This polarizing and dynamic time has certainly yielded inquiries about free speech and free press. While many Wellesley students are disappointed to see the bias of certain Western mainstream media outlets — such as “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post,” which unfortunately have employed Zionist-leaning rhetoric in their coverage of recent and historical events — we have this student-run newspaper, “The Wellesley News,” that provides localized coverage of news and opinions from across the student body.

Despite the fact that “The Wellesley News” Editorial Board has an established position regarding Palestine-Israel, such leanings have neither biased the news articles nor inhibited editors from publishing opinion articles that contradict their perspective. Such actions are the journalistic duty of a newspaper — to publish all available opinions and allow its readers to settle on a position. This applies to all forms of media coverage, but is especially crucial on a college campus — an environment that breeds critical thinking, discourse, and debate. Journalism and diversity of opinion cannot be sacrificed for fear of your readership’s reaction — or anything else, for that matter. College campuses are grounds for ideological diversity, not an ideological vacuum, and Wellesley is no exception.

Unfortunately, some university and college newspapers across the country have opted to shirk their journalistic duty and cower from publishing certain perspectives. An example of this is Stanford University’s student-run newspaper, “The Stanford Daily,” which claims to “[be] committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor.” 

Stanford University has been the source of many headlines lately, with pro-Palestinian students conducting a sit-in with tents and posters since Oct. 7. The school also made headlines in November when a Syrian student wearing a shirt that said “Damascus” was hit by a car whilst the driver yelled, “f— you and your people!” In a defamation campaign, the student was then called a “pathological liar” by both Stanford Genetics professor Judith Frydman and reported to be one by “The Stanford Review,” the university’s conservative independent publication.

Regardless of a newspaper’s ideological or political leanings, any publication that propagates information has a responsibility to ethically conduct itself. A newspaper should be a source of knowledge production, not ideological conformity. Yet “The Stanford Daily” has published double the amount of pro-Israel opinion articles than pro-Palestine ones. “The Stanford Review”, meanwhile, grossly compiled a collection of anonymous Fizz posts accusing the hit-and-run victim of dishonesty. Random posts from Fizz that accuse the victim of being a “pathological liar” — substantiated with nothing but anonymous stories and petty insults — are not sound evidence for invalidating a physical assault that left the victim bruised and hospitalized. 

What’s more egregious is that both publications are guilty of intellectual dishonesty by avoiding publishing one Muslim student’s opinion piece. Hamza El Boudali is the former president of Stanford’s MSU (Muslim Student Union) and the former vice president of Stanford’s Arab Student Association. He is a graduate student currently completing his master’s in computer science, and has attended Stanford for six years. He was also listed as the author for Stanford SJP’s (Students For Justice in Palestine) statement shortly after Oct. 7. Aside from his perspective as an Arab Muslim upperclassman who has been active and close to the recent events on campus regarding Palestine-Israel, he is the only Muslim or Arab student who was willing to write anything about this topic, as pro-Palestinian Stanford students fear doxxing and other repercussions from publishing articles, and the Daily has a strict no-anonymity policy. The opinion piece he wrote regarding Palestine-Israel was put-off for weeks by “The Stanford Daily,” who had agreed to publish it. 

El Boudali reports that after weeks of editing, meetings and submitting to concessions on his writing, he was finally told it was ready for publishing, only to be informed at the last minute that the Daily’s editors had decided not to publish the piece. He also notes that they were often unresponsive, and it took the urging of Muslim and Arab students sending them emails to get them to interact with the single op-ed offered by a Muslim student. Finally, on Friday, Dec. 8, the Daily published his piece, yet they added significant edits without his approval or consent (amending “genocide” into “potential genocide,” for example, which was later corrected at his behest). In the two months it took them to publish his piece, they published several pro-Israel articles (written by students) berating pro-Palestinian students and their positions. The Daily was not only more critical of the writing of the pro-Palestine piece, they also tried to sanitize this pro-Palestinian student’s voice, policing his writing. The editors wanted him to upend the entire premise of his piece, thus mitigating its impact, and got caught up in minutiae — such as changing a reference to Malcolm X, who is quoted at the end of the article, as “the legendary Malcom X.” The sentence was altered to “the great Malcolm X.”

Similarly, “The Stanford Review” has exactly zero pro-Palestine pieces in their publication, despite claiming to value free speech. El Boudali reports he submitted his piece to them as well, but that the editor-in-chief and other staff members were unprofessionally unresponsive. This student even wrote another piece catering to the Review, titled “Why Conservatives Should be Pro-Palestine,” but the Review remained staunch in their refusal to publish a pro-Palestinian voice.

Other college newspapers, such as the “Yale Daily News,” have been pressured to issue or retract comments made. For example, the “Yale Daily News” published corrections to an opinion piece titled, “Is Yalies4Palestine a Hate Group?” The corrections were regarding the accuracy of certain claims made in the article. The “Yale Daily News” was pressured to retract the corrections, as they were supposedly inaccurate — even though the point of contention was, in fact, an area of ambiguity. Objective, factual journalism cannot be sacrificed for the sake of appeasing certain readers. 

Times of disagreement are integral in revealing the true journalists from the fake — the government stenographers from the writers dedicated to truth. Newspapers — especially nowadays — will be forever preserved, their publications forever in the historical record. What side of history do student journalists want to be on?

However, this is not how Israel is portrayed in some Western mainstream media outlets. Using sly rhetoric, many publications avoid condemning Israel for its atrocities, instead using Hamas as a scapegoat and strawman against pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists. Now, this biased and misconstrued representation does not come as a surprise to anybody who has followed the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine over the years, with news outlets often turning a blind eye to the atrocities faced by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a daily basis. But what has been shocking to me, as a first-year Arab Muslim student here at Wellesley, is President Paula Johnson’s response to this issue. 

