A beautiful and important intervention in the Harvard Political Review, alleging five recent instances of bias on the part of Harvard’s newspaper of record, carefully documented by Lena Awwad, Asmaa Rimawi, Giacomo Bagarella and Hannah Schafer of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (and Schafer is the daughter of a rabbi who fought in the IDF).
This kind of pushback should be happening all over our media, but it requires brave writers who are not afraid of powerful editors. It is what Sarah Schulman did so brilliantly last year when she explained the New York Times’s efforts to censor her pinkwashing piece.
It is what we are doing here when we ask again and again, Where is Ben Ehrenreich’s piece on Nabi Saleh for the New York Times Magazine— which will explain at last why he was detained last July? Huh, Times editors: Haven’t you sat on this piece long enough to hatch it? Or has it been killed at this point as untimely? (P.S. Mr Ehrenreich, don’t you want to tell us what’s going on?)
Two paragraphs from the Harvard Political Review article (the editors of course distance themselves from the argument):
As members of the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), we are disheartened by what appears to be The Crimson’s silencing of Palestinian voices. In the past year, our experiences have been so negative that many Palestinian students and our allies feel alienated by this publication. Our five most recent episodes with the Crimson highlight this unfortunate reality….
Then, in October 2012, The Crimson put two Palestinian students through a nightmare of one week of back and forth exchanges before finally publishing an op-ed on our behalf. The amount of editing that went into an op-ed was shocking and the requests for references of each and every fact and assertion of ours was at a level that is not expected of other student groups. For instance, we were pressured to omit a reference to the Israeli occupation being illegal under international law. We pushed back by establishing that this was not a controversial claim; rather, there is a global consensus affirming this fact, and we expressed that we did not appreciate The Crimson’s attempt to censor us. As a result of our persistence, the op-ed was finally posted online, though The Crimson took it down not once, but twice, before finally letting it stand and be published for circulation.
Here’s a link to the Crimson’s Editorial Board: http://www.thecrimson.com/about/masthead/
These young people will have to live with the record of the their bias for the rest of their lives. Will it help them or hurt them in their careers? How will their actions today, and the consequences of those actions, affect their lives as they develop?
Does Harvard continue to deserve its place atop elite university rankings?
In the HPR piece, second paragraph: Half of our organizers and speakers were Jewish and/or Israeli.
Now that is a killing argument.
Can anyone imagine Apartheid South Africa getting this kind of treatment in the 1980s? I bet the Harvard Crimson was pushing for boycotting then. But South Africa couldn’t scream anti-Semitism as a smear tactic, nor did it have a passionate lobby inside America.
Yet we’re being told that somehow this support for Israel is entirely organic. Well, if anything, the actions of the editors in the media, some of whom are Zionists, tell a different story. I wouldn’t be surprised, by the way, if most of the editors were not Zionists. But most of those of aren’t, most likely don’t care either way and let the zealots run the show on I/P.
Too funny. A series of back and forth edits and requests for reference constitute a “nightmare”? Oh my, I think this comment might get rejected by the mods! I do declare that I feel myself swooning! A case of the vapors!!!
And the “for instance” is the entirely controversial claim that the occupation is illegal? A claim backed up by a dubious reference to a fictional global consensus and Security Council Resolution 446 which in no way determines the occupation to be illegal.
It is more disingenuous complaining.
The piece omits the fact that the editorial published by the Crimson editorial board was IN RESPONSE to an op-ed published by the PSC organizers about the conference before the conference took place. The op-ed was largely about why the two-state solution was impossible. The name of the conference was the One State Conference, and the purpose of the conference was to address the one-state solution, so there was good reason for the editorial board to assume that the conference was promoting . . . the one-state solution.
The op-ed that the organizers published before the conference was riddled with errors, and thus, several corrections were necessary. The first ridiculous error was the assertion that 5.4 million Jews were ruling over 11 million Palestinians, a ratio that underestimated the Jews (about 6 million) and substituted the number of Palestinians worldwide for the number of Palestinians actually in Israel and Palestine (5.5 million). The article also misquoted Desmond Tutu as saying that Israel’s system was “worse than apartheid,” which Tutu never said.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/27/Harvard-One-State-Solution/
So it should not have come as a surprise that when one of the same writers submitted another op-ed, the Crimson did the right thing and asked her to source her facts in an article where every sentence contained a factual assertion of some kind. Frankly, the writers of the piece in the Harvard Political Review can hem and haw all they want about mistreatment. My guess is that they can’t substantiate their claim that the Crimson does not treat other groups this way when they write op-eds on controversial subjects and they have a record of misstating the facts.
“In February 2013, a Crimson editorial writer published an op-ed targeting PSC and accusing us of having “anti-Semitism” in our midst merely because of our support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
Actually, most of the op-ed is about why the writer thinks the BDS movement is antisemitic, based on article he found on the BDS website. He goes out of his way to give PSC members the benefit of the doubt.
“Instead, on March 9, the Crimson published a fourth piece attacking the PSC without allowing us to respond. This op-ed reproduces the outrageous charge of anti-Semitism against us. . .”
It doesn’t. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/3/8/israel-apartheid-notices/
In fact, a search of the Crimson’s archives reveals that over the past year, the Crimson has published several pro-Palestinian op-eds, including:
1. http://www.thecrimson.com/column/empire-dismantled/article/2012/3/9/birthright-palestine-refugee/
2. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/29/israel-palestine-solution/
3. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/10/16/israel-sat-oped/
4. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/11/26/hillel-israel-palestine/
5. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/1/antisemitism-false-accusations/
6. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/3/22/harvard-palestine-detention-perspective/
7. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/13/israel-conference-civility/
So the notion that the Crimson gives pro-Palestinian op-ed writers a hard times is abject nonsense.