When I was much younger, whenever speak turned to the Holocaust, it was an article of faith that the commitment” Never Again” was entirely unnecessary. The universe may be brutal and cruel, but at least in the West, the Holocaust taught us a significant lessons about the vulnerability and direness of humanity’s restrictions. ” Never Again” was useless, most of us thought, that, well, it just wouldn’t be allowed to happen.
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Jews knew better.
In 2025, the commission that determines who receives the renowned Pulitzer Prize awarded the prize for remark to a Arab artist living in America, Mosab Abu Toha. The award committee gave Toha the nomination for commentary on the “physical and personal carnage in Gaza that combine serious reporting with the intimacy of memoir to express the Arab experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel. ”
There’s plenty to read about regarding “emotional destruction. ” All war feature it, and turning those thoughts into words takes expertise that the Pulitzer Prize commission recognized.
But Abu Toha also used his skills for personal creating to disparage and insult Jewish hostages, deny the murders of a prisoner family by Hamas terrorists, and disparage a released hostage’s 500 days of captivity.
Emily Damari was dragged out of her home on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists, losing two fingers in the process. She took issue with the Pulitzer Prize committee’s choice of Abu Toha, which caused her” shock and pain. “
She explained on X some of Abu Toha’s disqualifying comments in a post addressed to the Pulitzer committee.
” This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked,’ How on earth is this girl called a hostage? ‘ He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games- they are outright denials of documented atrocities,” she wrote.
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In one post on Facebook, Mr. Abu Toha criticized the media for seeking to “humanize” and garner “sympathy ” for 20-year-old released hostage Agam Berger and other “killers who join the army. ” In another rant, he delegitimized Ms. Damari’s status as a “hostage, ” referred to her pejoratively as an IDF soldier ( all young Israelis who are not ultra-Orthodox Jews do mandatory service in the IDF), and implied that her abduction was justified.
Mr. Abu Toha has also cast doubt on Israeli forensic evidence that showed that the two Bibas children — aged nine months and 4 years— were killed by their Hamas captors with their “bare hands. ” In another post, he denied that the Israeli hostages were tortured, despite numerous testimonies from freed captives— including Ms. Damari — detailing their cruel mistreatment in Gaza. The list continues.
Miss Damari concluded her on-point rebuttal of the Pulitzer Prize committee by shaming them for their ignorance and insensitivity.
Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial. This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.
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I have changed my thinking about the possibility of a modern-day Holocaust. The liberal elites represented by the Pulitzer Prize committee — those who fought the longest and hardest to bring the state of Israel into being in the first half of the 20th century — have walked away from the fight and turned their backs on the very people they swore they wouldn’t forget.
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