Wednesday morning, fake versions of Northwestern University’s student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, appeared on desks, in dorms, and around locations across campus. The top of the imitation front pages, which seemed to have been created with the same template as the Daily itself, bore the words “According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israel has killed 5,087 Palestinians. Including 2,055 children, 1,119 women, and 187 elderly.” The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza is controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the elected government in the Strip.
Students at @NorthwesternU put these fake newspaper covers in classrooms, dorms, and other buildings across campus. The caption under the photo repeats the blood libel that Israel bombed a Gazan hospital. Will we get a comment from university president Michael Schill this time? pic.twitter.com/cLR7ElDYPz
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) October 25, 2023
Below that is a headline, “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” under which the faux newspaper’s creators wrote fake quotes from university administrators. The first target, university president Michael Schill, had already created controversy with his statements since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. In an October 11 message to Northwestern’s senior leadership, Schill said that though he personally found Hamas’s massacres “horrific,” he would not issue a statement in his capacity as president of the university. “We are a University,” he wrote,
[that] celebrates free expression, diversity of people and diversity of viewpoints. This is essential to our role in society. The University does not speak for our faculty, students and staff on these matters — they have their own voices, and I would venture to say, there are no doubt differences among our students and faculty on what Hamas did and how Israel is responding.
After some at Northwestern objected to this statement, he followed up with a communication to the entire university defending his decision not to make a statement:
My view that I should not as the president of Northwestern make statements on behalf of the entire University . . . This belief is based upon the principles of academic freedom and free expression that undergird our institution and allow for a multiplicity of views on these types of matters.
That said, he added, “the abhorrent and horrific actions of Hamas on Saturday are clearly antithetical to Northwestern’s values — as well as my own.”
Schill’s position seems the opposite of of his previous inclination to comment on events outside the campus. The only issue on which he has issued a statement since taking over as Northwestern’s president in September 2022 was the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023) decision. However, as president of the University of Oregon, he wrote letters to that university’s community on subjects including the killing of George Floyd, the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and hatred against Asian Americans.
The mock newspaper at Northwestern includes fake quotes from Schill “on the situation in Gaza,” poking the president about his refusal to comment, though from the anti-Israel side. The students who put the paper together compared the 200 hostages still held by Hamas to 13 take-out containers missing from the university’s dining halls and featured a photo caption repeating the lie that “an Israeli air strike killed 471 Palestinians” at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza.
Northwestern’s connection to the government of Qatar has drawn attention in recent days. Eli Lake wrote for the Free Press that Qatar has donated about $602 million to Northwestern since 2008. The university has a campus in Doha that, according to its own website, partners with Al Jazeera, a state-run news organization that United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken called “full of anti-Israel incitement.” Many faculty members at Northwestern’s Qatar campus signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s attack on Israel.
The Daily Northwestern posted on X Wednesday afternoon, “We are aware of tampering with copies of The Daily’s print edition and are investigating the matter.” Thursday, the Daily‘s leadership addressed the “imitation front pages” in an editorial, writing that the paper’s staff “did not have any prior knowledge of our involvement in these tampered print newspapers, nor their distribution to newsstands and classrooms across Northwestern’s campus.”
The paper’s parent organization, the Students Publishing Company, issued its own statement, saying, “We reject and condemn this act of vandalism, and we have engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible.”
The university itself sent a message to the Northwestern community Wednesday evening, explaining that “someone or some group distributed fake copies of the University’s independent, student-run newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, across the Evanston campus,” and that “the fake newspaper included images and language about Israel that many in our community found offensive.”