Back in October there was an incident involving a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at Cooper Union in New York City loudly protested outside a library where a group of Jewish students were inside. This is the brief clip that was circulating at the time.

Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door.

Listen with sound on. pic.twitter.com/pwYRo5KA9X

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 25, 2023

The Jewish students inside said they were afraid and it was reported they had been locked into the library. The pro-Palestinian protesters claimed their protest wasn’t targeting anyone in particular even though they made their way to a glass wall where they could see several Jewish students inside and continued their chanting and pounding on the glass.

Two identifiable Jewish students at @cooperunion are harassed at a pro Hamas rally. Police had to rescue the Jews from the library through an emergency exit.

It's good that the White House @PressSec said, "There is no credible evidence that this is happening in our country" pic.twitter.com/ozIkH1YHWE

— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) October 25, 2023

Today the NY Times has published an article which does its best to minimize the whole thing as part of a PR war. Eventually we get to October 25, the day of the incident. Here’s how the Times describes what happened.

At 1 p.m. that day, about 70 students left class as part of a national pro-Palestinian student walkout, forming a semicircle outside the building and chanting. About 20 pro-Israel counterprotesters lined up between the pro-Palestinian protesters and the school.

Three hours later, roughly 20 of the pro-Palestinian protesters went inside — blowing past security guards who told them to stop, video shows — to bring demands, including that the college call for a cease-fire and end its exchange program with Israel, directly to the college president on the seventh floor. Ms. Sparks locked her door, but told the police that she did not feel threatened and allowed the protest to continue, the police said.

An hour later, the pro-Palestinian protesters made their way downstairs to the library where several pro-Israel protesters had gone. A security guard closed the door and stood in front of it. That’s when the banging started.

In interviews, protesters said they did not know who was inside when they came to the doors, and were only angry about being kept out. They banged on the doors in time to their repetitive chant, “Free, free Palestine.”…

After two minutes, protesters moved to a glass wall along the side of the library. It was only then, they said, that they noticed some of the Jewish counterprotesters were inside. For about seven minutes, they held up posters, banged cardboard tubes and chanted, the school said.

This is the part of the explanation that makes the least sense to me. So the protesters just happened to end up at the library where several Jewish students were inside. They claim they didn’t know that at the time and they weren’t targeting anyone. Except that ignorance only lasted about 2 minutes according to the timeline given by the NY Times. Because after two minutes they moved to a window where they could clearly see several of the Jewish students inside and then they kept up the chanting for another seven minutes. So it’s not true they didn’t know who was inside, only that they didn’t know initially.

In any case, the Times doesn’t dispute that the Jewish students were frightened by what happened, but it does try to minimize what the pro-Palestinian group was chanting.

The student who shot the six-second video, Taylor Roslyn Lent, was interviewed on Fox News. She said that while she wasn’t typically threatened by pro-Palestinian protests, she had felt threatened “when there were chants calling for the murder of Jews being chanted at me from my fellow students.”

(During the protest outside the school, students chanted various slogans, including the disputed phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” but they denied they were calling for violence.)

The Times is also framing this as part of a PR war led by “right leaning” organizations but fails to mention that both the Mayor of NYC and Governor of New York expressed concern about the situation. So this wasn’t just circulating in right-wing spaces.

State officials are in close communication with local law enforcement regarding protests on the Cooper Union campus tonight.

Antisemitism and all forms of hate and intimidation are unacceptable and have no place in New York State.

— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) October 26, 2023

In any case, commenters don’t seem to be going along with the idea that all of this was overblown. Here’s the top comment.

This article manages to whitewash, at length, an episode where a large group of students broke off from an outdoor rally, went into a building they were told was not for protesting, roamed the halls and decided to scream slogans outside of a library.

Coordinated yelling outside of a library is an intimidation tactic. A library is an acknowledged quiet zone for reading and studying.

The screamers can claim all they want about what their intended message was. But the way they delivered their message was violent and disruptive, and was perceived that way by the students inside the library.

The psychology of microaggressions has been widely studied and disseminated on campus. Even a quiet question can be perceived as aggressive. By definition, a large group of people yelling can even more readily be perceived as aggressive.

Yet this article paints them as harmless. A whitewash.

A commenter from California asks people to imagine if something similar had happened during the summer of 2020 and it was black students stuck inside the library with white nationalists pounding on the windows. No media outlet would have been downplaying that.

I just don’t understand the double standard on the hypocrisy of those on the left who are now protecting free speech when they know full well that if three years ago during the George Floyd protests It had been an angry mob of white nationalist banging on the door of the library, and there were black students inside that the actions would’ve been universally condemned, and any article, trying to minimize it or put it in “context” would have been shouted down and canceled. Does no one else see the hypocrisy?

This person says the story isn’t weaponization it’s normalization:

Students in protest – some in masks- that did not heed the direction of security guards, banging on the door yelling slogans, in a neighborhood full of posters showing Israeli flags in trash cans and River to the Sea chants. How is this not intimidation? You should not report on weaponization, but rather the threat of normalization.

Here’s someone making a point similar to the one I made above:

The walls of this library are glass. Unless somehow you want to claim that people pressed right up against the glass still could not tell who was inside, please don’t pretend that this wasn’t one group of students deliberately targeting and harassing their fellow students.

I could go on but let’s wrap it up with this one offering what is clearly sarcastic praise for the author.

Excellent and highly skilled job at reframing an incident in which a group of students behaved threateningly to another group, in a way that is virtually completely unheard of and isn’t normal and accepted campus behavior in any other context, and turning it into a seemingly minor, mostly normal free-speech incident that was simply blown out of proportion by ‘outside forces’.

Nice work NY Times. Too bad most people can see right through this.