{"id":3445,"date":"2025-05-01T13:47:59","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T13:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3445"},"modified":"2025-05-01T13:47:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T13:47:59","slug":"new-york-times-distorts-harvard-report-on-antisemitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/?p=3445","title":{"rendered":"New York Times Distorts Harvard Report on Antisemitism"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n A sign posted outside the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass., on April 23, 2024.<\/span>
\n Photo: Mel Musto\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/span>
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When it comes<\/span> to how it treats different groups on campus, Harvard wants the world to know that it is balanced. It cares about all groups equally. So naturally, on Tuesday, when it issued a lengthy report about antisemitism at Harvard, the university also issued a lengthy report on Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias at Harvard.<\/p>\n

The reports reveal a profound imbalance at Harvard. One group, overwhelmingly, feels unwelcome and unsafe. You\u2019d never know which group that is, however, from reading the New York Times.<\/p>\n

Before I say anything else \u2014 and there is much to say \u2014 it\u2019s important to note that how the New York Times reports this news will loom large in the public imagination and has the potential to do much damage.<\/p>\n

Consider these two paragraphs, which get buried two-thirds of the way into the New York Times piece<\/a> on the two Harvard reports:<\/p>\n

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The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)<\/p>\n

In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Got that?<\/p>\n

For all the articles, claims, reports, think pieces, op-eds, statements, and speeches from elected politicians and other worthies about rampant antisemitism on campus, these two massive reports discover that the one group on campus \u2014 whether we are talking about faculty, students, or staff \u2014 that most consistently feels nervous about expressing its views and most consistently feels physically unsafe on campus are \u2026 Muslims.<\/p>\n

We are often asked to take the feelings and perceptions of Jewish students, faculty, and staff as proxies for the objective safety<\/a> and security and sense of welcome that Jewish people do or do not feel on campuses across the country. Yet, according to their self-reported experiences in the new Harvard studies, Jewish students, faculty, and staff at Harvard consistently feel more welcome, safer, and freer to be Jews, including being Zionist Jews, than do Muslims at Harvard.<\/p>\n

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One-sided \u201cIsm\u201d<\/h2>\n

With that in mind, let\u2019s look at how the Times led off its piece:<\/p>\n

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A Harvard task force released a scathing account of the university on Tuesday, finding that antisemitism had infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.<\/p>\n

A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus, also released on Tuesday, found widespread discomfort and alienation among those students as well, with 92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Notice a few things.<\/p>\n

The Times leads with the report on antisemitism, giving second billing to the report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian sentiment. Given the statistics the Times itself reports deep into the piece, it seems like an odd choice of order.<\/p>\n

Also notice the terminology. On the one hand, we have \u201cantisemitism.\u201d Antisemitism is an \u201cism,\u201d in the family of racism, so it instantly calls to mind the worst social evil. There\u2019s nothing comparable when it comes to the triptych of \u201canti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the syntax of the paragraphs, the \u201cism\u201d of antisemitism is the actor and the agent. It can do grave harm, infiltrating and influencing the entire campus. It is an objective thing \u2014 what \u00c9mile Durkheim called a social fact. When it comes to anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias, the objective reality of the thing of racism dissolves into the feelings of students. It becomes a subjective perception or opinion of the alleged victims, who may or may not be victims at all.<\/p>\n

Along the same lines, antisemitism conjoins a range of issues, including the multiple shades of criticism of Israel, into a single form: hatred of the Jews. On the other side, there\u2019s no such unity of terms. Instead, we get an uncertain and floating array of different \u201cbiases\u201d: against a religion, against an ethnicity, against a group that many of Israel\u2019s supporters don\u2019t even acknowledge are a people, much less a nation.<\/p>\n

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