NPR routinely demonstrates wokeness with an anti-Israel bias. Saturday’s All Things Considered story by youth-politics reporter Elena Moore from the frontlines of the Israel-Hamas campus wars. She lamented how students are afraid of expressing pro-Hamas sympathies on progressive college campuses: “For some students who protested war in Gaza, fear and silence is a new campus reality.”
This, after NPR either ignoring or “both-siding” threats to Jewish students from those same now-suddenly terrified “pro-Palestinian” campus activists, since Hamas attacked Israeli civilians in October 2023.
Moore focused on the pseudonymous “Sam.” NPR loves playing up how dystopian America is right now by granting anonymity to all kinds of radicals. If you named „Sam,“ one might be able to find her chanting pro-Hamas slogans or pro-Hamas signs about ending Israel or cheering October 7. Moore isn’t focusing on how much free speech there is in Gaza — where anti-Hamas protesters can end up dead.
Last spring, Cornell University was home to a student encampment, where dozens slept in tents on the quad to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. The demonstration lasted more than two weeks.
„It’s actually one of my most beautiful memories in Ithaca,“ said a Ph.D. candidate at the school currently studying on a visa. She asked to be identified by the nickname Sam due to concerns over how she could be treated by immigration authorities if targeted for deportation.
….
It was part of a wave of demonstrations at schools around the country calling on universities to divest from Israel — protests that students have defended as largely peaceful [We all know what “largely peaceful” often means in the media]much of that same activism is now under increased scrutiny as part of a policy that the Trump administration says is aimed at eliminating antisemitism, particularly on American campuses.
The effort has led to the targeting of non-citizen students over their past pro-Palestinian activism, resulting in students losing visas and several high-profile arrests. These incidents have created a climate of uncertainty at many colleges and universities, leaving some students feeling increasingly silenced and fearful.
The foreign-student left is silent on campus these days? More evidence needed. NPR took Sam’s word that her “movement” doesn’t discriminate against Jewish students, “But watching Trump’s actions has made her worried for her safety.”
Even when NPR belatedly addressed anti-semitic incidents on campus, it was under a subhead sympathizing with the pro-Hamas faction: ‚So many students are just terrified.’
Since Hamas’s attack, legitimate fears felt by Jewish students have been downplayed by an NPR eager to whitewash pro-Hamas lefty protesters, who have sometimes committed harassment, threats, and even physical violence against Jewish students, even though their supposed beef was with the nation of Israel, now individual Jews.
During last year’s surge of campus protests, there were reports of antisemitic incidents that left some Jewish students feeling unsafe, including at Columbia University, as reported by the Columbia Spectator….
(Franklin Foer has graphic details in The Atlantic.)
But soon came the inevitable turn in the story, backing off the anti-semitism accusations, downplaying the incidents and quoting Kenneth Stern of Bard College, supposedly “a supporter of Israel,” who certainly has a lot of sympathy for those who chant on campus for Israel’s destruction.
Student protesters adamantly dispute allegations that last year’s demonstrations were discriminatory towards Jewish students. And while extremism researchers have clocked surges in anti-Jewish sentiment nationwide in recent years, they have also cautioned against broadly characterizing the campus protests as antisemitic.
Watching the administration’s arrests of Öztürk and Khalil has raised alarm bells, including from Kenneth Stern, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College and drafted a commonly used definition of antisemitism. In a recent interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Stern, a supporter of Israel, said Trump’s actions represent a „weaponizing“ of antisemitism.
Of course, Stern likened the deportations of non-American citizens to „McCarthyism.”
It’s a sentiment felt by students on campus who support the pro-Palestinian movement.
The audio transcript of the story defaulted to defending the pro-Palestinian side and conjured up the usual “chilling effect.”
: ….They say the administration’s actions are an attack on free speech that’s had a chilling effect for some on campus.
Many college campuses function as one enormous “chilling effect” when it comes to conservative views. But that’s also true of the „news room“ at NPR.
