learn irony and indirection and sarcasm, like Eastern Europeans before the fall of the Berlin wall.

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>> “The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”

Mr. Khalid appears unaware that the Jewish state is a glorious democracy that is merely defending its 1948 1967 borders interests against the holocaust of Iranian nookyoolar Hitlerdinejad. And Hamas.

Anyway, the Jewish state has offered to give Palestinians a few scraps of land they can use to pretend they have an actual state, so what’s up with all this negativity about the Jewish state? I mean, c’mon, it’s a glorious democracy!

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This is hysterical. I received an email last week outlining how NPR was changing their ‘code’ of ethics in broadcasting and programing from one of ‘he said,she said” presentations to one of announcing the truth based on where the facts fall and pointing out when interview guest make false statements. I though to myself this can be good or bad depending on whether or not this is a real change for presenting ‘facts or just another set up to harden Israeli propaganda.

And now I see a NPR station monitoring a employees ‘private statements on a Facebook page and putting him on “probation” for his own opinion? Regardless of whatever else he may have done to get himself fired there is no justification for probation for personal opinions.

Send the station a email…..the President of wypr and the programing directors:

tbrandon@wypr.org
bienstock@wypr.org
fsmith@wypr.org

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there’s more to this story than meets the eye

http://www.maynardije.org/richardprince/done-facebook-and-flipping-bird

Before the suspension was lifted, a Khalid nemesis from their days years ago at the Baltimore Sun, G. Jefferson Price, a former editor and foreign correspondent, visited WYPR studios for an interview.

Price could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but he wrote about the episode March 15 on his blog:

“A man flipped me the bird this week!

“He did it in a place where one might least expect it. This was not an expression of road rage on a busy roadway; it was at the studio of Baltimore’s local public radio station, WYPR where I was participating in a discussion of conditions in Uganda and the astounding impact of the viral video ‘Kony 2012.’ I was in the sealed interview booth. He was outside, on the other side of the large window looking into the booth. The gesture astonished me so much that I lost track of the first question posed to me by the host, Dan Rodricks.”

That person was Khalid, though Price did not name him. Price went on to recall Khalid unfavorably from their Sun days, adding, among other comments, “He had an exclusively-held high opinion of himself but management was unimpressed.”

Steiner, a staunch Khalid defender, recalled that Price and others urged the powers-that-be at WYPR not to hire Khalid nine years ago, a possible motivation for Khalid’s gesture. “Sunni says what he has to say. He wasn’t a diplomat. I don’t think Jeff Price was used to a black man talking to him like that,” Steiner said.

Moreover, “everybody who’s worked in the business knows people give each other the finger all the time in the newsroom.” Maybe it’s worth a suspension. “But to fire him? This is a guy who built that newsroom,” Steiner said.

Khalid, a former foreign correspondent for NPR and a Muslim, filed a lawsuit in 1997 against the network that sought more than $2 million in damages, accusing NPR and its then-foreign desk editor, Loren Jenkins, of racial and religious discrimination. It was settled out of court in 2003.

The lawsuit was cited by detractors as a reason WYPR shouldn’t hire Khalid — he was called “litigious” — but also a reason why Steiner welcomed him.

“He was blacklisted, even though you can’t prove it,” Steiner said. “Sunni’s really bright, a fearless reporter, a strong, sharp guy. Public radio in general is just a white male institution. They have no black reporters. This is a majority African American city. Sunni helped produce over 4,000 stories over nine years. He was the head of that news department, along with Mary Rose Madden,” a producer. “He worked harder than any man I ever knew. He trained young people. He mentored so many young reporters.”

Steiner left WYPR, where he also hosted a talk show, in 2005. Since May 2008, “The Marc Steiner Show” has aired on WEAA-FM, an NPR member station at Morgan State University. He says he is working on other projects.

“I think they were just looking for a way to get rid of him,” Steiner said of WYPR and Khalid. “If I can, I’ll hire him again.”

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Too bad radio station hosts do not get tenured. They should, as they are the 4th branch of government.

article:
James Abourezk: Tales of the Israel Lobby: Threats, Dershowitz, & Embedded Lobbyists
“James Abourezk represented South Dakota in Congress from 1971 to 1979. CNI asked Senator Abourezk about his experiences with the Israel Lobby. In his first response he told of an Israeli plot to assassinate him. In this column he discusses threats to his family, Alan Dershowitz, and Israeli lobbyists embedded in the U.S. State Department:”

http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/news/israellobby/item/1443-threats-to-you-or-your-family-tales-of-the-israel-lobby

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