Like the Wall Street Journal last week, the liberal Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, carried a story this week that convicted the Rev. Eric Lee of saying, “The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us.”
Prominent California reverend and black activist Eric Lee has apologized for anti-Semitic comments he said last month at a Los Angeles event commemorating the assassination of Martin Luther King.
The Los Angeles Times on Friday reported a “reconciliation” meeting between the Pastor and Daphna Ziman – an Israeli-American philanthropist and the recipient of this year’s Tom Bradley Award for community service, for whose honor Lee made the keynote speech at an award ceremony in Los Angeles.
During his speech, Lee, the local president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group, is reported to have suddenly launched an anti-Semitic rant, stating that Jews have made money on blacks in the music business.
In fact, there has been much dispute, which I reported several times over, about exactly what Lee said. And the word missing from the above story is “alleged.” It is what Lee is “alleged” to have said. But Ha’aretz’ Shlomo Shamir, like so many people who read Lee’s apology, assumed, apparently without talking with Lee or Daphna Ziman, the Jewish philanthropist whose emailed account of Lee’s speech went viral.
The difference between Shamir’s news article and the Wall Street Journal op-ed by MLK’s former lawyer is just that: One was news and the other opinion. Both, though, need to be accurate.
