Harvard Central Administration Marks October 7 With Lies Smearing Israel
Plus, a Republican runs with plan to “stop the overdevelopment”
It’s one thing for Harvard students to be embarrassingly ignorant about the facts of what is happening in Israel and Gaza. It’s another thing, at this late stage of the legal and political battles over antisemitism at Harvard, for the university’s central administration to be marking the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by pumping out propaganda accusing Israel of genocide.
Yet that is precisely what happened this week.
Nieman Reports—a Harvard-published publication that reports not to any school or faculty but to Harvard’s central administration—published a long article viciously critical of what it claimed was “Israel’s starvation of journalists.” The article recycles accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” and killing journalists “simply for reporting.”
The article refers to Al Jazeera without noting that it is owned and controlled by the government of Qatar, which is hosting Hamas terrorists. It also doesn’t disclose to readers that the author of the Nieman Reports article, Anisha Dutta, has herself worked for Al Jazeera.
There’s a reference to “Turkish Radio and Television Corp.’s TRT World” without making clear that that, too, is a government-owned-and-controlled outlet of another Hamas-harboring country. Where’s the Nieman investigation into press freedom in Turkey and Qatar?
The article headline of the article refers to “the record death toll for news workers in Gaza,” but the toll is not actually a record. More news workers have died in other conflicts, and some of the “news workers” that advocacy groups count as casualties in Gaza were actually Hamas terrorists operating under journalistic cover in a way that endangers legitimate journalists but that the article fails to condemn or even discuss.
The article extensively discusses Israel’s supposed offenses against press freedom in Gaza but it makes no mention whatsoever of the fact that Hamas threatens violence against journalists who report critically about it. The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, has acknowledged, “Hamas restricts journalists in Gaza.” The Nieman Reports article entirely ignores that, an omission that discredits the article.
The article did find room for a claim that “On Sept. 16, an independent U.N. inquiry for the first time alleged that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and accused Israel’s top leaders of incitement.” Nieman Reports doesn’t disclose to readers that the Neiman Reports editor is a former UN staffer. Meanwhile, calling the report “independent” is Orwellian; the report was ordered up by the U.N. Human Rights Council, a notoriously anti-Israel body whose current members include Cuba and Qatar. There’s nothing independent about it.
This is a good example of almost everything that is wrong with Harvard. There are no Harvard faculty members or students apparently involved in this; it does nothing to advance Harvard’s stated research and teaching mission; it offers nothing of original value, instead duplicating anti-Israel propaganda widely available in state-controlled media in various Muslim dictatorships or from advocacy organizations funded by those media. And it’s only the latest in a series of slanted articles demonizing Israel…there’s a whole section of “Gaza coverage” at Nieman Reports, each piece nastier than the next. Agnes Wahl Nieman gave money to Harvard to support fellowships for midcareer journalists to take Harvard classes, not to endow an anti-Israel propaganda organization. There’s no senior supervision—because it takes a year at least to hire anyone for anything at Harvard, the Nieman Curator, Ann Marie Lipinski, announced in February 2025 her departure, but no permanent successor has been named. If Harvard can’t operate the Nieman fellowship or the journal, for which I wrote a piece in the early 1990s, in a way that doesn’t disgrace the institution, it should either shut it down or cut ties. Maybe it could reallocate the funds to all the life-saving cancer research that has supposedly ground to a halt because of the Trump administration’s funding stoppages. If Harvard still has money to publish this garbage, it’s enough to make one wonder whether Trump has cut enough.
One could go sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph with the Nieman Reports piece pointing out the falsehoods, the missing context, the lack of skepticism about advocacy group claims or toward journalists working for state-controlled outlets. It’s not worth the trouble.
New Jersey governor’s race: There have been some polls showing Republican Jack Ciattarelli with a real shot of winning the governor’s race against Democrat Mikie Sherrill. The two candidates debated last night. The Jersey Vindicator, an outlet I had never heard of before, has a transcript. I haven’t been following the race closely, but one thing that surprised me was hearing the Republican talking about a crisis of “overdevelopment in suburban communities.”
Sure enough the Republican candidate’s social media has a “detailed plan to stop the overdevelopment of our Garden State.” The plan complains about “destruction of open space and farmland” and “increasing pollution from idling cars on already congested roads…chasing wildlife from their habitat.” He promises to “put the garden back into the Garden State” and impose “impact fees” on new warehouses so that “when infrastructure improvements are necessitated by development, the developer pays for it, not already overburdened taxpayers.”
There’s a tradition of Republican environmentalism in New Jersey going back to Christine Todd Whitman, who served as governor from 1994 to 2001. And some of what Ciatterelli is pushing back against is state laws or court decisions requiring local governments to approve certain projects. Trump made a campaign issue of this in 2020, asserting that the Democrats were trying to “ruin” the suburbs. If Ciattarelli does prevail in the election, the anti-free-market, anti-growth forces in the Republican Party will make a big deal about this as a factor in the victory. If he loses, it might be because he sounds anti-growth. What’s the line, exactly, when “development” becomes “overdevelopment”? Your own house is “development,” but the next house to be built is “overdevelopment.” If the issue is too much traffic, the cause may not be overdevelopment, but underdevelopment—lack of density means that too many things are a drive away, not a walk away. Anyway, with the New York City Republican mayoral candidate running against billionaires and the New Jersey Republican governor candidate running against “overdevelopment,” this is not the Republican Party that some of us grew up with.
Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi on world opinion: The New York Times has an interview with Eli Sharabi, author of the new book “Hostage,” about his experience as one of the Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023. The Times interviewer asked him “What goes through your mind these days ..when you see Israel becoming increasingly marginalized worldwide because of its conduct in the war?” His answer, in part, “I think that world opinion is against Israel. It doesn’t matter how the war is going. There is a lot of hatred toward Jews, toward Israelis. Most of the hatred stems from disinformation. Ultimately, Israel has the right to defend itself. It has the right to eradicate its enemies and the terrorism that is being waged against it.”
The term “disinformation” is less and less useful (see Newsguard’s “Commentary: Why We’re Moving Beyond ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Disinformation’”). But Sharabi’s basic point—that many people hate Israel not “because of its conduct in the war” but because of inaccurate information that itself is a kind of information warfare conducted by Israel’s enemies, including those at the Harvard central administration—seems to me to be a plausible assessment of the situation.
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