Elections in this country often inspire people’s passions in ways good and bad. We see a lot of flag waving, cheering, enthusiasm and discussion — and a lot of anger, hatred, and demagoguery.
This election has also inspired several community members to call upon The Chronicle to censor ideas — in our editorial content and advertising — that disagree with their own.
We will not and have not. As a non-profit institution, we are forbidden by law from endorsing candidates and parties. But further, our aim is to provide a full range of perspectives and information so that our readers can form their own opinions.
We also believe passionately in the free press and in the principle that the best way to combat distasteful words is with more words. To that end, The Chronicle provides several ways for readers to express their opinions.
To help create a positive and productive exchange of ideas, we are clarifying Chronicle policies and preferences on election matters and expressions of opinion generally.
We want readers to feel free to submit letters to the editor. However, there are certain guidelines that we and most other journals follow.
Letters are brief expressions of opinion. Nearly all publications set at least rough length limits for letters, partially as a result of space limitations. Ours are about 250 words, but we have run some slightly longer in the past.
Letters preferably should comment on items that have appeared in The Chronicle, but we do sometimes allow comments on general Jewish interest topics.
We will not print certain kinds of letters, such as open letters to particular people or institutions.
Our Web site, www.jewishchronicle.org, does allow readers to comment on particular articles immediately and without word limits.
Elevate discussion
Above all, we want our letters and opinion articles to deal with ideas, issues, facts or interpretations of facts supported by evidence. We do not want to publish personal attacks or opinions based on the low, fallacious tactics of demagoguery.
We do this for two reasons. First, we want to elevate discussion as much as possible and reflect the truth about our country. Since the Civil War, U.S. national elections have seldom been contests between good and evil; they mostly have been about different visions of good. Absent overwhelming evidence, it is demagoguery to claim otherwise, and we will not print such rants.
Second, even though we are not an Orthodox publication, there are Jewish principles and laws about how words can needlessly harm people that we think we should take into account.
One of the books on our reference shelf is Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s “Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How to Choose Words Wisely and Well”; and while we cannot say we follow it in every detail, we want to be wary of his warnings that “words can be used to inflict devastating and irrevocable suffering.”
But this last point requires further discussion, because the lines between an unjustified personal attack and real issues of a candidate’s moral character or personal situation are often not easy to tell apart.
According to philosophical logic, the person making an argument or contention or proposing a policy has nothing to do with the merits of the statement. Trying to demolish a statement by attacking the person making it is considered an ad hominem (Latin for “to the man”) fallacy.
We saw an egregious instance of this recently. A Chronicle reader submitted an opinion article favoring one of the two major party presidential candidates.
Unfortunately, this person also wanted to besmirch the other candidate by linking what this person saw in his campaign with historical “cults of personality” associated with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and communist dictator Fidel Castro.
We wanted to print the one part of the submission but not the other. That prompted the person to withdraw the whole, writing, “I believe that [the other candidate] will be a disaster to this country as well as to Israel if he becomes president, and his personality and tactics would be the cause for it, not ‘issues and ideas.’”
Now, let’s be clear about one thing. Republican nominee John McCain may be on the political right, but he is no Hitler or Franciso Franco; and Democratic nominee Barack Obama may be on the political left, but he is no Castro or Josef Stalin.
Any claims or suggestions to the contrary are not only unfair ad hominem attacks but also fall under the Jewish legal classification of motzi shem ra, or slander. We are not going to publish such manifest nonsense.
Yet, aren’t such personality matters as hypocrisy and tactics such as apparent cultivation of a cult of personality as pertinent to evaluating a candidate’s fitness for office as that candidate’s ideas and proposed policies? Is not the modern feminist slogan “The personal is political” often right?
The great American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce in his “Devil’s Dictionary” defined politics as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles,” and it often enough is exactly that.
So is it not legitimate to challenge the masquerade, to contend that the real reason a candidate advocates a policy is because of a personal stake rather than an objective judgment?
And when might a person’s character, situation or associations be relevant to the merits of an argument? For example, we know many Israelis find it insufferable that Diaspora Jews have opinions about what Israel should do about the West Bank, and they respond to those opinions not by contesting the ideas but by an ad hominem: “You don’t live here; we do.”
In fact, do not people who will not be directly affected by the results of their opinions have less moral authority for those opinions than people whose lives will be directly affected?
But then, are not people who live in a situation perhaps less capable of taking an objective view of it than someone who examines it from outside?
None of these are easy judgments to make, and as fallible humans we can and probably will make mistakes without meaning to.
Nevertheless, we at The Chronicle feel it is worthwhile at least to try to raise the intellectual level of political discussion, to tilt the balance more toward thoughtful than emotional.
We share one land and one community with those whose opinions differ from ours. Let us be empowered by those differences and recognize that though we do not share one vision for the world, we must aim toward civility and respect.
In the oft-quoted words of Mahatma Ghandi, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
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