A story in yesterday’s New York Times, about extremists who celebrate the murder of Jewish civilians, radiated concern for the victims. But in the Times’ telling, the victims are the extremists themselves.
That moral inversion was made possible because the reporter, Anemona Hartocollis, whitewashed the nature of the movement she was describing. By concealing its open celebration of terrorism, she turned a story about campus free speech and fanaticism into a story about only the former — and in doing so guided readers to sympathize with those who endorse the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The article’s framing is unmistakable. “What Happened to Campus Activism Against the War in Gaza?,” the headline reads. The subhead continues: “Protests swept campuses after the war began. But tough discipline, pushed by Republicans, curbed a student movement that was one of the largest since the Vietnam War.”
Readers are told a story about “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators who have been “arrested,” “suppressed,” and targeted by “crackdowns” by by university administrators who gave in to pressure by a “Republican-controlled” congressional committee. If those committee members described protests as being “tinged with antisemitism,” it is a charge that “protesters, some of whom were Jewish, strongly rejected.”
According to the New York Times, the protesters were merely upset by “the scale of death and destruction” in Gaza. Diplomas were withheld. The disciplinary processes were “protracted” and “interrupt[ed] the course of students’ lives.” A total of three commentators are quoted in the article, all of whom defend the activists.
Also unmistakable, at least for those willing to look beyond Hartocollis’s story, is the hatred and extremism at the forefront of the campus activism.
To better understand the demonstrations in question, we can look to Columbia University — not because it is a particularly extreme case, but because it is the “epicenter” of the campus protest movement, as the Times itself has reported.
And at Columbia, we can best understand the anti-Israel movement by looking to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — again, not because it’s some outlandish fringe, but because CUAD is the “main protest movement,” which “established a tent encampment on campus,” “set off pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school,” and “led many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia and Barnard since 2023.” That, too, is according to the New York Times.
CUAD has openly supported the Oct. 7 massacre, calling it one of the “greatest moments of Palestinian resistance,” a “crowning achievement,” and “the very essence of what it is to resist.” And they have amplified calls for such “resistance” against American Jews. “Let repression breed more resistance,” reads a social media post shared by CUAD. “All Zionist … infrastructure are legitimate targets.” The post is punctuated by the inverted red triangle used in Hamas propaganda videos to mark its military targets.
Already on Oct. 9, 2023, with the scope of Hamas’s murderous operation clear, the leading member groups of CUAD declared that they stood “in full solidarity” with the attack, which they lauded as a “historic moment.” The group has also expressed support for other terror groups and attacks on civilians, including the terror rampage at a Tel Aviv train station that took the lives of seven people.
“Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD announced in a post offering support to one of the group’s student leaders, Khymani James, who had previously been criticized for statements including “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; “I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die”; and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Even the New York Times has previously acknowledged that CUAD has “spoken approvingly of Hamas’s attack.”
These are the protest leaders at the epicenter of campus unrest, which the newspaper and its reporter now frame as sympathetic victims.
Beyond concealing the pro-terrorism sentiment that pervades much of the campus anti-Israel movement, the author shapes the story with other subtle manipulations. Recall her passage that briefly relays, then rebuts, criticism by members of Congress: “They argued the protests, including some of the slogans demonstrators used, were tinged with antisemitism, an accusation that protesters, some of whom were Jewish, strongly rejected.”
“Tinged”? In fact, committee members have remarked on a “pervasive rot of antisemitism” on campus, stated that “Antisemitism is proliferating at colleges across the country,” and argued that universities have been “upended by an epidemic of hate, violence and harassment targeting Jewish students.” The Times diluted the criticism to match its broader whitewash of campus extremism.
That whitewash, moreover, goes beyond the generic protesters. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, one of the three groups quoted in defense of the campus activists, is introduced only as “a Muslim civil rights group.” Readers aren’t told that CAIR’s executive director has expressed “happiness” about the Oct. 7 attack. The group has spread false rumors that Jews were responsible for the murder of a young Muslim boy. These are hardly neutral arbiters.
Nor is Graeme Blair, another of the three quoted pundits. Although the New York Times describes him only as a “professor of political science who was arrested during the 2024 encampment,” Blair is also a member of UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a virulently anti-Israel organization formed to “support and amplify” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Columbia’s SJP, mentioned above as having celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre, his hardly the only campus chapter to praise the massacre. Many other SJP chapters did the same, following the lead of National SJP, which called the slaughter glorious and historic “win.”
The New York Times could have produced a serious examination of how violent ideologies took root on American campuses and menaced Jewish students. Instead, airbrushed those realities, turning advocates of terror into symbols of free expression.