The Mainstream Media’s Pro-Genocide Coverage of Campus Protests

One of the main reasons why the Israel-Palestinian conflict has persisted for so long is the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which persists in no small part because the US mainstream media serve the propaganda function of manufacturing consent for that policy.

A good illustration of how the media fulfill that function is the coverage of college campus protests against Israel’s US-supported genocide in Gaza.

For example, there’s the media’s narrative that when protesters chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“, it is because they are anti-Semitic supporters of Hamas who are inciting violence against Israeli Jews. I thoroughly exposed the anti-intellectual nature of that claim in this article:

But let’s take a further look at the issue using the New York Times as our case study.

For our first example, under the April 27 headline “Crackdowns at 4 College Protests Lead to More Than 200 Arrests“, the Times reported the following in its lead paragraph (emphasis added),

More than 200 protesters were arrested on Saturday at Northeastern University, Arizona State University, Indiana University and Washington University in St. Louis, according to officials, as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.

So already we can see where the Times‘ sympathies lie. The story presented isn’t about peace activists who oppose a US-supported genocide but have been struggling to exercise their right to protest in the face of censorship, media distortions about their purpose, and universities’ attempts to quash their protests.

Nope. Instead, the Times would have our sympathies lie with the poor universities who just can’t seem to put a stop to this undesirable behavior among college students.

Reading further into the article, there is of course the usual attempt to characterize activists who support Palestinians’ human rights and oppose genocide as “anti-Semitic”. Here is the enlightening example of the justification provided by Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, for quashing student protests (emphasis added):

A Northeastern spokeswoman, Renata Nyul, said the demonstration had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and that the “use of virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews,’ crossed the line.”

Protesters denied both claims, and a video appeared to show that it was a pro-Israel counterprotester who used the phrase, as part of his criticism of the pro-Palestinian protesters’ chants. In response to that video, Ms. Nyul stood by her initial comments, adding that “any suggestion that repulsive, antisemitic comments are sometimes acceptable depending on the context is reprehensible.”

Notice how the university spokeswoman, after seeing the video, did not try to maintain that it was the pro-Palestinian protesters who shouted “kill the Jews”, which was the claim she made to try to characterize those protesters as anti-Semitic, yet she nevertheless stood by her characterization. Evidence be damned!

And don’t think that because the Times disclosed that the video contradicted Ms. Nyul’s claim that therefore this was objective reporting.

Notice how the Times lets Nyul have the last word, as though her reason for standing by her initial comments was somehow reasonable. An example of true objectivity would be to comment how Ms. Nyul was thus effectively arguing that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators should still be punished for something that was admittedly said by a pro-Israel troublemaker. Instead, the Times leaves its less attentive readers with the impression that Nyul’s justification for cracking down on protesters was still valid.

As another example of the lack of objectivity, nowhere in the article does the Times disclose that the supposed anti-Semites are protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US government’s support for it.

This is in keeping with a directive from New York Times editors to its journalists to avoid using the word “genocide” in their reports because it is “incendiary”. Never mind that even the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the most authoritative body on the planet on the meaning and application of international law, has issued a preliminary judgment that Israel has been perpetrating a plausible genocide. And we don’t need the ICJ to finish deliberating on that case to see that Israel’s actions meet the definition of “genocide” under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

To take another example from the Times, on May 3, it published an article titled “Attack on U.C.L.A. Encampment Stirs Fears of Clashes Elsewhere“. Once again, the word “genocide” does not appear in the article despite the obviously huge relevance it has as context for understanding the protests.

Instead, the Times says merely that students “are outraged by the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza” and calling for a cease-fire (bold emphasis added).

It’s little wonder that nearly half of Americans don’t know that more Palestinians than Israelis have died since October 7 when you have America’s “newspaper of record” so atrociously underreporting the Palestinian death toll.

Students aren’t outraged by the deaths of thousands of civilians. They are outraged by the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

As of May 7, over 34, 735 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s savage retaliatory military operation in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and 14,500 children. That is, about 70% of Palestinians killed have been women and children, which reflects the perfectly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment.

It is a military assault on the civilian population.

With 70% of the dead being women and children, not even the New York Times would have the gall to suggest that most dead Palestinians were Hamas militants engaged in hostilities. Even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last month tacitly conceded that over 60% of the dead have been civilians (by claiming that 12,000 have been “terrorists”, which we can reasonably assume to be too high a number because of how the IDF has used artificial intelligence, or AI, to select targets).

