Time to put my money where my mouth is.   

In the fall, some people at the university were upset about an ugly transgression and sought an apology from university President Dan Mote. Mote had dodged the issue, and I wrote a column on October 13  asking why he didn’t just apologize so we could all move on with our lives.

And now it’s my turn. I typically don’t write serious columns, so I feel the need to say there’s no joke in this one. On April 13, I unwittingly launched a sizeable portion of the campus into a discussion of hate speech and anti-Semitism. Now some people at the university are upset about an ugly transgression and want an apology from me. So I’ll one-up the president and not dodge the issue: I’m sorry.

In Mote’s defense, people only wanted a symbolic apology from him because despite his advanced age, he was actually not around for slavery. In my case, I reviewed the April 13 editorial cartoon, a piece from the very talented Jenna Brager, and found it to be controversial but harmless. In other words, in this instance, I failed at my job.

Let me start off by making it clear what I’m not apologizing for: The subject matter of the cartoon was, yes, controversial, touching on Palestinian-Israeli relations, stating “INJUSTICE IS: The Israeli government suddenly requiring Palestinians living in the West Bank to have previously-issued official ID cards and deeming the tens of thousands of Palestinians who don’t have them, ‘illegal infiltrators.'” A scared-looking Palestinian woman and child sat on a couch as a disembodied arm reached out of a door saying to them, “You’re being deported to Gaza!” The arm was identified as Israeli by an armband bearing the Israeli flag. What I don’t apologize for is the subject matter of the cartoon.

What I do apologize for, however, is for failing the cartoonist. If you’ve been around the backlash from the cartoon, odds are you already know that the drawing of the armband made many readers interpret the cartoon as a connection between Israelis and Nazis — the imagery of the Israeli flag armband is often found in highly anti-Semitic propaganda.

She hadn’t meant to make such a connection, and so a tiny part of a drawing sparked a plethora of letters, feedback and more than a hundred comments online. I knew the cartoon would spark debate, but where I failed in my job was not realizing the connotation of the armband. Instead of constructive conversation, all anyone wants to talk about now is how this comparison can be interpreted as hate speech. And so, I failed my cartoonist, who never intended to make that statement.

Moreover, I failed the readership of this paper and of my page, because the goals of the opinion section are to discuss, to entertain and to make people think. The goal is never to offend for offense’s sake, and I lament the idea that so many people were offended to the point where the discussion the cartoon should have launched was overshadowed. That’s my fault.

Sometimes, in order to elicit discussion, it’s important to balance on the highwire of offensiveness. While I don’t apologize for giving my staff reign to make controversial statements, I do apologize for not being a good enough editor on the night of April 12 to notice a larger issue was going to take hold.

I hope we can continue to toe that line. For all those who took offense on April 13, I understand your concern. When we offend for offense’s sake, I’m not doing my job.

Rob Gindes is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at gindes at umdbk dot com.