A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

The only New York Times coverage of a CUNY Law School commencement speech that Jewish groups and lawmakers have denounced as antisemitic came in a column that misleads readers about what was said and excuses it as “speaking out against oppression.”

A professor at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center, KC Johnson, posted a series of tweets eviscerating the New York Times column as “wildly misleading.” Johnson faulted the Times column for omitting the student speaker’s “most inflammatory remarks: her claim that CUNY Law’s endorsement of BDS showed ‘that our morality will not be purchased by investors.’”

Also omitted, Johnson said, was Fatima Mohammed’s assertion that Israel was “murdering” the old and the young, and that it “encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes.”

The column’s only quotes from Mohammed “are little more than leftist pablum—as if the goal is to shield NYT readers from the full extent of the address,” Johnson said. He said the column, by Ginia Bellafante, “offers the most charitable possible interpretation of Mohammed’s remarks.”

And Johnson also noted that the column “uses the statement from the CUNY ‘Jewish Law Students Association’ to implicitly shield the commencement speaker from charges of antisemitism—without mentioning that the group itself, like the speaker, is pro-BDS,” favoring the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.

The Times earlier ran a whole news article about the CUNY law commencement without even mentioning the speech favoring a boycott of Israel.

Another Times reader, the superintendent of the Kiryas Joel School District, Joel Petlin, observed, “They omit the important facts that the CUNY Jewish Law Students Assn includes non Jews, & Fatima Mohammed is even a member of the organization! This the hallmark of every @nytimes article on Jews & Israel. They take a factual statement but deprive the reader of vital context.”

The Times column concluded in part, “Ultimately, when a school inculcates in its students the importance of speaking out against oppression, it cannot be surprised when, given a big platform, they take you up on it.” The Times columnist seems to excuse the commencement speaker’s obsessive focus on “oppression” of the Palestinians by Israel. The Times columnist ignores that it could also qualify as “speaking out against oppression” to speak out against oppression of Jews in the form of antisemitism or against oppression of Palestinians by other Palestinians.

The Times seems to be on the lookout for these stories to run under cookie-cutter headlines that depict the anti-Israel agitator-haters as courageous free-speech martyr-victims. The Times’ far-left paying online readership craves these sorts of stories, regardless of whether the Israel-bashers are Arab or Jewish. But the Times column storyline is a caricature, misleading readers into believing that the real news is that Fatima Mohamed was subjected to “death threats and vitriol,” rather than that CUNY Law School commencement was turned into a platform for antisemitic tropes.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.