The media should be celebrating college protesters instead of demonizing them
Too many reporters have embraced the toxic assumption that any anti-Gaza-war protest is inherently antisemitic.
Mainstream-media reporters covering the growing wave of college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have adopted an overwhelmingly negative tone about something they should be celebrating: the peaceful free expression of college students understandably devastated by the pulverizing of Gaza and the slaughter of over 34,000 Palestinians by the Israeli military.
The root cause of this journalistic dysfunction is that too many reporters have embraced the toxic presumption that any anti-Gaza-war protest is inherently antisemitic, and that any such protest legitimately makes Jewish students feel unsafe.
That’s actually a grotesque viewpoint: it both smears peaceful protesters (many of whom are Jewish) and trivializes real antisemitism.
Antisemitism is a serious problem. Defining it properly is important. Calling for the death of Jews is antisemitic. So is bias, stereotyping, using antisemitic language, and Holocaust denial.
But calling for a cease fire in Gaza, or divestment from weapons manufacturers, or freedom for Palestinians, or even the end of apartheid in Israel – that is not antisemitic. That is making a political statement shared by many Jews.
Certain chants have been unfairly demonized. Calling for Palestinians to be free from the river to the sea is not synonymous with wanting to drive the Jews into the sea, which would certainly be antisemitic. It can simply be a cry for freedom for all Palestinians. Similarly, “long live the intifada” is about resistance, not about killing Jews.
And empathizing with the suffering of Gazans in no way implies anything like an endorsement of the horrific Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas, or the ongoing hostage-keeping.
And yet, the presumption of antisemitism underlies almost all the mainstream-media coverage, which, like this New York Times story, emphasizes “chaos”, “turmoil,” and “the fears of many Jewish students.”
The coverage routinely conflates the peaceful protests with a few truly antisemitic acts that have in most cases been committed by trolls attracted to the protests rather than by the college students themselves. (Student newspapers are making the distinction that the MSM isn’t.)
College students giving a damn about the suffering of others – and doing something about it by protesting and committing civil disobedience – is a long and admirable American tradition. If these students were protesting on behalf of Ukraine, or against hunger, the press coverage – if there were any at all – would be positive.
This is part of what college is all about. As Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The shut-up-and-study crowd ignores the fact that virtually every college and university in the United States has a dual pedagogical mission: the development of students’ critical-thinking skills (via knowledge production and dissemination) and the preparation of students to be informed, engaged citizens. ….
The administrative impulse to avoid controversy at all costs is making a mockery of higher education’s avowed commitment to preparing students for citizenship. When rights to free expression are trampled on, students are deprived of the opportunity to practice the hard work of living in community with people who hold diverse views.
By casting this form of speech as threatening, reporters are wittingly or unwittingly following the playbook designed by far-right Republicans who have lately been using what they call insufficient action against antisemitism as part of their know-nothing attempts to undermine the reputation of the supposedly “woke” academy.
In December, two university presidents who went before a Republican-led House committee and defended nuanced actions regarding the protests ended up being hounded out of their jobs.
By contrast, when Columbia president Nemat Shafik went before the same committee last week, as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, she “readily agreed with Republicans’ premise that pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia is shot through with anti-Jewish bigotry, and explained how, under her leadership, Columbia is cracking down.”
The next day, Shafik “took the extraordinary step of calling the police… and over 100 people were arrested.”
As Moira Donegan wrote in a Guardian opinion column:
The police raid against Columbia students that followed the next day can be seen as an extension of the policy of appeasement and preemptive compliance with the anti-Palestinian, anti-student Republican right that Shafik adopted in her testimony. In its war on education and ostentatious displays of grievance against “woke” universities, the far right has made itself hostile to academic freedom, peaceful protest and vast swaths of progressive speech. In her willingness to unleash state violence against student protestors, Shafik proved herself their willing ally. It is worth stating plainly what happened at Columbia: the raid was nothing less than the product of collusion between a university administration and rightwing politicians to suppress politically disfavored speech.
Nothing remotely like that was reflected in the MSM coverage, which has also dramatically underplayed the noxious anti-speech views of university administrators.
Consider what former journalist Claire Shipman, now a chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees, told the House committee: “One of the excellent recommendations of our antisemitism task force is that they have said that if you are going to chant, it should only be in a certain place, so that people who don’t want to hear it are protected from having to hear it.”
That’s not how protests work.
If Columbia is in crisis, the student-run Columbia Daily Spectator concluded last week, it is not because of the protesters, it’s because of the administration:
The administration has ignored our countless pleas to engage meaningfully with students, opting instead to continue down a path of surveillance, oppression, and authoritarian policies. Columbia should encourage free discourse on campus, not censor marginalized voices under the guise of “safety” and protection.
The assumptions baked into the corporate-media coverage of pro-Gaza protests is oddly reminiscent of the early coverage of the anti-Vietnam war protests. Those protests were initially seen as anti-American, which they were not. Today’s protests are being treated as if they are anti-Jewish, which they are not.
History was much kinder to the Vietnam-era protests than the early journalistic reports. Perhaps that will happen here, too.
Yes, there does appear to be a significant increase in hate crimes against Jews – much like there appears to be an increase in hate crimes against Muslims. And those bias-motivated threats and attacks should be prosecuted. But they are in almost all cases not directly associated with the non-criminal, First Amendment-protected protests on campus.
If protests on campus called for death to the Jews, that would be abhorrent and antisemitic. But the actual campus protests are about the death of Gazans — tens of thousands of them — and students exercising their right to freedom of speech should be applauded and defended.