The revered Columbia Journalism School issues this years Pulitzer Prizes on
its New York campus this week, with an unaddressed problem next door in its
own hallowed Pulitzer Hall. Prominently displayed inside the lobby,
Columbia Journalism School has allowed a memorial shrine to fallen Gazan
journalists who were anything but that.
As I reported in The Daily Mail five days before the schools 108th award
ceremony, at least 15 of the journalists worked for U.S. Treasury
Department-designated terrorist entity, Al Aqsa TV, Hamas primary
propaganda arm. President Barack Obama designated Al Aqsa TV in 2010 after it
pressed children to become suicide bombers and learn to use the AK-47, loudly
praised terrorist bombings in Israel, and routinely urged civilian
slaughters. The U.S. State Department declared the stations owner, Hamas, a
Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997, as have dozens of Western nations.
Thats not even the worst of it.
In 2016, Obamas State Department designated the stations director, Hamas
interior minister Fathi Ahmad Mohammad Hammad, as a Specially Designated
Global Terrorist. Hammad served as a senior military commander who supervised
military tunnel construction under Gaza, where Hamas is hiding 130 Israeli
hostages its terrorists seized during the October 7 attack; and coordinated
terrorist cells, U.S. government documents state.
Six more on the journalism schools walls worked for the Hamas-owned Al Aqsa
Voice Radio, a sibling of the TV station whose broadcasters have called on
Gazans to act as human shields for Hamas offices and routinely encourage
civilian murder.
Eleven more are accused by Israel of working for propaganda outlets
controlled by three other groups the United States has legally declared
outlawed terrorist organizations, including the ultra-violent rocket-
launching Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
As it prepared to hand out Pulitzer Prizes, the journalism school ignored my
emailed questions. But journalism groups, including the main one who drafted
the tribute list upon which the school memorial is predicated the Committee
to Protect Journalists trotted out an old, largely unchallenged argument
for promulgating its list: theyre still journalists if they self-identified
as journalists and werent pulling triggers.
That line of justification occupies extreme fringes of mainstream academia
counterterrorism, military, and law enforcement thinking worldwide, notably
in the United States. The U.S. homeland security establishment regards the
pen and camera of terrorist propagandists as deadly as fingers on triggers
and would kill or prosecute half of those on Columbia Journalism Schools
wall if given a chance.
Indeed, the U.S. Homeland Security and presidents on both sides of the aisle
regard propagandists for designated terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda
as dangerous enough to assassinate abroad with Hellfire missiles. Inside the
United States, the establishment prosecutes and imprisons propagandists like
those on Columbia Journalism Schools walls whenever possible. American
journalism institutions are so far out of step with the rest of the civilized
world that an argument can be made that their political stunts aid and abet
the murder of real people.
The line of argument journalism groups use to defend their tribute lists
The binary if-not-combatant-then-hero argument is hardly new. It last flew
in 2013, overcoming Jewish and pro-Israel groups that bitterly complained
when the now-defunct Newseum in Washington D.C. included two Al-Aqsa TV
cameramen on a highly prominent KIA memorial list projected on a 74-foot
First Amendment tablet facing Pennsylvania Avenue. Theyd been killed in an
outbreak of violence between Hamas and Israel.
Dozens of journalism groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ), vigorously argued that the two cameramen werent carrying weapons or
conducting surveillance when Israel bombed their vehicle, which theyd marked
as TV press. The Newseum initially pulled the names but then bought into the
narrative that these two cameramen werent carrying weapons and therefore
belonged back in the tribute.
Now the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is pushing the same narrative
for its new 2024 tribute list upon which the journalism schools Pulitzer
Hall memorial is based.
CPJ does not support journalists engaged in breaking the law, the group
told me in an email containing a recycled earlier statement about its tribute
list. In the cases we have documented, multiple sources have found no
evidence to date that these journalists were engaged in militant activity.
On that basis alone, the argument follows, they were legitimate journalists
who died in noble public service. More than 100 news organizations have
joined the committee in signing a letter in February attesting to worthiness
of its tribute on the sole grounds that none were throwing bombs.
Its time to debunk the intellectual defense these journalism groups rely on
to recast terrorist propagandists as noble journalists who died in public
service.
Propaganda Kills
Because they hold that propaganda kills just as surely as bullets and bombs,
the United States and its Western allies have mounted relentless counter-
propaganda campaigns against terrorist radio, television, and online media
outlets just like those run by Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad out of
Gaza. The key feature of this campaign are assassination hunts overseas for
ISIS and al-Qaeda propagandists in the long-settled academic science, rooted
in consistent academic studies, that nonviolent propaganda for terrorist
groups tightly correlates with attack frequency and human casualties
worldwide.
