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Sheaf board votes to pull article on Palestine after lobby group complains

Two members of the paper's board told The StarPhoenix they resigned the same day.

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The University of Saskatchewan’s student newspaper retracted an article from its website after a pro-Israel media watchdog sent complaints to the university’s administration.

Two members of The Sheaf’s board told The StarPhoenix they had resigned from their positions after it voted 3-2 to remove “The Reality of Palestine” from the paper’s website.

“It is the opinion of The Sheaf’s board of directors that the story did not meet the journalistic standards set out in The Sheaf‘s mandate,” read a statement posted on the student paper’s website on Friday.

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Notably, the statement was attributed to the board that oversees the paper’s operations, and not the editorial staff who write, edit and otherwise produce content for the 109-year-old publication.

Board chair Francois Biber declined to comment or say how he had voted.

“The Board stands behind the statement and will not be commenting further on the matter,” Biber wrote.

A member of the paper’s editorial team declined to comment and referred The StarPhoenix to the paper’s board.

The story, published in the “features” section, detailed the perspective of a Palestinian family in Saskatoon after 11 days of brutal fighting between Israeli military and Palestinian insurgents in May that resulted in catastrophic damage to the territory. The BBC reported that Israel claimed it killed 225 militants during the fighting and the country’s medical service reported 12 casualties at home. 

“Israeli Zionists are massacring all the Palestinians. They do not care if you are a child or an elder,” one man was quoted as saying in the now-retracted article.

It said people of different faiths had lived in the region peacefully in the past. It described Zionism as a “settler-colonial political movement with the aim to establish a Jewish nation-state in Palestine with a Jewish majority.”

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A lobby group called HonestReporting Canada took umbrage with that description, posting earlier this week that it had written to U of S President Peter Stoicheff with a complaint. It saidd The Sheaf’s story was “replete with hateful lies and featured outright falsehoods” that “denied Israel’s right to exist.”

Biber declined to answer follow-up questions on how the board’s members had voted or whether HonestReporting’s complaint was the reason for the retraction.

University spokeswoman Victoria Dinh confirmed the university had received “letters of concern” about the article and had informed The Sheaf.

The school said it had no further communication with the student-run newspaper, which is not funded by the university and enjoys full editorial autonomy from its administration.

“Our university supports free speech as a fundamental right,” a statement from the university reads. “We are a place of respect and diversity, diversity of political views, religious beliefs, sexual identities, ethnic backgrounds and racial identities. We strive to make our campuses inclusive, safe and supportive places for our faculty, staff and students to create, test, debate and challenge ideas. With this in mind, we conveyed all concerns we received about this specific article to the editorial staff of The Sheaf.”

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HonestReporting Canada describes itself as an “independent grass-roots organization promoting fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East.” It has a history of making similar complaints about Canadian media coverage it sees as being slanted against Israel.

zvescera@postmedia.com
twitter.com/zakvescera

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