Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a disturbing revelation about a New York Times source.
The Hamas-linked founder of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor—the advocacy group that was a key source for the May 11 New York Times article that made outlandish claims about Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian journalists—recently declared on social media that Gaza-based journalists have a right to dually serve as terrorist operatives.
Euro-Med Monitor founder Ramy Abdu, who reportedly “has documented ties to senior Hamas leaders,” acknowledged in a June 23 Arabic-language Facebook post that “a limited number” of “slain journalists had engaged in acts of resistance prior to their journalistic work—a right belonging to a people living under injustice and occupation, which no fair-minded person can deny.” The message was posted just two days before the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists announced a wholesale review of its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza, which has included dozens of confirmed military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups.
Both the CPJ and Euro-Med Monitor served as primary sources in Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s notorious May report, which at its most salacious, made the bizarre claim that Israeli soldiers raped two Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog in two separate incidents of what the Times called “sexual violence.” Less than a month since that column ignited an international controversy over the Times’s editorial policies and dueling newsrooms—and a potential lawsuit from the State of Israel—the central sources behind the claims are facing challenges to their own credibility. While the Times’s public relations department has vigorously defended Kristof’s report, and the sources behind it, the outlet has declined to comment—or not responded to requests for comment—as both the CPJ and Euro-Med Monitor are picked apart by various media watchdog groups. Two senior Times employees are on the CPJ’s prestigious board of directors, including the anti-Israel polemicist Lydia Polgreen.