The continued presence of terrorist content on the web is a grave risk to
citizens and to society at large, the European Commission concluded in one
typical policy paper proposing the find and remove such content. Terrorists
misuse the internet to spread their messages to intimidate, radicalize,
recruit and facilitate carrying out terrorist attacks.
One of the more prominent hunts ended with an August 30, 2016 precision
airstrike by U.S.-led coalition forces that killed ISIS propaganda leader and
spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, whose grisly propaganda empire in slick
monthly magazines Dabiq, Rumiya and radio and TV stations was credited with
drawing thousands of recruits to Syria and inspiring murderous attacks around
the globe.
Foreign Policy magazine, among many other creditable sources, quoted active-
duty government professionals and diplomats who credited his media work and
messaging with inspiring followers to kill. U.S.-led coalition forces finally
killed Adnani on August 30, 2016 in a precision airstrike near Al Bab, Syria.
That was hardly the first or last U.S. killing of a terrorist propagandist
overseas, including American ones. In September 2011, President Obama
controversially ordered a Hellfire missile strike that killed U.S. born al-
Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, saying his body of work killed
people and posed an imminent threat of violence or death to other Americans
even if he himself did not shoot the guns or detonate the bombs.
Al-Awlakis lectures and other propaganda were seen as the chief inspiration
for the bloody 2015 terror attack that killed 15 people in San Bernardino,
California; Hassan Nidals deadly 2010 attack at Fort Hood, Texas; the Faisal
Shahzad attack on Times Square; the Boston bombing and dozens of others
around the world that killed hundreds of innocents.
In April 2015, the CIA fired Hellfire missiles in Pakistan that killed U.S.-
born Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American another notorious
propagandist for al Qaeda whose work was considered so dangerous the U.S.
government put out a $1 million reward for his arrest on treason charges in
California.
In March 2017, another U.S. airstrike killed ISIS propaganda chief Ibrahim al
Ansari in Iraq for inciting vehicle, knife and arson attacks against American
citizens.
In the Israel-Gaza theater, the U.S. and Europe have left assassination
operations to Israel, which is plenty enough capable of taking out these
propagandists and often does so just like the Americans and European allies.
Hard Time For Terrorist Propaganda
In December 2019, a U.S. federal judge sentenced Texas-born Dallas resident
Said Azzam Mohamad Rahim to a hefty 30-year prison sentence for terrorism.
But Rahim didnt earn that punishment for killing anyone himself.
Hes in prison for spreading a warped ideology on social media and for
promoting violence against innocent people, including Americans, a
Department of Justice press release stated. For years from his home in North
Texas, Rahim moderated a State of the Islamic Caliphate social media
channel on Zello dedicated to recruiting ISIS fighters and where he touted
acts of terror.
Kill and do not consult anyone, he said in on 2016 message. Kill, by any
means. Smash his head on the wall. Spit in his face. Burn, I mean anything,
anything. Poison anything!
Even if Americas institutions of journalism refuse to see it, Rahims
prosecution and 30-year sentence are but one of many emblematic examples of
how the entire United States security establishment views the provision of
propaganda on behalf of a designated terror organization.
So profoundly fearful of non-violent activities was Congress and the White
House after 9/11 that it expanded and enhanced material support for
terrorism statutes that carry harsh sentences that include life in prison.
One of the key provisions of these laws targets anyone who knows full well
that they work under that terrorist organizations direction or control
and that it has been designated as a terror organization.
These criminal material support statutes have been used to send U.S.-based
jihadists to prison hundreds of times for more than two decades, often for
spreading propaganda on behalf of designated terrorist groups or doing
anything at all to support their murderous missions.
The U.S. justice system has brooked no mercy for Hamas operatives inside the
United States who merely raised money for Hamas. The DOJ in 2002 broke up and
prosecuted the largest Hamas fundraising operation in U.S. history, the Holy
Land Foundation, dishing out prison sentences ranging to 65 years for the
so-called Holy Land five who were prosecuted in Dallas.
What does this history mean in todays context? It means that heralded U.S.
journalism institutions like Columbia Journalism School most especially
those inside the United States should never get away unchallenged with
fringe justifications for lionizing propagandists for designated terrorist
groups in KIA lists and memorials.
Thats because their involvement in enabling tribute memorials qualify, on
their own as twisted propaganda that helps those terrorist organizations keep
killing people when the rest of the civilized world believes that is morally
wrong and legally prosecutable.
--
Let's go Brandon!
