Vox Populi
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American Friends Service Committee: New York Times rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide”
PHILADELPHIA – The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – a Quaker organization that has worked for peace and justice for over a century – has cancelled planned advertising with the New York Times after the paper refused to allow an ad that referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The ad 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.”
“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,” said Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary for AFSC. “Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability. It is only by challenging this reality that we can hope to forge a path toward a more just and equitable world.”
After receiving the text for the ad quoted above, a representative from the advertising team suggested AFSC use the word “war” instead of “genocide” – a word with an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law. When AFSC rejected this approach, the New York Times Ad Acceptability Team sent an email that read in part: “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.”
Many human rights organizations, legal scholars, genocide and holocaust scholars, and UN bodies have determined that Israel is committing genocide or genocidal acts in Gaza. This includes U.S.-based organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the University Network for Human Rights, international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and several Palestinian human rights groups. The New York Times regularly looks to several of these organizations as sources for its own reporting.
In January of 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a provisional ruling that Israel’s actions in Gaza were “plausibly genocidal.” The case was brought by South Africa, and now has the support of 14 countries. The same week that the New York Times rejected AFSC’s ad, the Washington Post ran an advertisement from Amnesty International that used the language of genocide.
“The suggestion that the New York Times couldn’t run an ad against Israel’s genocide in Gaza because there are ‘differing views’ is absurd,” said Layne Mullett, Director of Media Relations for AFSC. “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?”
AFSC has been supporting humanitarian efforts in Gaza since 1948 and currently has staff in Gaza, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. Since October of 2023, AFSC staff in Gaza have provided 1.5 million meals, hygiene kits, and other units of humanitarian aid to more than 1.5 million internally displaced people. In the U.S., AFSC programs are working to put pressure on the Biden administration and Congress to call for a permanent cease-fire, full humanitarian access, release of all who are held captive, and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel.
“Our courageous staff members in Gaza witness daily horrors and continue to provide vital support despite Israel’s relentless attacks on their homes and families,” said Joyce Ajlouny. “Our ad campaign aims to shed light on these atrocities while urging people in the U.S. to pressure the President and Congress to halt weapons shipments to Israel and advocate for an end to the genocide.”
American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization devoted to service, development, and peace programs throughout the world. Our work is based on the belief in the worth of every person, and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.
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I’m pretty sure the NYT has, more than once, repeated Biden’s claim that Russia is committing genocide and that few nations, including all of those condemning Russia, subscribe to that description. This is no surprise. It took a very long time for the NYT to admit that there were vast numbers of innocent civilian deaths from the Israeli war (“genocide!, genocide!, genocide!, dammit) and still remains hesitant in its criticism of Israel by prefacing most lengthy articles with the usual “But Hamas….”.
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I cancelled the NYT several weeks ago.
By definition there is genocide in Gaza. Also, there is a long history of the side with dominance in a political dichotomy claiming identical acts by their opponents are genocide, while when the power holder does them, they are not.
The AFSC was the organization that supplied anti-war booklets for my room-mate and me, when we were draft counseling during the years of the Vietnam War draft. They gave us encouragement and an ethical standard for what we did (and helped us keep our advocacy legal, btw). Bless them standing for a position many refuse: peace.
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I admire the AFSC tremendously.
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I’ve already canceled the Washington Post, maybe I need to rethink the NYTimes, too. Thank goodness for Substack and for Mother Jones and ProPublica!
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WP and NYT have become voices of the war machine. We watch PBS Newshour which is pretty objective, as well as NPR and Common Dreams.
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All good. Me too. Also The Guardian
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I understand why one would cancel such subs, but I also know that I want to know what is the thinking of the ruling class to better inform me and all of us about our enemy. In addition, I can’t get some of the detailed stores of other parts of the world from other sources. There is a danger in only listening to ourselves, as witnessed by the ultra-right in the US for a couple of good reasons. 1. We may hold more truth than “they” do, but we never hold ALL the truth. 2. We need to understand how they think, and why they act the way they do in order to wage the struggle for a better world. 3. Isolation in our own little bubbles of our own truths leads us only to …..isolation and sometimes even irrelevance. And even worse, sometimes leads us to blindly believing our own lies.
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Genocide is what I see. Unvarnished Genocide! Make it stop now!
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https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161469670414405&set=a.376289059404
i hope this works to link to my own image on my fb page with this caption: “MAY WE USE WEAPONS OF MASS CREATION TO FACE OFF THIS INSANITY! REMEMBER SUCH WEAPONS IN THE DANGEROUS DAYS TO COME! xxx, m
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MAY WE USE WEAPONS OF MAS CREATION TO FACE OFF THIS INSANITY! REMEMBER SUCH WEAPONS IN THE DANGEROUS DAYS TO COME! xxx, m
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How terribly, terribly discouraging that this is only one example of “language washing” among countless others by the New York Times and so many other news outlets.
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Genocide-washing is the norm in American media.
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