The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

46 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL leader for the administration, I don’t see any other way we could have handled such fraught issues. Getting It from Both Sides In 2000 the AFSA Governing Board updated the FSJ Edito- rial Board’s bylaws (now called “guidelines”) to specify that the magazine’s primary mission was to publicize and promote the American Foreign Service Association’s many activities on behalf of its members and to bring them “news you can use.”The Journal was also tasked with continuing to publish reporting, analysis and commentary about the Foreign Service and foreign affairs, with a goal of maintaining a roughly 50/50 ratio between those two broad purposes. There was little doubt that the former goal outweighed the latter as far as AFSA management was concerned. But it was not at all clear, at least to me, just how much leeway AFSA members had to use the FSJ to criticize Govern- ing Board decisions—until a test case presented itself. Back in the spring of 2001, while I was still associate editor, an FSO submitted a Speaking Out column that denounced AFSA for working with Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies to overturn discriminatory practices at the State Department and other foreign affairs agencies. The FSJ Editorial Board reluctantly approved the column for publication, with the proviso that a response from GLIFAA run alongside it. I suspect GLIFAA would have jumped at the chance to weigh in anyway, but the fact that I was a founding member, and had served as its president from 1996 to 1997, clinched the deal. The resulting point-counterpoint in the September 2001 issue, my first as interim editor, inspired a series of letters from readers over the next several months. Most of the writers praised AFSA for standing by GLIFAA, but several sided with the complainant and took us to task for commissioning a companion piece, rather than leaving it up to someone to respond in a later issue. (Looking back, I have to agree that the optics of doing it the way we did were not great, but I don’t see anything unethical about it.) Still others lambasted us for publishing the original Speaking Out column criticizing AFSA in the first place. That pattern would repeat itself over the next dozen years of my editorship just about every time we ran any submission on a hot-button issue. But it was well worth it to uphold the Journal ’s proud tradition of letting mem- bers have their say, no matter how many people disagree viscerally with the viewpoint expressed. The Bird Imbroglio That principle received per- haps its most severe test (during my tenure, at least) in June 2002, when we published a feature titled “Arab-Americans in Israel: What ‘Special Relationship’?” Its author was Jerri Bird, president and founder of Partners for Peace, a nongovernmental organization formed to educate the American public about key issues in the effort to secure peace and justice between Palestinians and Israelis. She was also the wife of FSO Eugene Bird, who, like his wife, was a Middle East specialist. Although Editorial Board members agreed the manuscript needed careful editing to remove the most incendiary lan- W herever you come down on any of the particular challenges the Foreign Service faces, I trust we can all agree that it is vital for the Journal to be a forum for discussing them without fear or favor. FSJ Editors Shawn Dorman, Steve Honley and Susan Maitra with FSJ Editorial Board ChairJames Seevers at the redesign launch in October 2012.