Zachary Jablow writes:

In the winter of 1981, six years into Indonesia’s occupation of the island nation East Timor, The New York Times Magazine published a report about the island that may as well have been written about Gaza any time since October 7th, 2023. Referring to the relatively small groups in the United States protesting their government’s role in the occupation, correspondent Henry Kamm wrote, “There is substance to these protests, even if, at their most extreme, they degenerate into hyperbole—accusations of ‘genocide’ rather than mass deaths from cruel warfare and the starvation that accompanied it on this historically food-short island, of American complicity rather than acquiescence.”

By the end of the occupation in 1999, about a quarter of the population of East Timor had died. A generation of scholars has since concluded that Indonesia’s systematic campaign of murder, starvation, and displacement indeed amounted to genocide. And the US was undeniably complicit, providing weapons and diplomatic support to the Suharto regime while publicly denying Indonesia’s atrocities. (In the Times article, Kamm acknowledged that the US had “furnished most of the weapons that Indonesia used for its invasion” but assured the reader that “the United States intended that these weapons be used only for Indonesia’s self-defense.”)

Likewise, this September the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that, using more than $20 billion in US military aid, Israel committed genocide in its Gaza war, now nominally ended under a tenuous US-brokered “peace” deal. A small chorus of US politicians have since adopted the label, albeit reluctantly. But as with its coverage of Timor, the New York Times has equivocated on the cause of famine in Gaza and frequently downplayed the appropriateness of the genocide designation. In April 2024, The Intercept reported that an internal Times memo had cautioned staff to “set a high bar” for allowing sources to use the term genocide “as an accusation” in its Gaza coverage, even in quotations—even as the paper encouraged the routine use of the term “terrorism,” without quotes, to describe the October 7th attacks on Israel.

The Times’ obfuscation of these two US-backed genocides is part of a broader pattern. In newly published research, my co-author Tianhong Yin and I delved into the paper’s archive to look at how it covered post-World War II atrocities that are now understood by experts as genocides. We compared the Times’ treatment of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia—cases in which the US was either not directly involved, or, as in Bosnia, ostensibly engaged in “genocide prevention”—to genocides like that, like Gaza, featured active American assistance to the aggressors. Specifically, we looked at the number of Times articles that referenced each country from the start of the genocide period up to 2020, as well as the number that included contested language like “genocide,” “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocity.”

Our results were clear: The historical events that the New York Times has most clearly remembered as genocides, as crimes that demand outrage and accountability, are those where American complicity was not part of the story. But in cases where the US facilitated mass violence, the Times is much more apt to omit the genocide label or avoid mentioning the situation entirely. [Continue reading…]