News Brief: NYT Bars Quakers From Using “Genocide” in Ad and Liberal Squeamishness Over the ‘G’ Word
Citations Needed | January 8, 2025 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We will be back very shortly with new episodes of Citations Needed after our winter break. But in the meantime, Adam, we wanted to talk about one of our favorite topics, The New York Times and their liberal squeamishness about certain words at certain times, as you’ve written, Adam, over the past year-plus, almost a year and a half, the Times in this coverage of the genocide in Gaza kind of vacillates in its language, oftentimes editorially, and in its straight-news reporting, avoiding the term, say, genocide.
Adam: Well, yeah, I mean, they’re never going to use that.
Nima: Clearly, right? But allowing that word in other contexts sometimes. Yet this still remains really inconsistent. And as you recently wrote, Adam, even front-page coverage of Gaza has waned. I think some of the criticism of the Times is not necessarily that they wholly avoid articles on Israel’s ongoing onslaught, but the language they use, where they place the articles, that is really telling about their perspective and what they want their readers to know, or what they don’t want their readers to know.
Adam: Yeah, well, increasingly, it’s less a qualitative criticism and more quantitative criticism, they are just not covering it as much or putting it as prominently. I think the assumption was, and I think this is what Israel was banking on, that eventually the daily outrages would become normalized. We hear a lot about, Don’t normalize X, or Don’t normalize y, but in many ways, the daily horrors emanating from Gaza have been normalized. And then, of course, you work the refs on social media, in terms of delisting or deprioritizing Gaza-related content on Tiktok and Facebook, the assumption is that people would lose interest, and I think that, to some extent, has been true. And so this is why charged words like genocide, despite the fact that, again, it is a term being used by almost all mainstream human-rights organizations is so toxic.
Nima: Yeah, so one example of this recently is an ad that was going to be placed in the Times by the American Friends Service Committee, was pulled by AFSC, not by the Times itself, but because the Times insisted on dictating what terms were used in the ad copy. And so joining us today to talk about this is Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, an international Quaker organization that works for a just, peaceful, and sustainable world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. Joyce, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Joyce Ajlouny: Happy to be with you.
Adam: Yeah, I want to start off by asking you what exactly happened here, to orient our listeners. The New York Times’ nominal reasoning for rejecting your ad was that it wanted to replace the word “genocide” with “war,” which, of course, gives people the impression that this is the, you know, the War of Austrian Succession, two armies lined up and kind of lobbying musket fire at each other, versus, again, what Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Court of Justice, among other groups and many genocide scholars do call a genocide, or at least in Human Rights Watch’s case, they use the highly qualified–and if you know Human Rights Watch, they don’t do this loosely–”genocidal acts,” which I guess is a little bit more conservative, but the New York Times did not allow you to use this word in their ad. They did let Jewish Voice for Peace use the term about a year ago in an ad. And I’m sort of curious what you think changed in their thinking in terms of explaining their logic, what did they tell you, and what, I mean again, they didn’t go from like “genocide” to “ethnic cleansing” or something. They went to “war,” which is this utterly kind of vapid, responsibility-free, agency-free term. Talk, if you could, about what they told you and why you refuse to use that term “war.”
Joyce Ajlouny: Sure. Let me just take us back a bit to the ad and what our intention was and why we wanted to invest in that public advocacy. AFSC has been working in Gaza since 1947, since the Nakba. We have staff there. We continue to be providing humanitarian aid. Our staff are, themselves, the aid workers who have been displaced and with their families killed and trying to fend for their families. And so we are speaking, AFSC is speaking from their voices, from what they tell us every day, from our worry about our partners in Gaza and their lives and how they are living under that threat of starvation and illness and bombardment on a daily basis. So we are speaking out of that firsthand knowledge of what is going on in Gaza.
We have decided to put an ad, a digital ad, in the New York Times to make clear to the public and to also call them to join us to action. And that is what the ad was doing. We wanted to make clear that what we are seeing from the ground and what we are hearing from our staff and from our partners is so horrific and it continues to be supported by our US tax dollars, and we wanted to compel the public to take action, to pressure their representatives, the President, to stop aiding Israel and support an arms embargo on Israel, so it would stop sending weapons. Our ad was very simple and short, and I’m going to read it. It says,
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.
