“At Columbia, the protests continued, with dancing and pizza,” read a New York Times headline last week. Two days later, another headline in the Gray Lady stated, “Some Jewish students are targeted as protests continue at Columbia.”
Critics who watch the New York paper of record closely, including those with extensive experience working for the Times, noted that the paper recorded the culinary and entertainment choices of protesters, who told Jews to go back to Europe, among other antisemitic comments, and that the Times suggested only that “some” Jews felt threatened.
“Just a fun dance party with pizza and calls to exterminate the Jews! Fun!” wrote Bari Weiss, editor of the Free Press and a former columnist and op-ed editor at the Times.
“From the weeks after Hamas’s massacre through the current wave of supposedly ‘pro-Palestinian’ protests, the New York Times has often downplayed, buried or ignored the extremism of anti-Israel protesters—even their incitement to violence,” Gilead Ini, senior research analyst at CAMERA, told JNS.
“Obviously, if these were just dancing pizza parties, as the Times’s ridiculous headline would have us believe, then Columbia wouldn’t have taken the extraordinary steps of calling in the NYPD and canceling in-person classes,” CAMERA’s Jonah Cohen told JNS.
“They are chanting a variation of Charlottesville’s, ‘The Jews will not replace us,’” wrote Adam Rubenstein, a former Times opinion staffer. “Media called this ‘white nationalism’ then.”
“Now they describe it as social justice with ‘dancing and pizza,’” he added. “‘Planning to stay all night, they were in a rather upbeat mood, noshing on donated pizza and snacks. An impromptu dance party had even broken out.’” JNS