The equivalent of that with respect to Israeli deaths would be to report that “dozens” of Israeli civilians were killed on October 7, but the Times reported an exact number of “1,200 people”.

To be more precise, the number is 1,269, including 382 members of the IDF and 887 civilians. So, it would have been fair for the Times to compare “hundreds” Israeli civilians killed with what has easily been a number of dead Palestinian civilians in the tens of thousands.

If the New York Times were trying to keep Americans in the dark about the fact that 27 times more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis, it would explain this type of reporting — which would in turn help to explain why nearly half of Americans are so totally ignorant about the subject that they can’t even answer the most basic questions like which side has suffered more death.

On the even more extreme end of things, you have the likes of Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, who last month claimed that “Hamas is now in control of the Biden administration.” Again, it’s little wonder why many Americans are so totally ignorant if not outright deluded about the nature of the conflict.

Coming back to the Times article on the UCLA encampment, incredibly, you have to scroll more than halfway down the page before you can learn that the “attack” referenced in the headline was not perpetrated by any of the pro-Palestinian protesters.

On the contrary, the “clash” broke out when defenders of Israel’s genocide attacked anti-genocide protestors (emphasis added):

The clashes that erupted late Tuesday at U.C.L.A. turned the campus into a national flashpoint. Masked counterprotesters entered the encampment set up last week by students opposed to the war in Gaza. The attackers hurled a firecracker into the encampment, tore down its outer walls and threw heavy objects at the pro-Palestinian demonstrators. No arrests have been made in connection with the attack.

The Times made sure to immediately add:

The Jewish Federation Los Angeles, which partnered with I.A.C. for the rally last Sunday, condemned the violence and said the attackers at U.C.L.A. did not represent the Jewish community or its values.

This contrasts with how pro-Palestinian protestors are routinely generalized as Jew-haters advocating violence against Israelis.

As another recent example, take the widely reported claim that a protestor “stabbed” a female student in the eye with a Palestinian flag just because she was a Jew.

New York Times columnist and genocide apologist Bret Stephens cited that student’s testimony as the key claim supporting his characterization of pro-Palestinian protesters as objecting to Israel’s assault on Gaza for no other apparent reason than that they hate Jews and support Hamas.

Here is how he reported the incident (emphasis added):

On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.

“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said a demonstrator jammed a Palestinian flag into her left eye. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.

But it was an obvious a hoax. Tartak was lying, as is clear from her own video of the incident that she posted to Twitter.

The video shows protesters walking calmly in a circle chanting for their university to disclose its investment portfolio and divest from any companies helping to enable Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Tartak was not being shoved around. Nobody attacked her. She wasn’t stabbed in the eye with a flag.

At one point, a female student being videoed by Tartak as she strolled by holds out the two-finger “peace” sign. At the same time, the next person in line in the circle, another female student, holds out her palm toward the camera as if to either wave “hi” or to protest being filmed. Neither protester touches Tartak; they both merely gestured toward her camera.

In the tale she told the media, Tartak turned that type of behavior into her being harassed and shoved around because she’s a Jew.

At another point in the video, a male student walks by apparently not even looking at her as he waves a Palestinian flag. The flag waves gently toward her camera. It isn’t clear whether it actually touched her, but we can give Tartak the benefit of the doubt and presume that it made contact. One explanation is that the protester carelessly bumped her with the flag because he didn’t even see her standing there. If we give her the further benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn’t an accident, the most generous interpretation is that the protester was pretending to pay her no attention while swinging his flag rather gently toward her head.

Here is Breaking Point‘s takedown of this hoax propagated by the media to mislead Americans into believing that the protesters are just a bunch of Jew-hating terrorist supporters whose activities the universities are right to quash with police force:

Matt Orfalea of Racket News has this video appropriately ridiculing the media’s narrative:

The media ought to be totally embarrassed that they actually propagated the claim of a violent eye stabbing. But nope. Why not?

Because the mainstream media’s willingness to relate her tall tale as though it actually happened reveals how they attempt to manipulate public opinion in favor of the US government’s policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

To illustrate how shamelessly the media propagated the hoax, Bret Stephens’ article in the New York Times was edited to remove the claim about a protester jamming his flag into the Jewish girl’s eye. That claim was replaced with this one:

Tartak said she was hit in the left eye by a Palestinian flag held by a demonstrator.

And at the foot of the article is now this “correction”:

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to an injury Sahar Tartak said she received. A video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.

