By Todd Bensman
A version of this article ran May 1, 2023 in The Daily Mail
America’s paragon of journalism education – the 120-year-old Columbia Journalism School in New York proposed by Joseph Pulitzer, namesake of the Pulitzer Prizes issued annually – has quietly erected in its main lobby an expansive photo memorial to some 100 “journalists” killed in Israel’s retaliatory war against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza.
A mere stone’s throw from protests roiling New York City’s Columbia University and has spread to college campuses nationwide, the eminent school’s lionizing tribute shrine is mounted prominently on the walls of “Pulitzer Hall that serves as an entry way to the school building. It is based on a Killed in Action tribute list produced by another institutional scion of US journalism – The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) – indicates official school endorsement and presuming thorough journalistic vetting.
But a review of the names on the tribute shows at least 15 of them worked for Hamas’ “Al Aqsa TV,” which the U.S. Treasury Department under President Barack Obama in 2010 designated as a distinct terrorist organization for glorifying violence on children’s programs and routinely pressing for horrendous crimes against civilians. The U.S. State Department designated Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, as have dozens of Western nations.
“Al-Aqsa is a primary Hamas media outlet and airs programs and music videos designed to recruit children to become Hamas armed fighters and suicide bombers upon reaching adulthood,” the 2010 Treasury Department announcement noted. “Treasury will not distinguish between a business financed and controlled by a terrorist group, such as Al-Aqsa Television, and the terrorist group itself.” The outlet remains on the terrorism list 14 years later.
Hamas leadership raised the initial capital for the TV station shortly after the January 2006 elections and runs all aspects of its operations, the U.S. government says. Al Aqsa TV gained international notoriety a couple of years before its terrorist designation when its children’s show star, the Mickey Mouse-like character, Farfour, was outed for promoting radical Islam, hatred of Jews, and would urge children to take up AK-47 assault rifles. The station’s response to ensuring international outrage was to depict an “Israeli” bureaucrat unjustly beating Farfour to death, then replaced the character with a bee named Nahool who continued to preach violence.
The station’s announcers nakedly celebrate horrific terror attacks in Israel, such as after a grisly 2012 bus bombing in Tel Aviv that wounded 22 and an Al-Aqsa announcer exclaimed that “God willing, we will soon see body bags. I pray to God the exalted we will see body bags in a short while.”
Six more on the journalism school’s walls worked for the Hamas-controlled Al Aqsa radio, a sister entity of the TV station in Gaza that has called for human shields to protect Israeli-targeted buildings and routinely encourages armed action against Hamas enemies. Its own Hamas-installed director once described his station as an instrument of “incitement” and anything but a neutral media outlet.
Still other reports that any Columbia School of Journalism research effort could not have missed suggest many more who appear on the list-based photo tribute worked for the propaganda wings of three other U.S.-designated terrorist groups active in the Gaza Strip, including the ultra-violent Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
The school has not publicized its lobby memorial, which has been expanded and improved as semi-permanent over time. Nor has its student newspaper apparently covered it. The memorial came to be known to the New York Post by some who lauded it on social media, where hundreds of thousands have viewed and shared it.A plaque amid the array of photos for the shrine the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association created it “to recognize the journalists who have died in Israel and Gaza in the months since October 7th” At least one journalism professor, Nina Berman, is directly involved in its creation, according to a Feb. 23 Instagram post by her that warned “anyone commenting with doubts about the legitimacy of these journalists or suggestions that they are terrorists will be promptly blocked.”
But while the student association somehow convinced the fabled journalism school to regard these individuals as “journalists” worthy of prominent physical tribute, the U.S. government clearly regards Al Aqsa TV as a producer of violence-inciting propaganda that threatens U.S. national interests.
So objectionable was the Hamas station’s output that Obama’s State Department six years later, in 2016, designated its director and Hamas interior minister, Fathi Ahmad Mohammad Hammad, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Hammad served as a senior Hamas military commander who, in addition to running the station, supervised military tunnel construction under Gaza, where Hamas is hiding some of the more than 133 Israeli hostages its terrorists seized during the October 7 attack; encouraged the manufacturing of homemade weapons for use against Israel; and “coordinated terrorist cells,” U.S. government documents state.
Other respected non-Israeli entities, such as Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, regard everything that Hamas produces through its television and radio outlets as anything but legitimate journalism. The center last year released a report that called everything produced by Hamas’ media outlets “propaganda campaigns” that mainly peddle “propaganda narratives.”
Retired FBI counterterrorism Special Agent James G. Conway of 30 years, much of it in international terrorism, said in an interview that terrorist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) have impactfully used propaganda media channels to radicalize, recruit and raise money to perpetuate violence, not journalism.
