Not all voices are being heard
A new tendentious behavior now seems to be exploited by editors of college newspapers who have violated the central purpose of journalism. They have allowed one ideology, not facts and alternate opinions, to hijack the editorial composition of their publications and purge their respective newspapers of any content—news or opinion—that contradicts a pro-Palestinian narrative and would provide a defense of Israel.
The latest example is a controversy involving the McGill Daily and its recent astonishing admission that it is the paper’s policy to not publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.”
“While we recognize that, for some, Zionism represents an important freedom project,” the editors wrote in a statement on Nov. 7, “We also recognize that it functions as a settler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displacement and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
The statement was in response to a complaint to the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) equity committee by McGill student Molly Harris.
“In July, a friend and I filed a complaint with SSMU Equity about a set of virulently anti-Semitic Tweets from a McGill Daily writer,” Harris wrote in a Facebook post. “After three months of back and forth discussions, we finally had a meeting with the McGill Daily about the culture of anti-Semitism that exists within their publication.”
Apart from Harris’s complaint, there is also the core issue of what responsibility a newspaper has to not insert personal biases and ideology into its stories, and to provide space for alternate views on many issues—including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—in the opinion sections of the paper.
At Connecticut College, Professor Andrew Pessin also found himself vilified on campus. Central to the campaign of libels waged against Pessin was the part played by the College’s student newspaper, the College Voice. In August 2014, Pessin wrote on his Facebook page a description of how he perceived fundamentalist organization Hamas, describing it as a “rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”
That image of a pit bull did not sit well with at least one Connecticut College student, Lamiya Khandaker, who, not coincidentally, had founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the virulently anti-Israel, sometimes anti-Semitic student activist group. Pessin apologized, but that was insufficient for the ever-suffering moral narcissists on his campus.In March 2015, the College Voice ran three op-eds, beginning on the paper’s front page, that condemned Pessin and accused him of racism and comparing Palestinians to rabid dogs.
The Wesleyan University community also underwent collective apoplexy over a 2015 opinion submission in the school’s student newspaper, the Wesleyan Argus, which critically examined the Black Lives Matter movement and questioned its tactics.
The thoughtful, relatively benign op-ed written by sophomore Bryan Stascavage outraged Wesleyan readers, and the newspaper’s staff was inundated with denunciations of the implicit racism of the offending op-ed and the “white privilege” demonstrated by its author, and demands that apologies be issued by the paper’s editors. The shell-shocked editors even felt compelled to publish a front-page apology for having run the piece in the first place.
To illustrate how a double standard exists in the academy as it relates to academic free speech, one only has to look at other opinion pieces that have appeared in the self-same Argus, such as a March 2015 column written by members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with the mendacious title “Israel’s Apartheid State.”
Another equally disingenuous SJP op-ed in the October 2015 edition of the Argus, “Occupation Breeds Violence, Free Palestine,” remarkably assigned the blame for the recent terrorism not on the psychopaths who were perpetrating it, but on its victims, asserting that “SJP not only condemns terror, we go further by condemning the primary engine of the ‘recent surge in violence’: Israel’s illegal military occupation of the West Bank.”
So while campus free speech is enshrined as one of the university’s chief principles, the current Wesleyan Argus controversy, as well as the editorial biases exposed in McGill’s and Connecticut College’s student newspapers, shows us that it rarely occurs as free speech for everyone, only for a certain few who feel they are morally and rationally more fit to express themselves than their ideological opposites.
Photo courtesy of kaboom pics karolina via CC0.