From the Editors

A speaker whose planned appearance in a campus lecture series drew complaints from Jewish students at Carnegie Mellon University is being rescheduled so speakers with balancing viewpoints can be added. Carnegie Mellon yesterday confirmed the change involving a planned Feb. 21 speech by Norman Finkelstein. The school says it is discussing with him an appearance later in the spring semester, but no date has been set. On Thursday, about 40 Jewish students picketed a lecture series appearance by EI’s Ali Abunimah. Some students later asked why no opposing speakers were booked.

Ali Abunimah, a writer and commentator on the Middle East and Arab-American affairs and co-founder of the Web site “Electronic Intifada,” laid out his opposition to a two-state solution to the Mideast peace process yesterday. The Middle East peace process is phony, Abunimah said, because what Israel wants to do — with U.S. complicity — is to set up independent homelands similar to the apartheid system under white-ruled South Africa. The apartheid system is so far advanced that a two-state solution to the conflict is no longer possible, he told about 100 students. What is needed is a unitary state in which Israelis and Palestinians would have equal rights, Abunimah said.

Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group, which owns the San Francisco Examiner and plans to launch the Washington Examiner on Tuesday, has pulled an advertisement promoting the two papers following criticism that the ad demonized Palestinian children, The Denver Post reported Saturday. The Electronic Intifada asked its readers to contact Examiner vice president of advertising Mark Wurzer and San Francisco Examiner managing editor Jim Pimentel to request that they pull the ad, according to the Post.

Although it has been relatively quiet of late, NPR’s reporting from the Middle East often results in protests from one side or the other — or from both at the same time. The accusation is always the same: that NPR’s journalistic processes are deficient at best and biased at worst. That use of the phrase in an introduction read by NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition on Jan. 4 moved Ali Abunimah, a long-standing critic of NPR, to complain: “This intro highlighted the phrase “Zionist enemy,” and suggested that it was a deliberate appeal to Palestinian extremism. What Abbas actually said, at a campaign appearance was, ‘We came to you today, while we are praying for the souls of the martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya.’”