That was it. And so, you know, there’s no way of knowing what’s been happening internally at the New York Times and why they allowed the term “genocide” to be used by Jewish Voice for Peace and others, perhaps. And for us, this is not an opinion piece, it’s a paid ad. But what we do know is that for the last year, the evidence of genocide has increased. It continues to shock us every day. And as you stated, you know, we don’t come up with these terms. There are scholars and legal experts that have made those determinations. So we can get into the technicalities of what constitutes genocide and what doesn’t, but I think it’s beyond that. It’s really about the intentional obliteration of the people in Gaza, and I can certainly speak more about what we’re seeing there in terms of intentionality as an organization that has been trying desperately to get our aid in Gaza, and how it has been stopped time and time again and so that also speaks to that intentionality, that aid is being indeed prevented from coming in.
Nima: I want to kind of talk about this idea of organizations that are used as authorities, sometimes, as kind of expert voices, sometimes, and then in other cases, not deemed acceptable enough to kind of, you know, define the terms of discussion, whether it’s Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, Oxfam, the International Court of Justice, even AFSC itself has been cited again and again by the New York Times and, of course, other outlets when it comes to say, condemning the actions of governments in say, Russia or Syria or China and elsewhere around the world. Yet what we’re seeing time and again, and certainly in this case, when it comes to Israel, all of that kind of authority, expertise and on-the-ground experience is discarded, or at least marginalized, to the point where it becomes kind of an editorial decision on the part of the New York Times advertising team or marketing team, right? This isn’t even an editorial decision to determine what words can be used in this context. What do you think, especially thinking about how this has been going on for well over a year now, what do you think the purpose of that kind of refereeing, of that deciding what is acceptable, what do you think that serves to do for the readers of the Times?
Joyce Ajlouny: Right, you know, I think it’s beyond words. I think we have seen and, Adam, you have reported quite admirably about this, and it goes beyond October 7. You know, when it comes to the issue of Palestine, how skewed the reporting has been, Israelis are always killed and massacred, and Palestinians just die. And we have seen how the lack of, really, interest in truth-telling, in humanizing the plight of the Palestinian people has been so stark when you open the paper, New York Times and others, and see headlines that do not give justice to the level of atrocities and pain and harm that is being inflicted on the Palestinian people every day. We see that also when they cover settler violence on the West Bank. So when it comes to Palestine, it seems like there’s always this exception that they can skew away from making it, humanizing the Palestinian plight. And we have to all question, why, when it comes to the question of Palestine, does the media release itself from its job of truth telling? And that is a question we have to answer.
Adam: Yeah, because I think the implications of the word genocide, in terms of what it entails, I think, is it’s like this sort of too big to fail. Obviously, again, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International are routinely cited for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, with respect to Russia, China, Syria, the kind of official bad guys. But if it’s the United States, if it’s its own, and again, I think that groups like Human Rights Watch are generally pretty conservative. They have, you know, they have a revolving door with the US State Department. They are criticized and known for not being particularly critical of the US and its allies relative to how critical they are of enemy states. They speak about enemy states and kind of existentially evil or ontologically evil terms, whereas the US is kind of, and Saudi Arabia and Israel are kind of misguided, but they make a mistake. So for them to even use the word “genocidal acts” is an indication that there’s consensus within the human-rights world that you simply won’t be credible in five, 10 years if you didn’t use the G-word with respect to what Israel’s doing in Gaza, because we almost certainly know a fraction of what’s actually going on, by virtue of the fact that over 150, 180, depending on what number you use, journalists, have been killed by Israel. So there is deficit of information.
So is that the implications of a genocide, the US supporting one, call into question all this kind of high-minded liberal rules-based order or claptrap that is foundational to how the US media sees itself in its role, that the US makes mistakes or it fumbles, or it’s sort of insufficiently meddling, but ultimately is good. It basically makes both Israel and the US ontologically evil in a sort of fundamental way. You can’t kind of accidentally commit genocide or stumble into genocide. So in some senses, the implications of the word are kind of too, the US is sort of too big to fail here, and so there has to be, you just have to kind of avoid it. And this is what I think you see happening, is that they’ll report on maybe the occasional war crime or the occasional kind of bad actor, but you’ll even get these stories that talk about children freezing to death, and then you’ll read the article.
