March Against Israeli Genocide isn't News to the New York Times
Freedom Plaza for the March on Washington for Gaza, January 13, 2024 (CC photo: Elvert Barnes)
Devoted New York Times readers are likely unaware that a huge protest was held in the nation’s capital on Saturday, January 13, to protest Israel’s wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and to condemn “Genocide” Joe Biden’s weapon shipments and diplomatic backing for Israel. The Times, despite having a huge bureau in Washington, DC, did not mention the event, even over the course of the following week.
It’s hard to get an independent estimate of the number of people who showed up—Palestinians and Americans of all ages and races, including Jewish Americans, arriving from all parts of the country—because neither the Washington Metro Police nor the National Parks Service provides crowd estimates. What is clear from photo images of Freedom Plaza, a broad 500-foot-long rectangle that can easily accommodate over 100,000, is that there was what Newsweek (1/13/24) called a “massive” demonstration spilling over into adjacent Pershing Park, with still more thousands of protesters continuing to arrive along on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Protester John Reuwer, treasurer and a board member of the organization World Beyond War, is a veteran of many protests, large and small. He attended the January 13 protest, as well as an earlier one on November 4. Reuwer said he attempted to gauge the number of marchers when they began walking out of the plaza towards a planned White House protest. “It took one hour and 40 minutes to clear Freedom Plaza,” he said, guessing that the total protester count was “between 100,000–150,000.” (March organizers claimed to have had 400,000 protesters in DC, though that seems a high estimate to this author, who has attended plenty of protests, dating back to the early Vietnam War actions.)
By size alone, the rally deserved a story in the Times. But this wasn’t just one isolated US demonstration; it was part of a global call for protest against the ongoing assault on Gaza, which by January 13 had killed nearly 24,000, 70% of the victims being women and children. Times editors were surely aware that large anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were occurring around the US and the world (Al Jazeera, 1/13/24).
Even more newsworthy than the number of demonstrators and simultaneous global actions was the reality that this was the second mass action in DC in two months. In both cases, the lead organizers were Palestinian or US Muslim pro-Palestinian organizations.
Also newsworthy was that those two demonstrations both prominently featured activists from Jewish Voice for Peace (Newsweek, 1/13/24), a leftist anti-Zionist organization that claims to have some 400,000 members. This unique sponsorship marks a huge development after the two decades of widespread US Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 attacks, as well as a rare political alliance between US Muslims and anti-Zionist American Jews.
Surely all this deserved an article in the the nation’s leading newspaper…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please go to: FAIR.org