Loren Jenkins, foreign editor since 1996 at National Public Radio, ordinarily works behind the scenes where his extreme anti-Israel views aren't on public display. He does sometimes dispense bromides via the NPR Ombudsman's column about the network's devotion to getting the full story on the Middle East and not judging "who is right or who is wrong."

But an audience in Aspen, Colorado on February 17, 2009 got a full dose of his bias -- and "who is wrong" -- during a revealing extemporaneous discussion held under the auspices of Aspen public radio at the Given Insitute.

How extreme are the NPR official's views? In the past, Jenkins has depicted Israelis as imperialists and interlopers in the Middle East and even linked Jews to Nazis in his writing. In a 1983 Rolling Stone article entitled "Palestine, Exiled" he wrote, for example, that an Israeli-administered south Lebanon prison was, in the words of a nameless Red Cross official, "a concentration camp. There is nothing else to call it." PLO leaders, in contrast, were characterized admiringly as freedom-fighters, as "modest" people, speaking in "soft and warm" voices. Of Yasir Arafat he said: "it is his liquid brown eyes that impress one the most." PLO terrorism, while "abhorrent," was primarily deplored as a tactical blunder that caused "image" problems...