And this is true in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and there’s no mention that Israeli leaders in October of 2023 explicitly said their goal was to have Palestinians living in tent cities. Well, the logical outcome of living in a tent city is you freeze to death. That is what they were promising. Explicitly. This kind of language was cited at the ICJ when they did rule on quote-unquote “probable genocide” because, and this is the same statements that were used in their determination by Amnesty International, is that you explicitly say, We are going to punish the civilians by forcing them into tents, because that will expose them to the elements and ultimately kill them and their children.
And so you have this kind of institutionalized refusal to connect the dots, that genocidal statements are never put in articles about genocidal acts. The genocidal acts are seen as kind of incidental or bad apples. But there’s never a sense of connecting any dots, which, again, is not something done for Russia or for other countries. So it seems to me that, in many ways, it’s just the reason why the New York Times is, you know, unlike in January of 2024, I think, that this is not consensus. This is before Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and all these groups really kind of came out and said, This is a genocide.
Nima: Right. It’s even less controversial to say that now.
Adam: Yeah, which, in a way, is probably why they didn’t want you to use it. I’m obviously speculating, but that strikes me as kind of plausible, that now that it’s becoming consensus within the human-rights community to retain any kind of credibility, right, not be like Human Rights Foundation, these kind of bogus neocon groups, but to have real credibility within the world, you kind of have to accept that it is a genocide, and I think they’re kind of scared of that becoming more mainstream. I want to know what you think about this idea of the US and Israel being kind of too big to fail.
Joyce Ajlouny: Yeah, I mean, we have seen it play out in different settings, even the ICC’s ruling and arrest warrants for Netanyahu, for example, and other ministers in his government was dismissed by the US. And you know, we heard a lot of musings about, Oh, the ICC, and that whole setup was not meant for us. We are the Western governments. We are the democracies. And, you know, it was set up, and it was created for those other countries, as if they are immune from accountability. And I think that is what is happening today, and how we perceive, and how I perceive what is happening is that there’s someone above these leaders, these regimes, these governments, are above the law, and this international-based order, and that that is what that use of the word genocide has implications in international law. And I think that they want to distance themselves from it, of course, but I put into question, we have seen how the Security Council has worked with the US, constantly vetoing any measure of accountability that holds Israel accountable to the atrocities it’s been committing in Gaza. But you wonder, if that’s the case, what is accountability, even if it’s deemed by the ICJ as genocide. Where is the accountability and how is it going to be enforced with the US?
Adam: I mean, I’m reminded of the Washington Post editorial that explicitly said what you’re saying, where they, after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Gallant and Netanyahu, they said, Well, the ICC is really for other countries.
Nima: Right.
Joyce Ajlouny: Yeah.
Adam: They said, Oh, that’s because, you know, Israel can police itself and arrest itself. But clearly, they’re not going to. Obviously, countries don’t arrest themselves for genocide. That’s obviously not going to happen. But they more or less said, The ICC is for poor countries, where Russia and people of color, sort of POC plus Russia, that’s it. Everyone else gets to kind of do their own thing, make up their own rules, as long as they’re US allies.
Joyce Ajlouny: That’s correct.
Nima: So, Joyce, you know you had mentioned this earlier, and I want to revisit it. The experience that AFSC has in Gaza is very extensive. As you mentioned, you were one of the very first international aid organizations working in Palestine during and ever since the Nakba, and you still, of course, have staff on the ground in Gaza in the West Bank. Please do tell us about the work that they are all doing, and of course, also, I mean, you, as a Palestinian yourself, your own experiences with what you’re hearing from your family, from when you’ve recently visited.
Joyce Ajlouny: Sure. I mean, I love talking about our work in Gaza, because I’m just in awe of it every day. Our staff in Gaza is a small staff, but I love their approach, because their approach is to work through other partner organizations that are in Gaza that we have established longstanding relationships with them. And as with everything else in Gaza, the genocide has destroyed civil-society organizations and institutions, and so our approach in Gaza is to revitalize and rebuild civil-society organizations by supporting them. So we work with them. So our staff is small, but we work with so many other partners. We’re amongst the major providers of food aid in Gaza, and so we’ve done a lot. I think we’ve reached over one and a half million people since October 7. So it’s really astounding what a small staff has been able to accomplish. And realizing that whether it’s food aid, I received a text message from our staff in Gaza saying that they’ve distributed hygiene kits for women. I’ve received another text message from them with pictures showing the distributions of what they called winter pajamas for Down Syndrome children. And those pictures were just heartbreaking, but also made me so proud to know that we are still able to do some lifesaving attempts, knowing that the needs are so vast, and what we are able to do is truly a drop in the ocean.
