opinion
Campus Newspapers and the
Cognitive War Against Israel
BY RICHARD L. CRAVATTS
F or at least two decades, university campuses
have been roiled by anti-Israel activism,
manifested by Israeli Apartheid Weeks, BDS
resolutions rammed through student governments
and the toxic activism of groups like Students for
Justice in Palestine.

This cognitive war against Israel, which fre-
quently morphs into antisemitism, has resulted in
a campus climate that oppresses Jewish students,
who are often vilified as racist Zionists who sup-
port an alleged apartheid regime that oppresses
the ever-aggrieved Palestinian Arabs.

Now, a new report from the antisemitism watch-
dog group Alums for Campus Fairness has revealed
that university student newspapers are part of the
problem. The report, entitled, “Institutional Bias:
Campus Newspapers and Israel,” reviewed nearly
2,000 articles on Israel published since 2017 in
the primary student newspapers of 75 selected
campuses. “Of the 1,450 articles that address Israel,” the
researchers found, “over a third — 532 — present
the Jewish state in a negative way.” A mere “17%
provided a positive view of the country.” Moreover,
“Over half of op-eds addressing Israel on all col-
lege campuses — 307 out of 585 — were negative.”
ACF also pointed out that, tellingly, “These same
newspapers are notably silent on antisemitism
and discrimination against Jews on their own cam-
puses, publishing only 505 news articles about
this growing trend in their own community.” That
statistic is particularly relevant in light of data from
the Anti-Defamation League showing that some
one-third of Jewish students had experienced
antisemitism in 2021.

Examples of anti-Israel media bias exposed by
the ACF report are, unfortunately, numerous. One
troubling example is the 2016 controversy involv-
ing The McGill Daily, which admitted that it refused
to publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worl-
dview, or any other ideology which we consider
oppressive.” “While we recognize that, for some, Zionism rep-
resents an important freedom project,” the editors
wrote, “we also recognize that it functions as a set-
tler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displace-
ment and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
At Connecticut College in 2014, Prof. Andrew
Pessin found himself vilified after he wrote about
Hamas on his Facebook page: “One image which
essentializes the current situation in Gaza might
be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a
cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”
The editors of the campus paper The College
Voice insisted that Pessin’s words were “dehu-
manizing” to Palestinians and had “caused wide-
spread alarm in the campus community.” The
paper’s editor, Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, initiated a
campaign of lies against Pessin, contending that
the students viciously attacking him for his speech
were “victims of racism,” which they were not. In
March 2015, the Voice ran three op-eds, including
on the paper’s front page, that condemned Pessin
and accused him of racism.

In April of 2022, the University of Chicago’s
student newspaper The Chicago Maroon violated
journalistic and free speech principles by retract-
ing an op-ed written by students Melody Dias and
Benjamin ZeBrack entitled, “We Must Condemn
the SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism.” The piece ques-
tioned the tactics and ideology of members of the
university’s SJP chapter. On Jan. 26, it noted, SJP
posted the shocking admonition “DON’T TAKE
SH***Y ZIONIST CLASSES” on its Instagram page.

Students were asked to “support the Palestinian
movement for liberation by boycotting classes on
Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.”
Dias and ZeBrack made a number of accusa-
tions against SJP in their now-deleted op-ed,
including that the SJP post “demonizes [Israeli]
nationality by declaring all courses taught by
someone affiliated with the nation as propa-
ganda.” SJP demanded the “immediate deletion
of the article” for what it called “offenses,” as well
as a “public apology issued by the Maroon to SJP
UChicago and to Palestinian students for the dis-
semination of misinformation and the disregard of
journalistic integrity and factual reporting.”
Astoundingly, in response to SJP’s absurd
demands, two feckless editors, Kelly Hui and
Elizabeth Winkler, not only deleted the offending
op-ed but wrote a craven editorial in which they
dissected the op-ed for its supposed factual inac-
curacies. They justified their surrender by claim-
ing that Dias and ZeBrack’s op-ed could be the
source of campus enmity. SJP’s call for a boycott
of courses about Israel apparently was not.

This double standard was also evident in a 2021
editorial, “In support of Students for Justice in
Palestine,” written by the editorial board of The
Daily Campus, the University of Connecticut’s stu-
dent newspaper. The editors were troubled by the
fact that during an SJP event, UConn Hillel “held
a demonstration nearby in direct opposition to the
ideas behind UConn SJP.” In other words, Hillel
attempted to engage in a balanced debate by
presenting its own views on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. This, it appears, was unforgivable.

The Harvard Crimson has also taken an extrem-
ist anti-Israel position, particularly in a controver-
sial editorial published in April entitled, “In Support
of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine,”
which was replete with slanders against the Jewish
state and called on the Harvard community to
commit itself to the corrosive BDS campaign.

The editorial was inspired by the April demon-
strations and programming of the Harvard College
Palestine Solidarity Committee, which, as part of
Israeli Apartheid Week, “installed a colorful, multi-
panel ‘Wall of Resistance’ in favor of Palestinian
freedom and sovereignty.” The fawning editorial
heaped praise on this childish mock wall and
suggested that “art is a potent form of resistance.”
The writers added that they were “humbled by
our peers’ passion and skill” in creating such an
activist masterpiece.

They further contended, “The admittedly con-
troversial panels dare the viewer to contend with
well-established, if rarely stated, facts” (emphasis
added). What were these “well-established facts”?
One panel, for example, announced in capital let-
ters, “Zionism is: Racism — Settler Colonialism —
White Supremacy — Apartheid.” It appears that the
word “facts,” in this case, was synonymous with
crude slander and libel. The editorial’s endorse-
ment of the claim that Israel is a white suprema-
cist state, moreover, constitutes antisemitic hate
speech according to the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance’s widely adopted defini-
tion of antisemitism.

Although most universities claim that free
speech is one of their chief principles, the ACF
report shows that it is rarely for everyone. It is
reserved for the lucky few who feel they are mor-
ally qualified to express themselves. As for their
ideological opponents, they must be silenced.

Biases are to be expected in the marketplace of
ideas. In newspapers, however, editorial bias and
the exclusion of alternate views are intellectually
corrupt practices that violate the spirit and pur-
pose of journalism. This is especially the case on
university campuses, where vigorous debate and
scholarship should be the supreme value, not bias
and suppression of others’ ideas. JE
Richard L. Cravatts is a Freedom Center Journalism
Fellow in Academic Free Speech and president
emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle
East, is the author of the forthcoming book, “The
Slow Death of the University: How Radicalism,
Israel-Hatred and Race Obsession are Destroying
Academia.” JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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