While many folks may avoid speaking about this polarizing conflict (i.e. genocide) entirely, the fact of the matter is that silence can be wrong. Being passive to injustice is nurturing and perpetuating it. But it comes as no surprise that an even greater wrong is explicitly validating and propagating injustice, which is why I say that President Johnson was better off staying silent about Palestine-Israel than sending out the shameful messages she did on Oct. 11 and 20. 

She begins her initial statement on Oct. 11 with, “This weekend Hamas launched deadly terrorist assaults on Israel and its citizens that are appalling in their magnitude and manner, including the brutal execution of innocent families and the taking of approximately 150 hostages. This attack has led Israel to declare war against Hamas. As president and a member of the Wellesley community, I condemn the taking of hostages and the indiscriminate murdering and terrorizing of civilians.”

All I can say is this: where were you, President Johnson, for the past fifty-plus years — six of which you’ve been Wellesley president — while the terrorist state of Israel has been occupying Palestinian land, expelling its people, and bombing and brutalizing the whole region? What are your comments about the fact that 106 years ago, some white European man promised a region in Asia to a group of other Europeans for the taking — with no say from the indigenous people involved? What do you have to say about the fact that right now, Palestinian deaths are vastly exceeding Israeli deaths — and have been by a large margin for the past several decades? What about the fact that Israel is actively committing various war crimes, including bombing hospitals? It’s not Palestine, President Johnson, that has an army and is backed by international superpowers. 

Right now, as I write this article, war crimes are being committed against Palestinians by Israelis — war crimes that the West validates — that you validate — by choosing to provide a one-sided narrative on this subject. No, not just one-sided — a racist narrative. 

I do not use that term lightly. But first, let me clarify one thing: it is certainly worth condemning the murder of innocent people. But Israel has been committing crimes since before Hamas existed. So if you condemn Hamas without first condemning the occupying state that led to its construction — if you use Hamas to say that the Palestinians have no right to fight against their colonizers — if you continue to focus on Hamas and not the state that is committing greater crimes that have the greater injustice of being validated by dozens of other countries, the foremost of which is the United States — if you have the audacity to call Hamas a terrorist group and do not call Israel that — then you are somebody who cannot condemn or criticize any act of colonialism beginning with what European settlers did to the Native Americans centuries ago. Your right to a moral high ground has been revoked. 

So, if you propel the lives of the Israelis over the Palestinians — if you propel the narrative that the white man creates over the one that the brown one lives every single day — that is racist. And Wellesley students should have no qualms about pointing this out.

This, in particular, is what makes President Johnson’s message so shocking: she is the president of Wellesley College — a school that prides itself on prioritizing diversity and inclusion. In my first-year Geosciences class, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Land Acknowledgement written by the Native American and Indigenous Students Association in the syllabus, stating, “In this course, we will often use Massachusetts and North American geology as case studies, and it is important to grapple with the complicity of this field in colonialism, exploitation, and scientific racism.” 

This is the level of social and historical awareness in a Geosciences class — not an English or History class — at Wellesley. This same Wellesley College has a president who just validated colonialism and exploitation. 

Some may argue that she said, “I condemn the taking of hostages and the indiscriminate murdering and terrorizing of civilians,” without specifically saying “Israeli” hostages and civilians. Her previous sentence, however, makes it clear who she’s referring to — and as I said, this is the subtle rhetoric that many are using to demean Palestinian lives while avoiding getting called out for doing so. 

President Johnson’s final paragraph does more of that: “As the situation in the Middle East evolves, I know members of our community will view the events differently … We live and learn together, recognizing our common humanity, in the hopes that we can contribute to the making of a better world.” This is fluff. Again, there is no such thing as “common humanity” when you choose to send out an email to the entire school decrying Hamas’s violence and yet are silent about Israeli violence. You stripped Palestinians of their humanity. 

President Johnson’s disastrous message ended on the worst note possible — with a quote from President Joe Biden. Joe Biden, the man who is an accomplice to Israel’s crimes and publicly supports them wholeheartedly. Why not just quote Alfred Balfour or Benjamin Netanyahu? 

I am embarrassed as a Wellesley student by the fact that the president of my school could send such an inadequate statement. I am embarrassed on behalf of Wellesley College — a school that proclaims to be sensitive to issues of injustice and colonialism, but fails to apply these ideals when faced with a real-world, modern-day example of it. What good are our “decolonial” history and science classes if we can’t do anything when the time comes to stand up? What good is learning about history — especially the history of Africa and the Middle East — if we so willfully and passively let it repeat? 

On Oct. 20, President Johnson sent out a second message, this time regarding the email sent out by the residential life team in Munger Hall that condemned Zionism. Instead of forcing the Munger team to issue an apology, President Johnson should have humbly asked them to teach her how to compose an appropriate, ethical statement condemning injustice. While some Wellesley students, like those in Munger, admirably and bravely stand against injustice and oppression, President Johnson can do nothing better than discipline them and reiterate her “strong [condemnation] of the terrorist attack by Hamas.”

At some point, these acts of blatant racism and bias become an issue of “If you don’t know, you don’t know.” I don’t know if President Johnson is being deceitful or ignorant, but either way, it is shameful. I speak on behalf of every pro-Palestinian student when I say that her messages have been hurtful, to say the least. But we are tenacious and intelligent enough to see through the lies. #FreePalestine. #CondemnIsrael.