The Hearst Corporation-owned San Francisco Chronicle recently weighed in on the efforts to combat anti-Zionist aggression on campus. Featured as a news report titled “A pro-Palestinian activist came to Oakland to practice medicine. An outrage campaign followed,” the piece by staff reporter Raheem Hosseini is, in fact, a combination of hagiography — of the highlighted activist, Gabrielle Wimer; whitewashing — of anti-Zionist actions on campus; and most of all, an extended attack — on all who attempt to expose the underlying antisemitism of these actions. The article was amplified through Hearst Corporation’s Connecticut publications, including CT Insider, Norwalk Hour, Register-Citizen, Middletown Press, Danbury’s News Times, and the Stamford Advocate.
It is accompanied by a photo of Wimer posing in her scrubs and a kaffiyeh with a caption that encapsulates the Chronicle’s advocacy journalism, inverting the role of attacker and defender:
Before coming to Oakland to practice medicine, Gabrielle Wimer, 30, was a Columbia University medical student who participated in a March sit-in to protest the expulsion of pro-Palestinian student activists. The act of civil disobedience got her arrested, temporarily suspended and put her on the radar of a reactionary network that treats student activists like public enemies.
Contrary to what the caption implies, however, the sit-in was not simply a form of peaceful, political dissent. but an aggressive storming by masked, kaffiyeh-wearing intruders of Barnard College’s Millstein center – a library and academic hub in the heart of the campus.
Disrupting the library and impeding students from reaching their classes, the protest was ostensibly staged to reverse the expulsion of students who had previously attempted to intimidate other students in a class about modern Israel. Those masked, kaffiyeh-wearing agitators had entered the classroom and refused to leave while pressing inflammatory “Crush Zionism” flyers — depicting a jackboot stomping on a Jewish star — upon unwilling students.
The March 5th protest involved further intimidation. Protesters banged on drums and chanted oft-used Hamas slogans calling for the erasure of the Jewish state — “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Free, free Palestine.” They displayed Palestinian flags and hung an effigy of the college’s president as well as a wanted poster for its dean. And even more tellingly, they distributed Hamas-issued pamphlets justifying the October 7th massacre. Indeed, the takeover of the building was orchestrated by the pro-Hamas Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Students for Justice in Palestine groups, both of which support Hamas’ genocidal violence as legitimate “armed resistance.”
Wimer was one of nine students arrested after refusing to heed repeated calls to evacuate the building due to a bomb threat.
Hosseini inverted this story, whitewashing the illegal pro-Hamas, anti-Zionist actions as “student activism” expressing “sympathy for Palestinians” and attacking its exposure as “a smear campaign.” According to the reporter’s spin:
… an act of student activism put Wimer on the radar of a loose network of activists, commentators and provocateurs who equate criticism of the Israeli government with hatred of the Jewish people, and conflate sympathy for Palestinians with support for the terrorist group Hamas.
Their smear campaign shows the lengths that groups operating with limited transparency and maximum impunity are going to silence individual activists as the Trump administration squeezes their institutions.
The reporter turns Wimer into a virtuous martyr victimized by shadowy and nefarious forces. He depicts her alternately as an innocent victim, righteous humanist, principled justice warrior, and courageous defender of Palestinians persecuted for protesting “the genocide in Gaza.”
The article’s subheading declares the same: “A Columbia medical student protested the genocide in Gaza. A Project Esther-style smear campaign followed her 2,900 miles to California.”
The article repeatedly defends and bolsters the genocide canard that Wimer promotes against the Jewish state.
First, Hosseini quotes Wimer to proclaim that
“what’s happening right now is a genocide. … And if we can’t agree that is wrong, if we can’t be on the same moral page … I don’t view that as a definitional issue so much as a devastating feature of humanity and where we are right now.”
He then bolsters Wimer’s genocide assertion by quoting Los Angeles lawyer Thomas Seabaugh who previously justified radical, anti-Israel university encampments, accepted the genocide canard as truth and exposure of the underlying antisemitism of those who promote it as false smears. In the article, Seabaugh claims that
“pro-Palestinian students correctly called attention to a genocide and were unfairly punished by their schools, their government and far-right vigilante groups…”
The reporter repeats the charge of deliberate genocide perpetrated by Israel another time before concluding the article with a final quote about genocide by Wimer meant to portray her as a paragon of virtue:
“Figuring out how to keep people safe in the East Bay and ending the genocide are both very important to me,” she said. “There’s only so much I can do in the emergency department.”
The SF Chronicle and other Hearst publications that ran this piece of anti-Israel propaganda under the guise of news reporting have abandoned journalistic norms and ethics. They inverted a story about the New Antisemitism, turning anti-Zionist activists into heroes and those who expose them into villains.