Imagine if the world’s top prize in the field of engineering were awarded to Hamas for its network of 350-450 miles of tunnels throughout Gaza.
While the terror tunnels are indeed an unprecedented engineering feat, this will not happen because engineering’s top prize – named after Queen Elizabeth II – is awarded for “benefit to humanity.”
That’s not so with the top prize in my profession, unfortunately. The Pulitzer Prizes have no such standard when it comes to the journalists who receive them.
Ahead of the awarding of last year’s prize, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting campaigned to the Pulitzer Board to not give the prize to “infiltrators and Hitler praisers.” But The New York Times international reporting team that won featured photographer Yousef Masoud, who both infiltrated Israel along with Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and has praised the Nazi leader on social media.
This year, there was hope that the sinking stature of the awards could be stymied. The international reporting award deservedly went to the Times’ coverage of the underreported conflict in Sudan.
But then came the prize for commentary, whose past winners include veteran journalists I’ve admired, such as my former editor at The Jerusalem Post Bret Stephens, as well as Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, George Will, Paul Gigot, Jimmy Breslin, Ira Berkow, Dave Barry, and my hometown Chicago Tribune’s Mike Royko and Mary Schmich.
Gazan writer Mosab Abu Toha wins Pulitzer
This year’s Pulitzer Board shamefully decided that this pantheon of journalistic luminaries will now be joined by Mosab Abu Toha, an antisemitic bigot from Gaza, who wrote some essays bashing Israel in The New Yorker.
Among the Pulitzer Board members who decided to enshrine Abu Toha was New Yorker editor David Remnick, who has presided over his magazine’s coverage of the current war. He had to recuse himself from the vote but undoubtedly unethically pushed for the guy he discovered to receive the prize.
The HonestReporting team discovered Abu Toha’s social media posts, which repeatedly justify acts of terror, including the kidnapping of Emily Damari, who was abducted from her Kfar Aza home, but he called her a “soldier” because she served her compulsory IDF service.
I presented the evidence to Emily. She wrote an impassioned social media post, which went viral, in which she pleaded for the prize to be revoked. Abu Toha responded to her on MSNBC by mocking her again, saying his friends lost a lot more than two fingers.
Abu Toha called her fellow hostage, violinist Agam Berger, a “killer,” even though her role in the IDF was to monitor the Gaza border on a screen. When I told Berger’s mother the prize was given by Columbia University, she said, “What do you expect?”
Call me naïve, but I still expect better from Columbia and its acting President Claire Shipman, a Pulitzer Board member who missed a golden opportunity to reject the antisemitism that marred her institution’s reputation and took away its funding. Instead, she will host a dinner honoring Abu Toha.
My alma mater Northwestern also continues to shame itself. The Pulitzer Board includes Northwestern Prof. Natasha Trethewey, who served as US poet laureate but whose legacy has been forever tarnished by her decision to award the top prize in journalism to an antisemite.
In one of his public posts following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in southern Israel, Abu Toha referred to the Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas as “not actually kidnapped.” Such language is not only morally abhorrent, it is an open justification for the kidnapping of civilians – including children and the elderly – by a designated terrorist organization.
In his post about Damari, Abu Toha questioned the legitimacy of the Israeli victims themselves, writing: “So this girl is called a ‘hostage’?” Yes. A civilian ripped from her home and violently taken by terrorists and held captive is called a hostage.
His online history includes repeated use of antisemitic imagery and phrases. He has referred to Israelis as “ZioNazis” and characterized Israel’s existence as a “cancer” – language that violates the definitions of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the US State Department.
Abu Toha thinks he knows better what antisemitism is. He defined it on Facebook as soldiers lighting a menorah in Gaza.
Pulitzer win raises controversy
While artistic expression deserves protection, prestigious honors like the Pulitzer Prize must be guided by ethical judgment. Abu Toha’s body of work cannot be separated from his public rhetoric, which glorifies violence, dehumanizes civilians, and spreads antisemitic hate.
Ask yourselves: If Abu Toha had insulted African Americans or transgender people instead of Jewish women, would he really have been given a prize?
“The Board is committed to honoring work that exemplifies the longstanding ethics of the journalistic profession,” the Pulitzer website says, in a statement that it can prove true by accepting my call to revoke the award. Taking the prize away would affirm the Board’s commitment to human dignity, moral clarity, and the foundational values of journalism.
As this is written, no one on the Pulitzer Board has publicly spoken up or responded to my letters or the petitions of the organizations that amplified my team’s work. But a respected acquaintance reached “contacts near the Pulitzers.”
“The prize goes to the work, not the person, and that’s what we judged and should be judged,” the Board source said. “But his comments as a person are abhorrent.”
That only confirms that if the Pulitzer Board gave that engineering prize, Hamas leaders would be flown to New York to receive it for the tunnels.
Hamas has gotten away with controlling the narrative in this war, painting Israel as the aggressor. That’s why HonestReporting published an interactive online map of the Gaza tunnels underneath schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings that Hamas has used for its terror operations.
Hamas is responsible for the destruction of Gaza. For years, Hamas has used underground tunnels to smuggle weapons, move and hide hostages, evade Israeli defenses, and protect Hamas’s leadership – all while using Palestinian civilians as human shields. The project offers clear, verifiable evidence of how Hamas prioritizes terror over the well-being of its own people.
The interactive map gives global citizens, journalists, and policymakers irrefutable, visual evidence of Hamas’s war crimes and makes denial impossible. It exposes the moral calculus of a terror group that chose tunnels over shelters for its own people.
Construction of a tunnel costs $3 million, and a bomb shelter only $30,000. Hamas could have built 300 shelters for every tunnel.
Those are facts that even the Pulitzer Prize Board should not be able to ignore.
The writer is executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting and the former chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post.
