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'Outrageous': NYT Rejects Paid Ad From Quakers That Calls Israeli Attack on Gaza 'Genocide'
"Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability," said the secretary-general of the American Friends Service Committee.
Jan 08, 2025
The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, announced Wednesday that it has cancelled planned advertising with The New York Times after the outlet rejected one of the group's proposed ads that read: "Tell Congress to stop arming Israel's genocide in Gaza now! As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza."
AFSC alleges that after receiving the text of ad, the Times suggested they swap the word "genocide" for the word "war." The word war has "an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law," the Quaker group wrote.
AFSC said they rejected this proposed approach and then received an email from outlet's "Ad Acceptability Team" which read, in part, according to AFSC: "Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions."
"New York Times Advertising works with parties submitting proposed ads to ensure they are in compliance with our acceptability guidelines. This instance was no different, and is entirely in line with the standards we apply to all ad submissions," a spokesperson for the Times said in an email to Common Dreams.
AFSC counters that a number of entities and individuals, such as the international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have determined that Israel is committing genocide or acts of genocide in Gaza.
"The New York Times advertises a wide variety of products and advocacy messages on which there are differing views. Why is it not acceptable to publicize the meticulously documented atrocities committed by Israel and paid for by the United States?" said Layne Mullett, director of media relations for AFSC, in a statement.
Joyce Ajlouny, general secretary of AFSC, said that "the refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth. Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability."
The AFSC has been a loud voice calling for a cease-fire and ending U.S. military support for Israel. For example, in April, the group announced a Tax Day campaign, a day of action where people held events and met with their members of Congress to demand they stop voting to spend U.S. tax dollars on military assistance to Israel.
AFSC staff in Gaza have also provided 1.5 million meals, hygiene kits, and other units of humanitarian aid to internally displaced people since October 2023, according to the Wednesday statement.
This article was updated to include an emailed statement from The New York Times.
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The Genocidal Legacy of Joe Biden Will Not Be Forgotten
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible with bombs and political support for Netanyahu, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion.
Jan 06, 2025
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy.
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric—unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse—rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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Experts Warn Cybercrime Treaty Gives Governments New Powers to Crush Dissent
"States should not ratify this treaty," said Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch.
Dec 30, 2024
A technology expert at Human Rights Watch on Monday urged countries not to ratify a first-of-its-kind cybercrime treaty that the United Nations General Assembly adopted without a vote last week, warning that the measure would give governments additional powers with which to crack down on journalists, whistleblowers, and peaceful protesters.
Deborah Brown, HRW's deputy director of technology, rights, and investigations, said that the Convention Against Cybercrime "extends far beyond addressing cybercrime—malicious attacks on computer networks, systems, and data."
"It obligates states to establish broad electronic surveillance powers to investigate and cooperate on a wide range of crimes, including those that don't involve information and communication systems. And it does so without adequate human rights safeguards," Brown warned, noting that "years of heated negotiations" produced a "deeply problematic outcome" backed by the United States and other major governments that had previously expressed opposition.
Brown explained that the newly adopted convention—which is set to take effect 90 days after 40 nations ratify it—"will obligate governments to collect electronic evidence and share it with foreign authorities for any 'serious crime,' defined as an offense punishable by at least four years of imprisonment under domestic law."
"Many governments treat activities protected by international human rights law as serious offenses, such as criticism of the government, peaceful protest, same-sex relationships, investigative journalism, and whistleblowing," Brown wrote. "Additionally, the convention could be misused to criminalize the conduct of children in certain consensual relationships as well as the ordinary activities of security researchers and journalists."
"The U.N. Cybercrime Convention is excessively broad and introduces significant legal uncertainty."
The U.N. General Assembly's adoption of the treaty last week brought to an end a five-year negotiation process during which civil society organizations voiced deep concerns about the emerging document.
In October, a coalition of groups including HRW, Amnesty International, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation urged the U.N. General Assembly to oppose the treaty, warning that its adoption and ratification would undermine "democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, endangering a wide range of communities and jeopardizing the safety and privacy of Internet users globally."
"The U.N. Cybercrime Convention is excessively broad and introduces significant legal uncertainty," the coalition said. "It provides for states to leverage highly intrusive domestic and cross-border surveillance powers for the purpose of a broadly defined list of criminal offenses which bear only a minimal nexus to information and communications technology systems and go far beyond the scope of core cyber-dependent crimes."
The groups pointed specifically to Article 23 of the convention, which they said mandates "the collection of e-evidence on a wide range of crimes, even those that don't involve information and communication systems." Such a requirement, the coalition warned, could easily be "misused by governments to stifle dissent."
Brown echoed that concern on Monday and argued that the human rights safeguards embedded in the treaty are limited and "many are optional."
"Others lack any means of enforcement, which provides no confidence that international human rights standards will prevail over abusive state practices," Brown added. "States should not ratify this treaty and those that do should take significant measures through domestic law and negotiations over the protocol to ensure it will be implemented in a way that respects human rights in practice, not just on paper."
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