by BFUU members
Sunday, Jun. 07, 2009 at 3:54 PM
In an e-mail to members of the Los Angeles Indymedia collective, members of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists have issued this statement regarding the June 8 performance of holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon. (The names have been removed for privacy purposes.)
Please do set the record straight on your site asap. The Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (BFUU) is neither sponsoring nor co-sponsoring nor endorsing the Gilad Atzmon event Monday night 6/08.
Even tho a BFUU member did set the record straight on your site, BFUU continues being slandered. As a result, people are sending hateful email and phone messages from out of state. Flyers have been posted locally calling for a picket of us for hate speech. I was told that local police have been notified. Feeling bullied, the event has not been cancelled, and we are preparing to de-escalate a potentially volatile scene.
Publicity saying that BFUU's Social Justice Committee is sponsoring the event was not put out by anyone at BFUU and was in error. The Committee has previously co-sponsored events with the International Solidarity Movement. That committee was initially co-sponsoring this event, but in any case that committee can do nothing that represents the BFUU congregation unless approved at one of the bi-annual all congregation meetings, which did not occur in this case.
Thank you, ************, for inquiring about the slanderous accusations against BFUU posted at LA IndyMedia. If I am the 1st to respond, it is because we have a new office worker. We had a part-time consulting minister whose term has just ended. I am a former BFUU board member, current alternate Trustee on the Board, and former chair of BFUU's Social Justice Committee.
In solidarity and appreciation,
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Dear Madame or Sir,
I am very sorry to bother you with this question, because on the face of it, it seems absurd.
I am a volunteer with the Los Angeles Independent Media Center (la.indymedia.org), which has an open newswire to which anyone can publish. Recently, several stories have been published that claim that your congregation is sponsoring a June 8 performance by Gilad Atzom, who is apparently a musician and infamous anti-semite and holocaust denier (I had never heard of him prior to the posting of this article.)
I found this hard to believe, and so did a little bit of investigating. I found no such performance listed on your website or anywhere else on the web. The accusation apparently stems from bluetruth.net, a "Pro-Israel" website and has subsequently been spammed on many IMCs nationwide and mirrored on blogs and other sites.
While I think this research is a good basis for debunking this claim and removing the story from the newswire (we rarely engage in censorship, but this slandrous accusation could be a liability for us), a denial from you would seal the deal and allow me and the members of our collective to set the record straight, at least on our website. Contrarily, if the BFUU is indeed sponsoring said performance, I would also like to know.
Thank You For Your Attention to This Matter,
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www.bfuu.org