The Sarah Lawrence College Students for Justice in Palestine posted multiple claims in a social media post for why they turned down a New York Times interview, claiming that the outlet is complicit in the ongoing war in Gaza.
In a post uploaded to Instagram by the SJP, the student group outlined a series of points that attacked the outlet after the New York Times requested an interview from members of the group.
In the post, the SJP claims that the Time has been “[A]iding and abetting Israel’s criminal war on the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen,” and also attacked the NYT for framing alleged war crimes in Israel as “self-defense strategies” and “declining to cover these violations altogether.”
The SJP also claimed that the NYT has “[E]scalated its Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric, sensationalizing and smearing all forms of resistance against Zionism.”
In the post, the SJP cited how the NYT put a story written by a former Israeli intelligence officer on its front page, where the piece highlighted an investigation that displayed how Hamas militants committed “widespread sexual assault.” The group says that while pieces such as that one were published, the “[S]ysyematic and continuing rape of Palestinian men in Zionist prisons goes uninvestigated in the pages of the Times.”
The SJP also used claims from “Electronic Intifada” that editors at the NYT have decided to “[F]orego real journalism in favor of yet another iteration of the tired, ahistorical narrative that Arabs fighting back against Zionist aggression are committing ‘antisemitic attacks,” by choosing not to show a visual on the clashes between Moroccan and Israeli soccer fans.
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The SJP further stated that the “[S]elective and biased coverage of the war on Gaza” is “[C]ontinuing the fatal legacy it established during World War II,” with the group referencing the NYT’s coverage of the Holocaust in the 1940’s where the SJP outlined that the outlet “[B]uried coverage of the Holocaust in its back pages and published a total of six front page stories.”
Aside from also making further claims such as the NYT is the “[N]ewspaper of choice for American war criminals,” the group stated that they “[D]o not trust the Times of any of its reporters to truthfully represent the demands of the encampment or our cause.”
Instead of holding an interview, the group is opting to call on the NYT to “[S]hift its attention away from our minor disruption of campus life and toward the Israeli campaign to end the lives of the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran.”
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
