Ramin Setoodeh knew he’d get a hard time. But he didn’t expect this.
The editor-in-chief of Stanford’s student newspaper survived an attempt to oust him from his position by irate pro-Palestinians after the Stanford Daily ran a series of staunchly pro-Israel ads.
“I knew people would be upset and some people might be offended. If I based the decision on whether or not people were going to be offended, I couldn’t run many things in my newspaper,” he said.
“But I didn’t anticipate [the reaction] would be this big, and I didn’t anticipate they’d circulate a petition” to get him fired.
The last of five weekly full-page ads sponsored by the New York-based One Truth Foundation runs in the Nov. 21 edition of the Daily. Past ads featured juxtapositions of Israelis grieving and Palestinians celebrating on Sept. 11, 2001 or the destructive tally of a suicide bombing listed alongside the financial benefits showered upon the bomber’s family. All the ads come with the tagline: “There are two sides to every story, but only one truth.”
Angry letters began pouring into the Daily almost immediately after the first ad ran in late October, and the editorial pages have been brimming with debates since.
“Your advertisement of cheering Palestinians celebrating the tragedy of 9/11, juxtaposed alongside ‘grieving’ Israelis is the crudest of propaganda ploys … I wonder how Jewish groups would react if pictures were shown of the tragic loss of life of 34 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 that was deliberately attacked by Israeli jet fighters …” wrote Palo Altan Jagjit Singh in the Nov. 10 Daily.
Following the initial outrage, letters defending the ads and the Daily’s right to print them began appearing in the paper.
“Why is there such an outcry when a pro-Israeli side is for once presented on this campus? … I applaud the Daily for presenting the Israeli side of the conflict, and hope that supporters of the other side have the tolerance that they demand from everyone else to listen to the opposing opinion …,” wrote psychiatry research assistant Asya Karchemskiy on Nov. 6.
The ads also ran at Michigan State, Duke, Ohio State University, Yale and others, with mixed and emotional reactions on each campus. While several school papers pulled the ads following negative feedback, Setoodeh insisted running them for their full, five-week course.
A group calling itself the Coalition for Justice collected several hundred signatures demanding the ads be dropped and more than 100 signers called for Setoodeh’s firing. Neither happened.
While the One Truth Foundation paid $7,000 for the ad series, Setoodeh insisted that the Daily did not accept the ads simply for economic gain.
“Looking back, I think the right decision was made. The ads present a different viewpoint that might not always be expressed on this campus. People obviously disagreed with the viewpoint and I might even disagree with it. But we allowed the point to be heard and people expressed how they feel,” he said.