So the description of a protester deliberately jamming a flag into her eye was merely “imprecise” in terms of conveying what actually happened.

The Times maintains that the flag “hit her face” even though the video doesn’t actually show that.

And the Times maintains that it is possible that the protester did jam the flag into the girl’s eye — even though it is totally obvious from the video that that did not happen.

Additionally, notice that the way the Times edited the article actually makes it less accurate because the sentence they changed was correct as it was: Tartak did not merely claim that she was hit with a flag; she did claim that the protester had assaulted her and literally “jammed” the flag into her eye.

This demonstrates Stephens’ and the Times editors’ total shamelessness about having relayed Tartak’s false claim to their readers as though it had actually happened. After it became publicly known that it didn’t happen, instead of correcting the article by disclosing that the Jewish student had lied, the Times doubled down on its deception by falsely claiming the she had never claimed to have been stabbed in the eye!

The “correction” thus also serves to render Stephens’ propaganda piece only slightly less effective in its aim of convincing Times readers that the campus protesters are a bunch of Jew-hating Hamas supporters.

Another New York Times article published on May 3 was titled “Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course“. The way the Times reports it, our primary concern should evidently be that for the previously “untouchable” issue of “financial divestment from Israel” to be taken up by universities in a serious manner would be to take sides, and “Taking sides now is a surefire way to inflame at least one faction in a conflict that has divided campuses, split the Democratic Party and handed Republican lawmakers a cudgel with which to attack the institutions.”

We are thus led by the Times to the conclusion that it would be unnecessarily divisive for educational institutions to give into protestors’ demand for divestment, and our main concern, evidently, should be how some donors said that “going through with divestment would cross a bright line” resulting in a cutoff of funding for universities, which is surely an outcome we should want to avoid at all costs.

And, of course, the Times reminds us that “One longstanding response to such calls” — which long predated the violence ongoing since October 7, 2023 — “is that divestment from Israel stems from antisemitism, because activists are targeting the only Jewish country in the world and not seeking divestment from other nations accused of engaging in human-rights atrocities.”

The Times thus reports as though it is a fact that protesters’ calls for divestment are inherently anti-Semitic. It makes no attempt to even question much less challenge that argument against divestment.

The possibility that there is no inherent anti-Semitism in protesting a crime against humanity being perpetrated by the self-described “Jewish state” and supported by the protestors’ own government is not broached by the Times.

This gets back to the deliberately omitted context.

The background the Times provides for readers is that there has been a “debate on college campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza.” There is no mention of the fact that over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly civilians. The word “genocide” of course does not appear anywhere in the article despite this being the critical context for the whole story.

Once again, nowhere in the article does the Times provide the critical context that what students have been protesting on campuses across the US is Israel’s assault on the civilian population of Gaza and the US government’s support for it.

Times readers were better served on May 3 by an opinion piece written by John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University, who shares the campus protestors’ view “that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity.” (Not a “genocide”, mind you, just “an atrocity” like could be said of any war.)

McWhorter agrees with the protesters that “the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with unaccountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified.” (Not mere “thousands” of innocent Palestinians, mind you, as claimed the same day in the same newspaper’s news report.)

He agrees that President Joe Biden should “simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.” (So the US should cease its complicity in “an atrocity” but nothing so extreme as a “genocide”, mind you.)

The reader thus learns more about the actual context from reading this opinion piece than any of the aforementioned news articles.

McWhorter also legitimately criticized tactics used by some demonstrators as both wrong and ineffective, such as what the Times described as the “occupation” of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, which is not an unfair description but is ironic because, in addition to Times editors instructing reporters not to use the word “genocide” in the context of Gaza, reporters were told not to use the term “occupied territories” to describe Gaza or the West Bank — even though that is literally their status under international law.

McWhorter also says that when protests first started occurring on college campuses, he “did not believe the participants were motivated by antisemitism”. But accompanying that remark was his criticism that “the volume, fury and duration of their protests left many Jewish students feeling under siege for their Jewishness.”

Evidently, college students should feel free to protest the genocide, but just do it more quietly, without expressing anger about this crime against humanity being supported by the government claiming to represent them and by companies that their universities are invested in, with less persistence, and otherwise in a way that attracts less attention to the issue and doesn’t upset Jewish students — like Sahar Tartak — who align themselves with the “Jewish state” that is perpetrating the genocide .

College students objecting to the US government’s and their universities’ complicity just can’t go around being so unsympathetic toward the precious feelings of those who support Israel’s genocide. It is unbecoming of a civilized society.