A new low for the Pulitzer Prize

Back in normal times, many moons ago, it was frowned upon to denigrate women who’d been kidnapped by violent men. It would have been seen as especially sick to disparage women who’d been seized by an army of anti-Semites during a bloody carnival of Jew-killing. Speaking ill of such victims would likely have earned you scorn in decent society. Not anymore. Now it wins you the Pulitzer Prize.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary has gone to Mosab Abu Toha, a writer from Gaza who lives in the US. The prize is overseen by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The judges praised Abu Toha’s essays in the New Yorker for showing the world ‘the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’. They had rather less to say about his online hysterics, in which he called Israeli hostages ‘killers’ and denounced the BBC as ‘filthy people’ for daring to suggest the Bibas kids were murdered by Hamas.

The sleuths over at the Honest Reporting website have uncovered Abu Toha’s digital bitching. And it ain’t pretty. He flipped following the release of the British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari in January this year. ‘How on Earth is this girl called a hostage?’, he asked on Facebook. She’s a ‘soldier’, he said, who had been ‘detained’ by Hamas. And ‘this is the case [for] most of the “hostages”’.

Note those scare quotes. It’s amazing how hateful punctuation can be. The implication was as clear as it was vile: these aren’t real hostages. They’re not innocents. They’re occupiers who were taken as prisoners of war by Hamas. Here, Abu Toha both legitimised Hamas, treating it as a normal army doing normal army things, and denigrated the hostages, even going so far as to rob them of that title. ‘Soldiers’, ‘occupiers’ – ie, the fuckers had it coming.

What he said was false. Ms Damari was not a soldier when she was kidnapped. She had served in the IDF years earlier, as all young adults in Israel are required to do. But on the day she was violently abducted, she was just an Israeli, just a Jew, like most of the hostages. That’s why she was taken: for the crime of being a Jew in the Holy Land, and better yet, a female one, making it all the easier for the neo-fascist brutes to drag her to Gaza. They invaded her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, shot her, and held her captive in the grimmest conditions for almost 500 days.

In his social-media outbursts, Abu Toha was essentially repackaging a crime against humanity as an act of resistance. It was a species of atrocity denialism, where the racist seizing of Jews was reimagined as the just detainment of soldiers. In a stinging open letter to the Pulitzer Prize board, Ms Damari has described Abu Toha as the ‘modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier’. In ‘question[ing] the very fact of my captivity’, and the captivity of the other stolen Israelis, he ‘denies truth [and] erases victims’, she says. And now, she tells the Pulitzer board, you’ve ‘joined him in the shadows of denial’.

Abu Toha had even worse virtual meltdowns. He called Israeli hostages ‘killers who join[ed] the army’ and slammed the global media for ‘humanis[ing]’ them. Yes, heaven forfend that anyone mistake an Israeli for a human being. He laid into the BBC when it reported on claims that Hamas terrorists had used their bare hands to kill the Bibas children: four-year-old Ariel and Kfir, who was just nine months old when Hamas dragged him to a hellish jail in Gaza. Was he a soldier too, Mr Toha? ‘If you haven’t seen any evidence, why did you publish this?’, he asked of the BBC. He answered his own question: it’s because you are ‘filthy people’.

You know what’s filthy? Getting angrier about the coverage of the kidnap and killing of Jewish infants than about that atrocity itself. Imagine how far into the cesspit of Israelophobia you’d need to have sunk to shout ‘filthy’ not about the fascist bastards who held Jewish children captive, but about the BBC for reporting on the possibility that the children were killed by hand. It is a testament to the moral rot of the Anglo-American literary elite that people like this win prizes now.

This is a new low for the Pulitzer. And that’s saying something. In 2023, it gave its prize for literary criticism to Andrea Long Chu, a man who masquerades as a woman and who has written grossly misogynistic things. He once described ‘the asshole’ as ‘a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed’. ‘Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is’, he wrote. This is what passes for prizeworthy writing now? Men in dresses denying the truth of womanhood and men from Gaza denying the truth of Emily Damari’s unjust subjugation? Men who think women are all about getting fucked and men who think Israeli women deserve to be fucked over by Hamas? If this is literary society, drop me out.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy