The ‘NYTimes’ continues to slander and silence Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace

Four years ago, the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine invited me to speak to them. My topic was “How the New York Times Rigs the News from Israel/Palestine.” (Here’s a version of it.)

About 30 students attended, nearly all of them women. There were a couple of pro-Israel students in the audience. During the question period that followed my talk, the atmosphere was polite and serious. There was no hysterical rhetoric. There was no name-calling. There was absolutely nothing that could even be remotely construed as antisemitism.

Columbia’s administration yesterday banned that chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, along with the university’s branch of another principled organization: Jewish Voice for Peace. A top official said the two groups constituted a threat to “campus security.” 

Today’s print edition of the New York Times has a long, biased front-page article about the turmoil on U.S. college campuses over the Israel/Palestine conflict. The report reveals its slant in one of its headlines: “Antisemitic Invective Is Complicating Battles Over Speech on Campus.” We’ll get to more details in a second. But one of its most significant failures is that it nowhere mentions Columbia’s ban on SJP and JVP — even though the university’s move was announced yesterday afternoon, with plenty of time for the Times reporters to put it in their article.

Overall, today’s Times report gives far more space to the concerns of pro-Israel Jewish students, asserting right near the beginning that “critics say that many of the [pro-Palestine] slogans and protests have careened onto support for terrorism and antisemitism.”

This is a shocking charge, but the Times waits until paragraph 18 to let a “pro-Palestinian supporter” give a response, for just a couple of paragraphs. 

And not until paragraph 36 do you learn that the pro-Palestinian protests are “being supported by, and in many cases, led by young American Jews.” If the protests truly have “careened into support for terrorism and antisemitism,” then what are Jewish students doing leading them?

What’s more, you have to dig down to paragraph 50 to learn that university administrators are “facing open rebellion from [pro-Israel] donors and alumni.” This fleeting mention demands follow-up. Surely, the Times could have contacted these big donors and gotten them on the record about how they are applying financial pressure?

There is plenty more offensive and ludicrous bias. Here’s just one example: First, the Times snidely says that the pro-Palestinian students “have adopted a potent vocabulary, rooted in the hothouse jargon of academia,” which includes “Echoing the struggle against institutionalized racism in South Africa, [that] Israel is an ‘apartheid regime.’”

Hold on. Multiple distinguished human rights organizations have asserted in long, detailed reports that Israel runs a system of “apartheid”; the groups include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the respected Israeli group. (This site has regularly documented how the Times ignored their “apartheid” findings. It would be particularly odd if the paper is accusing Amnesty of “hothouse jargon,” as it relies on the organization for global human rights information — outside of Israel/Palestine.) 

Once again, this long article in the print edition makes absolutely no mention of the fact that Columbia (and Brandeis) banned student organizations with no due process, no evidence, and apparently no right of appeal.

The Times has put up a much shorter online article, which does report the Columbia bannings. It quoted a college official at some length, as saying the two groups had participated in an event on November 9 that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” That event was a peaceful walkout and art installation, and the paper made no effort to directly ask the young Columbia students for their response, even though you can catch the subway right outside the Times headquarters and be on the college’s campus in 15 minutes. So: the paper let a powerful university administrator slander his students, unchallenged.

At least the online report did hint at the elephant in the room: donors. And, toward the end, it quoted a Harvard alumnus and “former hedge fund manager,” who said he was contacting others to stop donating to his alma mater.

Finally: here’s a suggestion, (that the Times surely won’t take).  Catch that #1 subway train outside your office; travel up to Columbia, and interview students from both sides of the dispute. Who belongs to Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace? What do they think?