And a lot of people ask us about how we distribute aid and where aid comes from, since Israel is preventing aid from coming in, and what we have found out through our staff is that some aid, and it’s not really aid, it’s really commercial products, do come in, and once they do, they are being sold for massive amounts that people cannot afford. So what we do is we buy them in bulk, and then we do the distribution of them. Our staff are intense. They have been displaced so, so many times since October 7, they have been trying to aid their children, who have been sick with hepatitis A, trying to fend for them, bring them food and water, but at the same time going out and being the aid workers. There’s a film that they actually produced in Gaza, Serena and Firas, that is online, and I hope that folks could also watch that.
But it’s really, truly admirable to witness what they’ve been able to do in the midst of the atrocities that they’ve been living under, day in and day out since October 7. But the work that we do on the ground is also very important for the advocacy work that we do in the US. We see that our government is indeed complicit, and we see how our tax dollars are fueling and contributing to the war machine, and we have been doubling down on our advocacy efforts in the United States, calling for an arms embargo, a permanent ceasefire, refunding in UNRWA, which is the main humanitarian agency in Gaza providing aid that the US has defunded, and other calls for the US to actually follow its own laws, like the Leahy laws and others and international law.
We do this work in the US, while at the same time trying to work with other faith-based organizations. You know, AFSC is a Quaker organization, and we work with other faith-based organizations to ensure that we use our platforms, that we use our constituencies to further those messages of ending the atrocities and working towards a lasting peace in Palestine. We have a campaign. We call it the Apartheid-Free Communities campaign, and we are calling congregations, faith groups, organizations, to pledge to become an Apartheid-Free Community. We have been working very, very diligently on providing the research and the guidance for those who are interested in divestment, and compelling them to divest from Israel and from the weapon industry in general, and so all of those corporations that have been profiting from the occupation of Palestine, from the genocide in Gaza, we have provided guidance and screenings of investments that we have online. On our website, if you search Investigate AFSC, you can screen organizations, city councils, universities, can screen their investments and see if they are indeed increasing the profit of those corporations, and indeed if they should be divesting. And so there’s a lot of work that we do on the ground in the United States, really bringing the voices of our staff in Gaza also to the public realm.
You know, I’ve lived most of my life in Palestine. I’ve raised my children there, and I still have my mother who lives there, and my mother-in-law, my son, who decided to go back and live there. So this is close to home for me, and since October 7, it’s been grueling. It’s been grueling. And you talked about normalization, and you know, so it’s for us living in the US, we try to fight that every day. I try to fight it.
Adam: Well, it’s really good work that y’all are doing. I’m about halfway through Adam Hochschild’s book Bury the Chains about the British abolitionist movement, and Quakers are like the Forrest Gump of social justice. They just show up in every story. They’ll be like, Oh yeah, Quaker. It’s another Quaker.
Joyce Ajlouny: Right.
Adam: Reading about Vietnam, Oh, it’s the Quakers. You read about the South African part, it’s the Quakers. So I’m really glad y’all are keeping the flame going. And I think people who don’t necessarily have that history. [Chuckles]
Joyce Ajlouny: Yeah, yeah, thanks for saying that. Thanks for saying that. And I think that’s what really compelled me to come to AFSC when I started seven years ago, is that history, that incredible, courageous history, where, when things were controversial, AFSC and Quakers stood on the right side of history. This is why, in 1947, the Nobel Peace Committee awarded us the Nobel Prize, because when we went to Europe post-World War II, we fed all children. So many stories of courage, so many stories of really doing, the controversial, going where others don’t go. You know, we have for a while been supporting the nonviolent resistance movement of boycott and divestment. We support nonviolence, but we’re not pacifist in the way that we sit around and do nothing. You know, we don’t believe in war. We don’t believe in arms. We believe in peaceful resistance and divestments and boycotts, and are part of what we promote and the action that we take with our communities around the world.
