Editor’s Note: Professor Elliott Colla sent the following email to the New York Times canceling his subscription on July 6, 2026 and shared it with Mondoweiss to publish. To learn more about Adam H. Johnson’s book How to Sell a Genocide see our interview with Johnson here.
From: Elliott Colla
Subject: Goodbye
To: letters@nytimes.com
Dear Editor,
I am a life-long reader of your newspaper. I don’t mean that as hyperbole. Quite literally, I learned to read while sitting next to my father as he read the morning paper every day. He would point out words, sound them out, and I would copy him. Eventually the sentences began to make sense. And even though it’s been a while since I buried my father at Mt. Sinai cemetery, I continue to read the daily news religiously.
I don’t remember a day when I didn’t turn to you for information about the world. When I was growing up, I read in paper form. At some point, I switched to online and it was just as good, often better. Reading the NYT has been such a daily ritual for so much of my life that it feels like it’s a part of who I am. For that reason, it’s not easy for me to write this letter to you. And while I doubt if you will take note of what I have to say, it’s important to me to say it. So here goes: I’m cancelling my subscription and encouraging everyone I know to do the same.
This decision is some years in the making—but let me cut to the chase as to why, on this particular Monday, I’m cutting my ties to you.
This past weekend, I read an most extraordinary book, Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide. You will definitely want to read it, since much of it is about the New York Times. Johnson makes an astonishing case for prosecuting many of your reporters, editors, and managers for the crimes of inciting and maintaining Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As you know, the legal prosecution of genocide is not limited to investigations of the military or police. As we saw with the Holocaust and Rwanda, genocide prosecutors have also typically investigated the role that media groups play in generating violence. Johnson details the role you have played—and continue to play—in producing American consent for the ongoing US-Israeli assault on the Palestinian people. I hope that Johnson’s study will become part of a legal case at the Hague, where perhaps you and your colleagues will receive a fair trial.
You should be aware that Johnson’s study makes two very clear accusations against your organization. On the one hand, you have produced many inciting claims which led directly to violence. In particular, Johnson highlights some of your most thoroughly discredited pieces, such as “Screams Without Words” and your reporting on Israel’s multiple atrocities at the Al-Shifa Hospital. Arguably, your libelous reports on UNRWA had an even more serious impact, since they led directly to months of famine and mass starvation among Gazans. Each of these reports provided flak for war crimes that resulted in hundreds and thousands of deaths. Worse, these and many other stories were sourced to Israeli agencies that have well-established records of lying and disinformation. Despite their well-documented mendacious history, you gave these stories a platform and soaked your readership with propaganda that has proven false time and time again. Multiple media critics have elucidated the many falsities in these reports for many months now—and somehow, you have yet to retract them. What gives? Are you being held hostage?
Johnson’s second big point has to do with your very consistent pattern of depicting Palestinian humanity as less than Jewish humanity. By this, he is refering to a deep-seated pattern of bias and double standards, such as:
· Your centering of Jewish suffering over Palestinian suffering.
· Your passive-voicing of Israeli atrocities.
· Your silence on Israel’s use of mass detention and torture.
· Your silence on the openly genocidal rhetoric across the entire political spectrum of Israel society.
· Your silence on the routine rape of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
· Your use of contorted, imbalanced wordings, such as: “Israeli hostages” versus “Palestinian prisoners”; “Israeli children” versus “Palestinian minors”.
· Your insistence that Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but Palestinians do not.
Such dehumanization is consistent with racist, supremacist thinking on your part. To say this is not to speculate about your interior thoughts and motives, but rather to reflect on the clear meaning of your published words and the deliberateness and consistency of your editorial policies. As you will see, Johnson’s most damning claims are backed by substantial evidence and direct quotation.
Johnson’s study makes it clear how hack your organization has become. And he’s not even talking about your opinion pages, which routinely platform Israeli propaganda, incitement to violence, and encouragement for more endless, pointless wars. You took one of this country’s most august institutions and drove it into a ditch. And why? To provide cover for a genocidal apartheid state?! If you think that this makes Jews safer, or if you think this is good for America, you’re dangerously insane.
