The Pulitzer Committee which awards major prizes for US journalism, has drawn heavy criticism from media watchdogs and a former Israeli hostage for giving one of its annual prizes to a Palestinian poet who has repeatedly justified the Hamas killings and kidnappings of October 7, 2023.
Mosab Abu Toha received his award for a series of essays on life in Gaza for The New Yorker magazine.
But he had also been a fierce critic of nearly everything Israeli or Jewish on social media.
His comments about British-Israeli woman Emily Damari who was held captive by Hamas for 471 days sparked widespread outrage.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’). This is Emily Damari, a 28-year-old UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detained on 10/7. So this girl is called a ‘hostage’? This soldier, who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying, is called a ‘hostage’?”
HOSTAGE EMILY DAMARI’S RESPONSE TO PULITZER BOARD
Ms. Damari responded to the Pulitzer Prize Board with an open letter on X, reading, in part:
“My name is Emily Damari. I was held hostage in Gaza. On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border into Gaza.”
“I was one of 251 men, women, children, and elderly people kidnapped that day from their beds, their homes, and a music festival. For almost 500 days I lived in terror. I was starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human. I watched friends suffer. I watched hope dim.”
“And even now, after returning home, I carry that darkness with me because my best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels. So imagine my shock and pain when I saw that you awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Mosab Abu Toha.”
‘HE’S THE MODERN DAY EQUIVALENT OF A HOLOCAUST DENIER”
“This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether [female soldier] Agam Berger was truly a hostage.”
“These are not word games. They are outright denials of documented atrocities. You claim to honour journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
“Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honouring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.”
Emily Damari lost two fingers on her left hand when her kidnappers shot her as they dragged her out of her apartment in southern Israel, and for months in captivity the wound did not heal due to the conditions in which she was kept.
She was also shot in the leg, and the only medical treatment she was given was an expired bottle of iodine.
“A BLEMISH ON THE PULITZER PRIZE”
Media watchdog HonestReporting described the award as “a blemish on the Pulitzer Prize.“
It called on the Pulitzer Committee to rescind the award to Mr. Abu Toha, writing: “It seems that both the magazine and the Pulitzer Committee failed to check Abu Toha’s virulent social media posts against Israeli hostages.”
David Harsnayi wrote in The Daily Signal that the Pulitzers have become an “irremediable joke.”
In 2023, Mark Hemingway of The Federalist, wrote an article titled For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation.”
He observed that: “This many high-profile failures in such a short time makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.”
The Pulitzer Prizes are 23 annual awards given by New York’s Columbia University for achievements in the United States in “journalism, arts and letters.”
They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer who made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
