Thanks to Walter for doing something that I concede I should have done before posting my original accusation. He e-mailed LfF about their status. He reproduces this reply in his journal:
Hi Walter:
Rothstein & Memsic is the design company that was given the job of creating and registering our website. It also designed the LfF logo and submitted it to us for approval. Our dealings with that company were only about the LfF website and logo. Contrary to what a LISnews poster recently asserted, we are not a front group for any entity or company. We are simply an organization of librarians.
The group of librarians who founded LfF did approach Stand With Us for sponsorship. Stand With Us agreed to do so and we are affiliated with it. A growing number of our librarian-members have the access code for the posting of articles on the website, which they continue to do. Librarian-members also pick the list of links from our website to others. The LfF librarians who do not have our website access code can and do recommend items to be added.
Sincerely yours,
Andy for LfF
[email protected]
I concede here while I could logically say that there was some sort of relationship between LfF, StandWithUs and R&M, there was no hard evidence allowing me to logically conclude that therefore LfF was simply a tool of R&M and/or StandWithUs. Andy’s note gives a believable relationship among the parties that I, Daniel, do not intend to contest further.
So I apologize to LISNews readers for asserting something before I could prove it one way or another. I still stand by the suggestions I made for the group.
You’re Too Nice!
Daniel,
In all sincerity, you are much too nice and humble for your own good to give this group an apology, undeserved in my view. They are pro-Israel kooks, fanatics. Hostility to all critics and criticism of Israel, no matter how valid, is their raison d’etre. This is quite evident from most of the articles they post in their site’s archives. They don’t see themselves that way, but they know others will (and for good reason, in reality) perceive them to be kooks, hence they work from the shadows to avoid the endless complications to their career that having a reputation as a kook would involve. Anybody, such as the names you suggest, who publically gets involved with them, to help them raise their reputation, risks lowering their own reputation.
Providing this group an apology is assuming they have a crediblity they in fact lack, as if they were on the same ethical level as a decent and honest person like you, as if this was all merely a misunderstanding between all-around sincere and well-meaning people, which they are not. Hence you may be giving them credibility unearned and for free, something they can use to advance their schemes.
You produced an excellent list of suggestions that could enable them to be respectable if they implemented them, but given their extreme biases and aggressive and highly presumptuous agendas, I would not expect them to take up your ideas any time soon, as asking them to abide by real standards is asking them to change their nature, which largely would require them to cease supporting Israel uncritically and chauvinistically. Trying to get one’s cat to cease hunting birds would be a less futile gesture than asking this group to be genuinely fair.
Re:You’re Too Nice!
A review of your hateful comments about these matters, during the last several days, easily shows you are a true fanatic, Kelly! As for Daniel, I agree with most of your suggestions to Librarians for Fairness.
Re:You’re Too Nice!
Another Anon! I wonder how man there are, is “Anon” one person doing all the answering or are there a bunch of them?
I wonder Anon, if you “shouted” your comments, like somebody did from your organization recently. In a recent post on your site, one which your organization wrote a preface to to the article, “The Abandonment of the Brave,” http://www.librariansforfairness.org/news_post.asp ?NPI=124, we see these words:
“To the bigoted American Library Association’s so-called Social Responsibilities Round Table we shout: WHERE ARE YOUR PROTESTS ABOUT WHAT IS BEING DONE TO MR. CHOUDHURY?” Now, I ask, what does this man’s plight, however unfortunate or unjust, have to do with library acquisitions? Nothing in the article that follows clues us.
The Librarian for Fairness person states shortly before this, “Not a few libraries now routinely ban and censor materials deemed to be politically incorrect, while heavily skewing their collections to an ultra-radical leftist viewpoint.” Any close reading of the article that follows this pleasant preface shows there is nothing contained in it about library censorship in imposing a ultra-radical leftwing viewpoint. Jeesh, you’d think from the above it’s like we’re living in Red China, circa 1950’s, under Mao. Why didn’t they just spit out that libraries they don’t like – which are many it seems – are staffed with librarians who are literally commies? (What is an ultra-radical leftwinger, after all?)
And the shouting is not over, as this expert on human rights organizations (who cares if they re not library organizations, I guess for him or her) adds:
“And we shout the same thing to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International,” which they conclude “have largely abandoned the principles that they were founded on.”
No evidence for these huge accusations is offered; it’s nothing but strident, false, ear-piercingly shrill, nasty accusatory-as-hell rhetoric. And you say I’m hateful? I say: stop the shouting, my ears hurt. And stop falsely accusing your critics of having the very same negative qualities that *you have* in great abundance.
Now above and in other items that I’ve written on this, I made an effort to use analysis, not just name-calling (and the little I’ve done of the latter I earned with some analytical effort, which no Anon has ever made here yet.)
In the light of the examples cited above (and so many more can be given), the verdict is as I said before: Librarians for Fairness is made up of kooks, fanatics. Anybody who isn’t one already will surely become one if they join them. Any library or legitimate library group which is uncautious enough to take them seriously and civily engage them in their shrill claims is going be in for quite a lot of shouting.