A free speech' station airs a dose of anti-Jewish vitriol. For over 30 years, KPFK-FM and the rest of the five-station Pacifica Network have played an anti-establishment role in West Coast broadcasting. As pioneers in listener-sponsored "free speech" radio, the stations broke new ground with their coverage of riots in Los Angeles's black Watts ghetto and anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. The station's Middle Eastern and Israel coverage was sympathetic to the Palestinian side even before that became fashionable in the established media. But it touched a new level during a 30-hour fundraising broadcast in February, billed as "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend." The program, produced by Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn, a university sociology professor at California State Dominguez Hills, aired a string of anti-Semitic sound-bytes that some of KPFK's Jewish and non-Jewish employees found hard to stomach. Several angrily charge station management with refusing to deal decisively with what they now regard as an established pattern of hate-mongering and Jew-baiting manifested in weekly broadcasts devoted to local African-American and Caribbean audiences. According to published reports, a substantial part of the "weekend" dealt specifically with Jews. Black Detroit academic Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan (who claims he was raised as an Orthodox Jew) told listeners that Jews had stolen Bible stories from black Egyptians; Muslim extremist Louis Farrakhan said that "killing" of white oppressors will begin, and Dr. Lionel Jeffries, the Afro-American Studies professor at City College of New York recently emroiled in controversy over anti-Jewish remarks, lectured on African intellectual warfare.
The attacks were not the first to be broadcast on KPFK-FM. In December, for example, Steve Cokely, the disgraced ex-aide to late Chicago mayor Harold Washington, told listeners that the AIDS virus had been invented by Jewish doctors to kill black babies. The charges led to the forced resignation of Cokely, who is black. Cokely also urged that Los Angeles become another Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where anti-Jewish rioting took place last year after a black child was killed by a car driven by a Lubavitcher hasid. Outraged KPFK staffers say they are afraid to protest, for fear of actual physical reprisal or because they could lose their jobs. The complaints come not only from the Jews on the 10-person staff, but from non-Jews as well, and has made headlines in the local Jewish Journal weekly and the daily Los Angeles Times. Despite its "free speech" mandate, KPFK wasn't talking about the latest fuss. In a February 23 memo to staff and volunteers, station manager Alan Fong warned broadcasters to "refrain from any KPFK air/tape discussions" of the matter. "I cannot be more explicit," he wrote. "Please do not discuss this matter on KPFK, or you will lose your access to these airwaves." Fong, who did not return The Jerusalem Report's phone calls, said in his memo that he was following the advice of counsel in response to a complaint registered with the Federal Communications Commission by the local office of the Anti-Defamation League. The complaint referred specifically to the on-air characterization by Person-Lynn of ADL associate director Jerry Shapiro with whom Person-Lynn had engaged in heated debate last year in a local black newspaper as "an idiotic, psychotic European Jew." Such abuse is prohibited under the FCC's "personal attack" ruling. Insiders at the station believe Fong, even if he wanted to crack down on the rhetoric, is hamstrung by a powerful local board of directors dominated by radical ethnic nationalists, many of whom are black. The controversial program was part of the station's annual fundraising drive, which concluded in early March. Fong, a Chinese-American, has been characterizing the current flap as a conflict restricted to the black and Jewish communities, but both Jews and nonJews have objected to what they call the station's race-baiting. There are also signs of rebellion inside the station itself. Some staffers say they are considering resignation, others have indicated they plan to ignore Fong's instructions and speak out. One broadcaster, Australian strategic affairs expert and screenwriter, Ian Masters, says he plans to dissociate himself from the taint of the "black David Dukes" he says have taken over the station. He complains that Israeli officials with whom he had previously enjoyed close professional contact are no longer willing to speak with him. "I have no doubt this Person-Lynn idiot is behind this, and frankly, I can't say that I blame them," says Masters. Many of the objections to the "weekend" broadcast came from the evening phone-in Person-Lynn calls "audience analysis." One caller said that "the Jews have not seen anything yet… What's going to happen to them is going to make what Hitler did seem like a party." Another denounced Jews for opposing Farrakhan and rap singers Ice-Cube and Public Enemy, whose lyrics have been condemned as anti-Semitic. Person-Lynn's response: "Uh-huh." After the controversial broadcast, Person-Lynn said that he had received only one complaint from a "European Jewish lady" that the broadcast would incite violence against Jews. "I expect some Jews will call meanti-Semitic," he was quoted as saying in the Jewish Journal, "but they can kiss my beautiful African behind because I can back up everything that I said." "What's scary," says historian Clare Spark, a former KPFK program director, "is the tremendous response he got when he asked for support for the station. Lynn raised $ 15,000 in three 15-minute pledge breaks, an unusually large sum. If he had asked for more he would have gotten it." Personnel at KPFK told The Jerusalem Report that Person-Lynn usually gets what he wants at the station because he frightens people. Suzy Weissman, who has a program on Soviet affairs, says that in 1984 he phoned at three in the morning haranguing her and calling her a "Jew" and charging that she had sabotaged his fundraising efforts. Asked by The Jerusalem Report, Person-Lynn denied making the call. Masters said he has heard that the broadcaster threatened someone in the station with a shotgun. Person-Lynn confirms the threat, but says that his weapon was actually a crowbar. Spark says Person-Lynn once threw switchboard operator Andrea Enthal against a wall, breaking her thumb, and that Enthal declined to press charges because she was too frightened to risk further assault. Person-Lynn says Enthal had been sabotaging his Martin Luther King Day broadcast by lowering microphone levels, but says that although they engaged in a scuffle, he did not deliberately cause the fracture. He also told The Jerusalem Report that he was not an anti-Semite but a scholar, and that he could back up his controversial statements including a charge that one of the factors in the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 was their financing of the slave trade. The furor is unlikely to die down before KPFK officials meet with the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and the ADL sometime in March. In time, the FCC is also expected to hand down a ruling on the ADL complaint.