The beleaguered editor of the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper, is under pressure to offer an apology, or some sort of explanation, for a scurrilous attack the paper ran last month on the Anti-Defamation League. A source at the university says the school's attorney is taking a serious look at the ADL's demand for a retraction of the piece, which accused the organization of being a "super-spy organization" funded and operated by Israeli intelligence.
The paper ran the piece anonymously, with the author noting that he or she feared "possible repercussions" from its publication. The ADL's mandate, the article insisted with an almost complete dearth of attribution or accuracy, was to spy on Americans critical of Israel or Jews. In the past, the author alleged, it had spied on Martin Luther King, Jr. Its activities constitute "espionage, which is illegal, a violation of trust, a threat to civil liberties and an infringement of first amendment rights."
Although the Bruin later published a rebuttal by a UCLA law student, Bruin editor Roxane Marquez has to date refused to respond to ADL entreaties for a retraction to the author's "defamatory" and "wild and false" accusations. When reached by The Jerusalem Report, Marquez declined to discuss the paper's editorial policy, which apparently affords anonymity to op-ed writers.
Marquez had earlier taken a lot of heat for a 5-part series she wrote about Israel after participating in a press junket to the country last year. That series was filled with errors, and is said to have offended both Jews and Palestinians.
The ADL's sensitivity to the Bruin's charges may stem, in part, from residual vulnerability over the 1993 investigation by the San Francisco's District Attorney's Office of its surveillance activities. The charge of spying against the ADL, which was directed largely against private investigators working as ADL subcontractors to monitor a wide gamut of political organizations, was settled out of court.