“Media today plays a key role in international terrorism,” said Conway, who owns and operates an international police training company Global Intel Strategies. “ISIS, though social media alone, was able to recruit over 100,000 foreign terrorist fighters to come to the Iraq/Syria theater and fight on behalf of ISIS between 2014 and 2017. Al-Aqsa [TV], as the prominent Hamas media entity, plays a key role in promoting and promulgating the Hamas message” of suicide bombing and genocide.
The United States has not designated its sister radio station, “Voice of Al-Aqsa” as a terrorist organization, but no one denies that its U.S.-designated overseer Hamas established the radio station after taking control of Gaza in 2006 and still operates it. Hamas made its first director Ibrahim Daher, who still reportedly runs it.
In 2006, the Associated Press quoted Daher disavowing any pretense of neutral journalism especially during armed conflict where the station called on civilians to act as human shields for a house that Israel announced it would bomb.
In a 2014 interview with The Washington Post during an outbreak of war with Israel, Daher admitted, “The main thing we stress is the activity of the resistance, and how much people support it. Our policy has always been to keep silent about certain news.
“We aren’t interested in showing other things, like any success by the Israelis or how businesses were hurt by the war, or Gazans who have fled the city because of it,” he said. “We choose what we cover.”
Before the journalism school allowed the memorial, the pro-Israel outlet Algemeiner raised questions about many more of those on the Committee to Protect Journalist memorial list, based on information from the Israeli-government sponsored Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.
Had Columbia Journalism School faculty or student researchers conducted their own basic Internet search, they would have found that 11 more so-called journalists now enshrined on the wall worked for outlets controlled by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the U.S. State Department designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997.
Another significant problem is that the Committee to Protect Journalists states on its own website that, “We do not include journalists if there is evidence that they were acting on behalf of militant groups or serving in a military capacity at the time of their deaths.” Some of those on the list and wall, however, did serve in Hamas combat units, such as Hamza Al Dahdou, who served as a deputy commander in the Zeitoun Brigade’s rocket force. Another had been imprisoned by Israel for terrorist activity, The Algemeiner reported in February.
Did Columbia Journalism School and the committee lend their names and prestige to so prominent a tribute without basic journalistic due diligence that could have first established the American intelligence community findings about Al-Aqsa TV? Did they know about the terrorist entity support of those on the list and allow them anyway? And, why did the school decide to dedicate its building’s lobby to the deaths of journalists in this conflict rather than those covering the Russia-Ukraine war, or the ongoing wars in Yemen, Afghanistan or Ethiopia?
Neither the school nor the Committee would consent to an interview about the list or memorial wall. Neither journalism school Dean Jelani Cobb nor his chief of staff replied to requests for comment via email and telephone Friday (April 26).
Journalistic malfeasance is more likely than not the answer. The committee itself notes that its reporting was incomplete and insufficiently corroborated but published it anyway – without basic journalistic vetting.
For instance, in lieu of the requested interview, the committee forwarded an old statement asserting that its research “to date” found no evidence that any of the “journalists” on its list “were engaged in militant activity” and also that all qualified for tribute for having died in the line of journalistic duty.
The committee, on its site, contradicts its own claims, noting that it has yet to confirm the circumstances surrounding many of the deaths. One committee statement admits its list is merely “preliminary” and subject to amendment as new facts come in.
“We continue to investigate the circumstances of each case,” a committee statement forwarded to The Post said.
Indeed, the committee has amended the list it published. A footnote appended to the committee’s list, for instance, states it removed two token Israeli journalists originally on the list, Shai Regev and Ayelet Arnin, because Hamas terrorists killed them on October 7 in their homes before either could cover the ensuing war.
It is a glaring lack of consistency that the committee has yet to remove Palestinians its own research shows died with relatives at home rather than while covering the news. Among them were Al-Aqsa TV’s Iyad Matar, who the Committee said died “along with his mother in an Israeli air strike;” Abdelhalim Awam, an Al-Aqsa TV worker “killed in a strike on his home” while visiting his family; and Mohamed Khalifeh, an Al-Aqsa TV worker killed in an Israeli airstrike on his home along with his wife and three of his children.
The journalism school has proven just as sloppy and journalistically lax. All these victims, including the Israelis removed from the committee’s original list, remained on the school’s memorial wall last week, unamended, as having been nobly killed in action.
Given these known journalistic lapses, how could these bastions of American journalism have ruled out the possibility that others on their memorials died while shooting at Israeli troops or collecting intelligence on Israeli troop movements for their terrorist leaders?
In allowing the monument in its building, the journalism school and committee failed at the basics of fact-exploration – an inexcusable lapse – or didn’t care that many it memorialized at best weren’t journalists at all but terrorists complicit in the war begun by Hamas.