Commentary

Alaska Senate candidate Joe Millers’s “brown-shirted security detail (that) put a Jewish reporter in handcuffs at (a) public event” is gone now, but for a time last week it lived in the pages of The Daily Beast.com and in the mind of Alaska Dispatch News columnist Charles Wohlforth.

This is what he concocted for the Beast on Wednesday:

“(Sen. Lisa) Murkowski wasn’t conservative enough for Republican primary voters in 2010 and was defeated by Joe Miller, whose brown-shirted security detail put a Jewish reporter in handcuffs at (sic) public event.”

This was Wohlforth’s recollection of what happened at Central Middle School where FBI undercover operative Bill Fulton put the cuffs on Alaska Dispatch News editor and then co-owner Tony Hopfinger after a Miller rally six years ago.

Little of what Wohlforth wrote is true. Hopfinger is not Jewish, and Miller’s security detail was not wearing brown shirts. But, of course, Wohlforth’s statement was not meant as a description of what the detail was wearing. It was meant as a not so thinly veiled reference to the “Sturm Abteilung” of Nazi Germany – Adolf Hitler’s murderous brownshirts.

Seventy-eight years ago this month, the Brownshirts led Kristllnacht (Crystal Night), a  nightmarish, government-organized assault on the Jews of Germany that began the most murderous persecution of  a religious group in human history. Across Germany, 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked starting the night of Nov. 9; 200 synagogues were destroyed; a number of Jews were beaten to death; and 30,000 people were taken to the concentration camps where the Nazis would eventually murder 6 million of the 9 million Jews though to be living in Europe in the 1930s.

Given this history, why a generally decent guy like Wohlforth would reference the brown shirts and a Jewish reporter in relation to Miller – no matter how much Wohlfoth might dislike the man – is baffling.

As Hopfinger himself observed, “why try to play the anti-Semitic card when Miller, in fact, has never said anything bad about the religion or its people?”

Several whys

But that is not the only why. There are others.

Why trivialize the Holocaust in this way? Why not, in these days of powerful search engines, probe the interwebs for some sign of something, some hint at least, that Miller had anti-Semitic leanings, even seemingly benign ones, before making an accusation of this sort? Why not, just to cover your ass, check your own memory of events?

Memory is sadly fallible, and yet it is mind-boggling how few journalists these days think to pull up the history of the past before referencing it in the here and now.

Wohlforth made his attempt to suggest a Miller association with Nazism in a story headlined “Why Hillary Clinton Could Actually Win Alaska Over Donald Trump.”  Wohlforth wrote a similar story once before. It appeared in the New Republic in 2008 when incumbent resident Barak Obama was running for election and was titled “Can Democrats Claim the Alaska Frontier.”

Wohlforth was a cheerleader for Obama then. He is a cheerleader for Clinton now. That’s fine. More power to him. He is a card-carrying liberal and proud of it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

What is wrong is crappy and suggestive reporting.

Hopfinger is Catholic

To start with, Hopfinger is not Jewish. He is Catholic. Hopfinger called Wohlforth on this over the weekend. Wohlforth, to his credit, apologized for his mistake and corrected it. He said he thought he’d heard somewhere once that Hopfinger was Jewish.

(It is interesting how despite corrections these things live on in the clouds. A Google search just now brought up this: “5 days ago – Charles Wohlforth … and was defeated by Joe Miller, whose brown–shirted security detail put a Jewish reporter in handcuffs at (sic) public event.”

At a time when journalists have a world of information at their fingertips, Wohlforth’s “I thought I heard it somewhere” defense is indicative of how too much journalism still works.

But Hopfinger’s religion and ethnicity can be overlooked as a small mistake. It is different with Miller, a man who served his country honorably as a tank commander in a bloody war in the Middle East in 1990.

There is no indication anywhere, nor has there ever been, that Miller is an anti-Semite. The evidence would, in fact, indicate the opposite. Miller’s Southeast Alaska campaign advisor in 2010 was Alan Stein from the small community of Point Baker. Stein is very Jewish.

In an email, he called the suggestion of a brown shirt attack on a Jewish reporter “bat shit” and then later sent this:

“I worked with (Holocaust) survivors in Israel in the ’60s. They would be horrified to think the Holocaust was being diminished by trivial comparisons like the one Wohlforth gave. I wonder if he isn’t a closet anti-Semite himself.”

Let us hope not, but why in God’s name would anyone write something like Wohlforth wrote? I read Wohlforth’s story and admit to being offended for the same reason as Stein albeit on a less personal level.

I am not Jewish. At least not that I know of. The Medred lineage is unclear. My mother, before her death, tracked the family back to Austria where the trail ended.  It appears likely the Medreds arrived there from farther east.

I’d guess the name was once Medved which is the word for “bear” in Russian and a number of Slavic languages. There is no way to know if the ancestors were fleeing west or simply looking for a better life elsewhere.

It was one thing I never dug into. I just didn’t have much interest. Maybe I should blame my father.

Biggest offense

He wasn’t much for looking back. He was of that American generation that thought it more important to look forward to what could be instead of dwelling on all the bad that had been. And there’s plenty of bad in American history. The country has its sins. We all do.

The greatest one these days might be that we’ve lost that vision my father and those of his generation had of a better place.

“I have a dream,” Martin Luther King said in 1963. It was a dream, in King’s words, of a country where “we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together….”

King’s “beautiful symphony of brotherhood” seems so far away in the politics of the moment.

Today we work in opposition, struggle against each other, argue over whether any of us should pray, and try to highlight our sense of freedom by imposing our views on our fellow citizens.

And the media, sadly, is too often the leader in this desecration of the social fabric. The media is too often an advocate for the worst kind of divisiveness. To quote a journalist friend who gave up journalism:

“(Wohlforth’s) use of ‘brown-shirted’ and ‘Jewish’ deploys the grotesquely overused Nazi metaphor and gives a 100 percent wrong impression about what really happened. I mean WTF? How does pestering a thin-skinned candidate with questions and then getting temporarily detained warrant a Holocaust comparison?”

How indeed? Is it not enough to say  simply that Hopfinger was handcuffed by security forces working for Miller?  Does a  columnist really have to go all Lyin’ Brian Williams and embellish the story to make it quote-unquote “bigger and better.”

It’s pretty well-known I’m not a Miller fan. He appears to have a few character flaws. Don’t we all. But none of those flaws should stop journalists from treating him fairly, and the minimum in fairness – the absolute, indisputable, rock-bottom minimum in fairness – is factual accuracy.

This rule applies as much to columnists as to reporters or editors.

Wohlforth owes Miller an apology along with Hopfinger. Wohlforth owes readers, a few of whom still given greater credence to newspaper reporters than people mumbling in the local bar, an apology. He owes those Republicans he suggested voted for a Nazi-affiliated candidate an apology. And he probably owes the alleged “brown-shirted security detail” an apology.

Let’s see, there was Fulton and Fulton and a couple almost nameless soldiers he hired from a local military base. They were politically disinterested and doing only what Fulton told them. They are definitely owed an apology.

And Fulton? Well, here’s how the Huffington Post described the supposed brownshirt detail commander after an interview in 2013:

“…He’s fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. He said he thinks that ‘anybody should be allowed to marry anybody they want’ and that abortion is an issue between a woman and her doctor. Global warming, he said, is real. He voted for President Barack Obama — both times.