Nima: Yeah, you know, I think your work puts into stark focus or stark contrast, really, what we’ve heard from, say, US governments over not only the past, you know, however many decades, but certainly in the past year and a half, the Biden administration, you know, doing this kind of playing the arsonist as well as the firefighter game, where the United States continues to arm and support and justify and defend a genocide while then kind of doing this, you know, handwringing about working toward a ceasefire that obviously it doesn’t really want, or that it kind of redefines the term to mean whatever it wants it to mean, and then when it comes to aid, before we let you go, Joyce, I’d love your thoughts on this wild kind of PR gambit that the Biden administration did about building a pier to bring in aid, you know? I mean, obviously they could end this genocide with a phone call. And yet, there is this kind of ongoing propaganda work that gets done to kind of shield itself from just being on the wrong side. It just really puts into focus where you and AFSC have stood, and kind of how US administrations, over so many years, have tried to kind of game the system to their own advantage, to kind of look like they’re working for peace.
Joyce Ajlouny: Yeah. I mean, they’re masters at distraction, right? Offering distractions, and with this pier, it’s utter nonsense, and building a pier when you have so many other ground bases that can easily open, if Israel decides to open the door and let aid in, they can do that, and they can do that overnight, and they can get massive amounts of aid overnight. They have the infrastructure. They have the bases. They have, the gates can open. So they distracted everybody by saying they’re building the pier, or then they started doing the airdrops as well of aid when they should have been doing something else, when they should have been putting their energy towards pressuring Israel to open the gates and bring the aid in. That is what they should have done.
When I went to the White House and spoke to advisors of presidents last year, and I asked them about this, and they said, You think we can just order Israel around? And I said, Yes, you can. [Laughs] And so this whole notion that Israel is a sovereign nation and we can’t influence it. This is what really comes back at us time and time again. And to me, that is just astounding that they even dare to share that narrative about their lack of influence on Israel when it’s really a phone call away, when they can just stop sending their weapons. If they stop sending their weapons, Israel will stop their aggression on Gaza. It’s as simple as that, and nothing has been done towards that. And that is, that is the sad story. And I believe that this is going to come back and haunt us. Yes, it’s going to come back and haunt Israel for generations, that their people, their government, allowed this to happen, but it’s going to come and haunt us as Americans and our government, because we also contributed through our turning a blind eye, through giving Israel total impunity to do whatever it wants.
And then we start showering the people with aid. I remember when I was, before this job, I headed a wonderful Quaker school in Ramallah in Palestine, and as head of school, I had to contend with the fact that Israel was bombing our town and our school, and it was bombed with US-supported weaponry and aid. And then, the next day, you know USAID wants to help us rebuild the school. And that is the irony of it. The United States can’t keep working on both ends. They’re trying to work it out to ensure that its support to Israel remains solid. And then in the face of the world, it wants to be seen as this wonderful humanitarian organization, and, Look at what we’re doing for the good of people. It can’t continue doing that. It’s very stark, where their allegiance is, where their interests are.
And you know, we started talking about the media here, and the media is all part of it. And you know when media is profiting from this whole system, it’s in bed with the government, and we’ve seen that play out time and time again. And so as much as we say that our government is complicit, we also say the media is complicit when the New York Times refuses to use a term, genocide, that has been used and deemed appropriate by scholars that are trained to assess what is deemed genocide in the world and what isn’t, and they are trying to police that and control the narrative, then they are too complicit, and it’s going to come back and haunt us. Haunt them as well.
Nima: I think that’s a great place to leave it. I think the policing of your ad, you know, whether it’s the the ad team at the Times or all the way up to the editorial board about defining narrative, you know, controlling language here, this story may actually shine a brighter light than if the ad had just run as it was. It kind of shows what’s going on in a different kind of way. And thank you, Joyce, so much for joining us today to talk about this. We’ve been speaking with Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, an international Quaker organization that works for a just, peaceful, and sustainable world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. Joyce, thank you once again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Joyce Ajlouny: Thank you.
Nima: And that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Stay tuned for more full-length episodes coming your way in the coming weeks. Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks again for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show if you are so inclined, and we hope that you are, through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded, but that will do it. Thanks again for listening. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’ senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