Finally, in case you’re wondering who I am, I am a Middle East expert with over forty years of experience living in and writing about the region. Since the 1980s, I have lived in Egypt, Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, and Iraq, and have taught countless students at some of our country’s top universities. I speak and translate Arabic and have family in the region. I have been a source for, and friend to, some of your most accomplished reporters in the region. I’ve even been quoted in your pages a few times, most recently a few months ago! That knowledge and experience certainly informs my evaluation of Johnson’s case against you, since it was not news to me that the NYT has a problem with representing Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims fairly. But in the last three years, your organization took the hate and incitement to a new level.
It’s too much for me, and I cannot in good conscience continue to support you with a subscription, even though that means I’m going to miss out on some of my favorite writers, like Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg.
In enabling genocide, you’ve wrecked the most precious thing you once possessed: legitimacy. I hope you get it back one day.
Respectfully,
Elliott Colla
Associate Professor
Georgetown University
Elliott Colla
Elliott Colla teaches modern Arabic literature at Georgetown University.
I haven’t read Johnson’s book, but read him on Twitter when I had an account until recently. It is on my list of things to buy and read
Anyway, yes, the NYT stinks and always has when it comes to atrocities committed by the U.S. or its allies. And they are guilty of the things you say.
What they would probably point out is that they also have carried some stories where they thoroughly investigated some Israeli war crimes and proved them beyond a shadow of a doubt. Two examples I remember off the top,of my head— they thoroughly investigated that cold- blooded massacre of the ambulance drivers and medics and in another story they went into detail about the common IDF practice of using kidnapped Palestinian civilians as human shields. And though their reporters ignored it, Kristof did print the story of how the Israelis rape their prisoners. They have printed enough that I think causal readers of the NYT who don’t follow the issue that closely now know that Israel commits atrocities and lies about it. And some of their other opinion writers clearly see Israel as having a horrific record ( Polgren especially), though this is balanced by idiots like Stephens and Bruni. Stephens was one of several NYT op Ed writers who defended the massacre of the protestors in the Great March of Return back in 2018.
But I am not denying their overall guilt, just pointing out that there are some at the paper who also do good work. I used to write angry letters to them myself about their horrible coverage on this subject. My guess is that there is conflict within the paper, with people in charge still stuck in the mentality which sees Israel as “ civilized” and others who try to write honest pieces.
The NYT has always been like this — they treat accusations of war crimes against the US and its allies as highly contentious claims to be treated with great caution, if they mention them at all, whereas claims against their enemies are just what you expect to see from the awful Other.
A fair critique of the news section of the NYT. But not the editorial pages, which arguable carry considerable weight. For example, “Your silence on the routine rape of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.”
Opinion | The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians – The New York Times
Opinion | The Horror of Sexual Assault in Israeli Prisons – The New York Times
Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. – The New York Times
To paraphrase Einstein, things should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler.
I’m unwilling to give up my subscription to the NYT. It’s a dilemma, as Elliott Colla’s letter implies. Good writers – Michelle Goldberg, Jamelle Bouie, John McWhorter, Nicholas Kristof, Maureen Dowd, M. Gessen and others. Against them – Bret Stephens, Thomas L. Friedman [sic], neither of whom seem to be popular with readers. I like the readers’ comments, especially when something I’ve written gets to No. 1 in the charts (not necessarily because my comment is brilliant, more to do with the fact that I’m five hours ahead of New York time, so can sometimes get pole position).
There is also the fact that it is invaluable to know “what the enemy is thinking”. In some cases it’s more like “if the enemy is thinking”.
Just in my lifetime–I’m about to turn 80–the NYT “lost” or had no legitimacy at least as far back as the Vietnam War, and maybe back to its inception, whenever that was. It’s the legitimate voice of US imperialist capitalism (perhaps the “good cop” version/tendency), isn’t it?
Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide — JTA and Times of Israel