Activists protest New York Times editor for complicity in genocide of Palestinians

By Penny Freedom
New York City

In the early evening of July 17, despite the sweltering heat of a New York City summer, activists protested outside the home of Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. 

The activists were there in solidarity with the people of Palestine to call out the Times’ systematic manufacturing of consent for genocide.

Every week for months, anti-genocide activists have been on the ground at both the Times’ headquarters in midtown Manhattan and Kahn’s house, calling out the newspaper’s egregiously biased reporting of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. 

Protesters accused the Times of spreading disinformation, burying the facts, using double standards when reporting Israeli versus Palestinian fatalities, using dehumanizing language against Palestinians, failing to retract debunked articles and failing to provide evidence of the Israeli claims it publishes. 

A leaked memo from the Times, referenced in an April 2024 article by The Intercept, also exposed the Times’ systematic censoring of words such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” 

The protesters outside Kahn’s house engaged with thousands of passersby — neighborhood residents, tourists and university students — by handing out flyers and copies of the Times War Crimes, chanting and delivering speeches. A majority of the passing New Yorkers engaged positively with the protest, an encouraging sign in a city with huge economic and cultural ties to apartheid Israel. 

Some of the signs and posters carried by protesters highlighted Israel’s egregious war crimes through photos of starved and martyred children. Others honored the sacrifice of the over 200 journalists murdered by Israel since October 2023. 

The educational flyers distributed to hundreds of members of the public included alternative media sources and the accounts of on-the-ground journalists in Gaza.

The flyers also called on the public to stop paying for propaganda and unsubscribe from the Times. 

Provocative chants such as, “Every time the media lies, a neighborhood in Gaza dies!” emphasized for the public that the disinformation published by Western mainstream media has real life consequences for the people of Palestine. 

Another chant, “Ethnic cleansing is a war crime! New York Times, where’s your headline?” called out the Times’ failure to report accurately and proportionally on the scale and cruelty of violence being perpetrated by Israel as a matter of genocidal policy. 

Israeli and U.S. officials are on record proposing the forced removal of Palestinians from their homeland, and articles from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz show how Israel Occupation Forces have been instructed to shoot and kill unarmed Palestinians regularly.

The protest ended after nearly three hours with a call to action for the public: Stop supporting the Times and all other mouthpieces for imperialist violence, and speak out about Israel and the U.S.’s war crimes. 

The activists also had a closing message for Joseph Kahn and the Times staff: until they retract their lies and start reporting truthfully on the genocide of Palestine, “We will be back!”