In May of this year Mona Chalabi won a Pulitzer Prize in the “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary” category for her contributions to the New York Times. According to an item in the Times (they always cite their award-winners), “Ms. Chalabi’s illustrations were honored for combining ‘statistical reporting with keen analysis to help readers understand the immense wealth and economic power of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’.”
The Times didn’t report – but Will Sommer of the Washington Post did, in November – that at the awards ceremony Chalabi had chastised the audience: “I don’t think it’s the ‘Israel-Gaza war.’ I think it’s the ‘Israel-Palestine war. And no one in this room is willing to mention the ‘P-word,’ and I think it’s really important. I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to make speeches here, but it felt important.”
She upset Times editor Jake Silverstein even more by showing him a chart she had posted on Instagram, “presenting data to suggest that the Times devotes less attention to Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths in the ongoing Gaza conflict — and calling out the Times for ‘bias’.”
(BTW, our Mona Chalabi is not related Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile “leader” whose false claims about weapons of mass supposedly justified the US invasion 21 years ago.)
Last month, Sommer recounts in the Post, “Chalabi announced on Instagram, where she has more than 468,000 followers, that she donated the $15,000 that came with her Pulitzer win to a Palestinian journalists group to help fight what she sees as an ‘asymmetry’ that elevates Israeli voices over Palestinian ones in the media.
“Chalabi’s criticism comes at a time when discontent has simmered within some major newsrooms over media coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. Last week, hundreds of journalists — some flouting newsroom policies against espousing public political stances — signed an open letter calling for Israel to end military actions that have killed Palestinian journalists and warning Western media organizations about ‘dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.’ Los Angeles Times told reporters who signed the letter that they were banned from writing about the war for three months.
“New York Times Magazine writer Jazmine Hughes resigned this month after signing another open letter accusing Israel of genocide, an action Silverstein called a ‘clear violation’ of Times rules.”
Chalabi works as a data editor at Guardian US and says she has enough money saved to weather the loss of the Times as an outlet. Recalling the Pulitzer awards dinner to Sommer, “She noted that many attendees wore buttons calling for the release of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in Russia since March, while she felt as if the plight of journalists in Gaza was overlooked. As of mid-November, 37 Palestinian media workers have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“Some forms of protest are being permitted and some are not,” Chalabi observed.
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Note to Mona Chalabi
Checking out your work on Instagram, I came across the graphic pointing out the biased definition of Zionism in the Associated Press stylebook. (The Times used to have a writer named William Safire who would remark on changes in the meaning of words. I think you’d have his approval. I’m an old print journalist and you mos’ def have mine.)
I assume the Times editors still have their own stylebook and I infer from recent headlines such as “Harvard, Columbia and Penn Take Steps to Fight Campus Antisemitsm” (11/12) and “Jewish Celebrities Confront AntiSemitism on Tik Tok” (11/17) that they define the term as “anti-Jewish prejudice.” This is to suggest that if you challenge that definition, that you take it up with the editors who guard the stylebook. It’s not right that one tribe should own what applies to “any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.” So sayeth the dictionary.
Also, “The name comes via Latin from Greek Sēm ‘Shem,’ son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these people were traditionally supposed to be descended. The term therefore came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaean tribes.”
Asserting ownership of semitic identity has paralleled Israel’s assertion of ownership of the land itself. They go together like software and hardware… You’re the one to turn it around at this very basic level. (In the beginning was The Word.)
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Inventory: Gray’s Anatomy
“It’s not hoarding if it’s books,” proclaims the t-shirt I was given by a loved one. I never wear messages on my shirt, but broke my rule for “Let Timmy smoke!” and now I’m breaking it again. The problem is, if you’ve read the book, you remember why you wanted to keep it. If you haven’t read the book you remember why you got it in the first place and think maybe you’ll get around to it yet.
Among the books I’m kissing goodbye as we leave sweet home Alameda are five volumes of Gray’s Anatomy, published magnificently in 1913 by Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia and New York, each with a breastplate that says “University of California Medical School Library. In memorial Bertram Stone, MD.” Over the years I had scanned in some of Gray’s perfect drawings to run as graphics in Synapse and O’Shaughnessy’s.
This is how the books came into my possession. At UCSF’s Parnassus campus there’s a building called Millberry Union that housed offices and eateries when I worked there (1987-99) and still does. Trucks making deliveries use a driveway on Parnassus that slopes down one story. In a space adjoining the driveway stood the large rectangular bins in which the waste generated at MU resides until it gets picked up.
One afternoon in the early 90s, I was on the floor below street level and happened to notice the top of somebody’s head occasionally appearing above the rim of the bin designated for paper and glass. I looked in and saw a US Postal Service worker, in uniform. The floor of the bin was covered with books from the UCSF library – discards, obviously. I climbed in, too, and began checking out the merchandise. My fellow scavenger, on his lunch hour, didn’t mind sharing the wealth, and said the supply was replenished daily. I climbed out with a small haul: a two-volume Fraser’s Golden Bough, two books by Albert Schweitzer (don’t know what became of them), and five volumes of Anatomy: Descriptive and Applied by Henry Gray. But I had a guilty conscience. Wasn’t there something sinful about owning valuable public property, even if some bureaucrat deemed it surplus?
So I went to the lady I knew in Chancellor Krevans’s office and told her about the library tossing books into a garbage bin. The lady said I should appreciate the library’s “need to modernize.” I said there were undoubtedly medical schools in third-world countries that could use these classic texts. I may have mentioned Cuba and Nicaragua to no avail. Finally, I played my trump card: “Think of what an item this would make if Herb Caen found out.”
A few days later I went down to the lower level of Millberry Union, figuring there would be some new books in the recycling bin. There were none. Then I noticed that a second, much smaller steel bin had been placed nearby – and padlocked. A janitor confirmed that it was the new receptacle for library discards. I was impressed by how fast the Chancellor’s office had acted.
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