The contrasts in the headlines were striking.

Projected on a screen were copies of online stories from The New York Times and the BBC News, both covering killings in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli bombings of Palestinians in Gaza.
Pointing out the differences in the treatments, Hena Zuberi of the nonprofit human rights group, Justice For All, noted how in one set of headlines, the group carrying out deadly attacks, Israel, goes unnamed, and in the other, the opposite is true. Russia is named.

Zuberi pointed to the screen. “The Israeli army is not mentioned, at all,” she noted of the presentations by both publications in her examples. “Who conducted the air strikes? No attacker is named.”

In a New York Times headline she used as an example, the dead in Gaza were “reported” in the passive voice, and not simply stated as a fact, as was the case in the Ukraine coverage.

“When they start talking about Palestinian lives, the voices suddenly become detached and very passive,” said Zuberi, who was leading a workshop last week in Roxbury on recognizing and combating Islamophobia in the media.

“This is not just by chance,” argued Zuberi about what she called anti-Muslim media bias, noting that readers have to “understand the power of words.”

The media relations offices of the BBC and New York Times did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story. The BBC acknowledged receipt of the request and the Times did through an automated response.

Zuberi said her group, Justice for All, monitored 2,700 television stations for five days from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1 and heard the words “Israel” and “hostage” mentioned 302,471 times and “Palestinian” mentioned 9,428 times.

“The message was ignore Palestinian lives,” she said. “You can not ignore that there is a consistent narrative that is put out and shared over and over again to justify this genocide.”

Zuberi, who is editor in chief of Muslimmatters.org, had previously worked as a television news reporter and producer for CNBC Asia and World Television News, according to her profile. She was also a reporter for Muslim Link newspaper in Washington, D.C. But now much of her focus in on campaigning against the genocide of the Rohingya, the treatment of the Uighur people by China and the increasingly repressed Muslims in India, as well as the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, maimed and made homeless in Gaza and the West Bank.

Taking aim at big, mainstream publications such as the Times, BBC, CNN and other outlets, Zuberi argued that small and independent publications fail to have the reach and influence of major news outlets.

“The little ones don’t have the budget to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread their articles,” she said.

Several smaller online publications such as The Intercept and The Grayzone, as well as the Qatar-funded media giant Al Jazeera, have also been critical of coverage in the Times and elsewhere for their coverage of Palestine. And advocacy groups have also expressed similar concerns to Zuberi’s. In a post written by the Muslim Public Affairs Council earlier this week, the group’s president Salam Al-Marayati voiced dismay over Islamophobia in online and popular media.

“The media’s coverage of the Gaza conflict often fails to distinguish between groups like Hamas and the American Muslim community. This allows for dangerous misconceptions to thrive, framing Muslims as perpetual aggressors,” wrote Al-Marayati.

In her workshop in Roxbury, Zuberi went further, and drew parallels to coverage of Palestinian deaths to earlier coverage in mainstream English-language press of the genocide of the majority Muslim Rohingya people.

“At the end of the day,” she said to a small audience of mostly Muslim women and men, “each of you and your children are impacted.”

Only one reporter was in attendance.

Zuberi also made the case that various governments, including those of Israel, the U.S. and India, and other activist and political groups, help shape an Islamophobic narrative in popular media, by providing easy access to interviews and other material that support their views including, she said, framing the war on Gaza as simply a conflict between religious groups. At the same time, she said, the press, which she contends portrays Muslims and Muslim-majority groups in an overwhelmingly negative light, not only exacerbates Islamophobia, but also helps shape U.S. policy and law. She noted an effort in Congress – bill H. R. 6408 – that would give the secretary of the Treasury the power to take away the nonprofit status of organizations it decided were “terrorist supporting,” though some rights groups point out the label can be loosely and unfairly applied to Islamic organizations and Palestinian causes, or to those opposing Israel.

“How many of use grew up under the shadow of 9/11 and the Patriot Act?” she said, referring to legislation passed after the World Trade Center terror attacks in 2001 that many legal activists argue infringed on civil liberties.

“Media impacts policy,” Zuberi said.

But it can also shape the way people feel about themselves, especially children, she said, when asked about Islamophobia in the media by a Sampan reporter during a break outside the workshop. Sampan recently wrote about a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing the negative effects of anti-immigrant political speech on Latino families.

“I have four kids … and I can speak from personal experience that we really don’t watch mainstream media in our house, not because we don’t want to, but because of the incessant portrayal of Muslims and of Islam in a manner that we don’t identify with. … The impact that that has on our children – one of my daughters went and became a therapist. … That’s her job, because there are so many traumatized children in our community.”

She said that Muslim families in America and elsewhere “consistently have to fight for their humanity and to prove that they are human, too.”