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The winner of a Pulitzer Prize this year, for Commentary, was a Palestinian propagandist and “poet,” Mosab Abu Toha: “Pulitzer Prize goes to Gazan poet who discredited hostages, disputed murder of Bibas family,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, May
Abu Toha was awarded the prestigious prize on Monday for a series of essays in the New Yorker about the suffering in Gaza, where he was born and raised….
The New Yorker, yet. The magazine that published Robert Benchley, James Thurber, WiIliam Maxwell, John Updike, John Cheever, Joseph Mitchell, St Clair McKelway, E. B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, and the drawings of Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, is now publishing a pro-Hamas propagandist and liar named Mosab Abu Toha. “What a falling-off there was…”
On January 24, 2025, Abu Toha posted a picture of then-hostage Emily Damari, saying, “How on earth is this girl 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?”…
What should we call this young recruit who had hardly begun her mandatory military service, Emily Damari, who had two of her fingers blown off by Hamas, as she was taken, screaming in despair, off to Gaza to be held in tunnels by her captors, subject to every sort of humiliation and degradation (use your imagination), and held in order to be exchanged for terrorist murderers who were held in Israeli prisons? She was finally released, this hostage, on January 19, 2025, after fifteen months of captivity. But for the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Mosab Abu Toha, she can’t possibly be a “hostage.” According to him, “she and her country have been occupying” the Strip. What’s he talking about? There has not been a single Israeli in Gaza, until the present war that Hamas started, since 2005, when Israel pulled every last one of its citizens out of the Strip.
On February 3, 2025, he made a similar post about Agam Berger, calling her an “Israeli ‘hostage’” in inverted commas.
“These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army! These are the ones who CNN, BBC, and the likes humanize in articles, TV programs, and news bulletins.”
Apparently, the anti-Israel animus displayed by CNN and BBC is not anti-Israel enough for Abu Toha. Even to carry stories about these hostages is to gain sympathy for them, and for Mosab Abu Toha, that will never do.
Furthermore, after then-IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the BBC that Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas were shown by forensic evidence to have been murdered by their captors, Abu Toha said, “shame on BBC, propaganda machine.”…
Abu Toha simply ignores the forensic evidence presented by the IDF that showed that the Bibas boys, four-year-old Kfir and nine-month-old Ariel, were murdered by their captors, who strangled them, and then, to hide the evidence, battered their bodies so as to claim they had been killed in an Israeli air strike. Abu Toha, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, goes Hamas one further. He doesn’t say they were killed by an Israeli bomb. He denies that they were ever killed. This is the man who has just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
According to a post on April 15, Abu Toha was born in Gaza City in 1992 and has a BA in English from the Islamic University of Gaza.
He claims he has “never been part of any political or military factions in Palestine or abroad” and does not support any.
No, he doesn’t have to be a member of Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad to further their aims by deflecting criticism of their atrocities, including the mass murder of Israelis. He needn’t be a Hamas member to insist that the Bibas babies were not killed by the terrorists, but either died from an Israeli bomb, as Hamas claims, or even, as Mosab Abu Toha appears to suggest, were not killed at all. and that this claim should be seen as part of a plot to blacken Hamas’ sterling reputation.
Will the Pulitzer Prize be rescinded? Why should it? The Nobel Prize committee never took back the Nobel Prize for Peace that was given to that arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat. The UN never apologized for employing Kurt Waldheim, a Nazi war criminal, as its Secretary-General from 1972 to 1981. In 2003, there were calls for the Pulitzer given to Walter Duranty in 1932 to be rescinded, but in the end, nothing happened.
So Mosab Abu Toha, celebrator of Hamas as the brave defender of Palestinian rights in what he calls “occupied Gaza,” will pocket his prize — no doubt delivering a speech full of still more calumny against the Jewish state, secure in the knowledge that nothing he says or does will cause the Pulitzer Prize committee to rethink its choice. He’s in the running now for another prize: “Pulitzer Prize Winner Most Undeserving Of The Pulitzer Prize.” His only competition is Walter Duranty.
The Pulitzer Committee is just one of the majority of formerly prestigious US institutions to be undermined by the Marxists. Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish immigrant, would probably be horrified that the prize for journalism he created and endowed has been awarded to an anti-Semitic liar.