The drumbeat of revelations about the CPJ’s bias, centered primarily on its oft-cited list of journalists slain in Gaza, has thrown the organization into turmoil.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

The Committee to Protect Journalists employs multiple staffers who have engaged in anti-Israel advocacy, accused Israel of “genocide,” promoted anti-Israel economic boycotts and, in one case, authored a bizarre manifesto advocating “resistance and revolutionary violent pressure” against “the Zionist occupation,” according to new research from the media watchdog group HonestReporting.

The revelations are likely to raise further questions about the CPJ’s impartiality as the embattled New York group—founded in 1981 to defend journalists worldwide—descends further into turmoil and infighting over its oft-cited list of Palestinian “journalists” killed in the Gaza war.

The list, which major media outlets use to discredit Israel’s war effort, has been found to include numerous military operatives for terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The embattled CPJ is already in an uproar over the vote by its board—composed largely of leading journalists from prestigious news operations like the New York Times and NBC News—to affirm that people who work for “organizations affiliated with militant groups” can still be considered “journalists.”

The board, already under fire for the pronounced anti-Israel sentiments of several members, voted 17 to 1 last week in favor of keeping that contested definition, with only Fox News voting “no,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The hostility to Israel seen on the CPJ’s board appears to extend to at least half a dozen of the group’s staff members, according to HonestReporting, an Israeli media watchdog that unearthed extensive evidence of some CPJ staff’s past affiliation with radical—and sometimes violent—anti-Zionist organizations and causes.

CPJ Levant researcher Rama Sabanekh, for example, who is listed on the organization’s website as a “third-generation Palestinian refugee based in Amman, Jordan,” emerged as an anti-Israel student activist around 2017 while attending SOAS University of London, HonestReporting found.

When Sabanekh ran for a SOAS Students’ Union position that year, she penned a “manifesto” outlining support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the global campaign to economically isolate, punish, and shame Israel.

Just a year prior, in 2016, Sabanekh helped orchestrate a virulently anti-Israel protest at University College London to oppose a speaking appearance by former Israel Defense Forces commander Hen Mazzig.

The Telegraph noted that police were called to the event, “which left Jewish students barricaded” inside the room, which was ultimately breached by the protesters.

The following day, Sabanekh uploaded a photo to Facebook celebrating that the “lecture theater [was] shut down,” according to archived posts accessed by HonestReporting.

In another since-deleted Facebook posting from 2017, Sabanekh wrote that “justice will never be achieved through political and diplomatic ‘efforts’… But it is a collective people’s effort towards resistance and revolutionary violent pressure on the Zionist occupation by all means possible.”

Another 2017 photo shows a keffiyeh-wearing Sabanekh posing beside the anti-Israel activist Hadi Nasrallah—who mourned the death of late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and claimed that “Israel deliberately aims[s] to kill children and babies in every way possible”—during a protest against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Additional open source information uncovered by HonestReporting revealed that Sabanekh penned a 2022 article decrying “the settle[r] colonial project of Israel over Palestinian waters” and the “Zionist expansionist ideology.”

A February 2024 video shows Sabanekh delivering a lecture on how the “Zionist occupation of Palestine has engineered its borders and its plans for occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians around water resources.”

CPJ staffer Yasmine Mosimann, who joined the organization in 2025 as a “specialist editor” for the Middle East and North Africa, also cut her chops as an anti-Israel student activist affiliated with Solidarity for Palestine Human Rights (SPHR) at McGill University in Montreal.

Mosimann supported the BDS movement, lending her name to the movement’s official website, and backed a 2016 vote by McGill undergraduate students to support anti-Israel boycotts.

Since-deleted photos further confirm that Mosimann “celebrated the student body’s decision,” according to HonestReporting, and that, in 2018, she posed for a group photo with SPHR McGill holding a bullhorn during “a vigil for Gaza.”

Mosimann also penned several articles for the McGill Daily about the “voices of Palestine” and “understanding state violence in Palestine.”

A third CPJ staffer, Levant program coordinator Joud Hasan, has also shared pro-Palestinian content across LinkedIn and Facebook.

Hasan promoted one post, for instance, encouraging people to “unite against ‘genocide, apartheid, and occupation’ by participating in Palestine Cinema Days.”

In another, he shared a post that praised the independent Meta Oversight Board’s 2024 determination that the phrase “from the river to the sea”—a term widely understood to advocate for Israel’s erasure—does not violate the social media company’s policies on hate speech and incitement.

Between 2021 and 2024, HonestReporting found, Hasan “uploaded a series of images documenting his attendance at multiple ‘Queers for Palestine’ rallies, alongside a post depicting an elderly Arab woman confronting an IDF soldier, captioned, ‘I’m older than your state. ’”

Two other CPJ employees—CEO Jodie Ginsberg and Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah—have worked with and platformed Hamas operatives and those affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.

Qudah gave an “exclusive interview” to the Iranian state-controlled Tehran Times in October 2025 in which she discussed how in Gaza, “reporting is not just a job—it’s a form of survival, resistance, and witness.”

She added that the “resilience” of so-called Palestinian journalists “is both heartbreaking and deeply inspiring. It reminds us of the essential role of journalism in documenting human suffering, injustice, and resistance.”

In a recent LinkedIn post, Qudah referred to a Palestinian man who was killed while trying to seize an IDF officer’s weapon as a “martyr.”

In others, she has accused Israel of perpetrating “industrial-scale mass killing,” a “literal genocide,” and a “systemic descent into unrestrained brutality.”

The “current violence” between Israel and Hamas, she wrote in 2024, “is not an isolated incident but rather a symptom of underlying conditions such as apartheid and oppression.”

In April of this year, Qudah moderated a panel at the International Journalism Festival and hailed Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh as “one of the most important voices documenting the genocide in Gaza.”

She did not mention that Al-Dahdouh was arrested during the first Palestinian intifada in 1989 for serving in a Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell and throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 7, and was released in 1993.

CPJ CEO Ginsberg has also “regularly platformed Hamas operatives,” according to HonestReporting.

In October 2024, for instance, Ginsberg reposted a message from supposed Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif claiming that Gazan reporters face “silence or death” from Israel.

Just five days later, Israel released extensive evidence that Al-Sharif was a Hamas squad leader and member of its elite Nukhba forces.

Ginsberg never removed her post or acknowledged that Al-Sharif was an active terrorist. Al-Sharif—who died last year in an Israeli airstrike—is also still listed as a “murdered” reporter on the CPJ’s website.

Ginsberg has also publicly accused Israel of “smearing journalists” by revealing they are actually terrorists.

“Smearing journalists as criminals is a tactic prevalent in autocracies—and one used frequently by Israel—and has two aims,” she posted in November 2024.

“The first: justify attacks on journalists after the fact. The second: discredit Palestinian journalists and their reporting.”

The CPJ’s chief global affairs officer, Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, has a similarly biased footprint on social media.

She reposted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof—the author of a widely discredited report alleging Israeli soldiers raped two different Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog—in May of this year when he claimed that “Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, enabled by the US, was a moral outrage.”

“The facts. #ThisIsJournalism,” she wrote above Kristof’s missive. Later that same month, Kaiser promoted Kristof’s outlandish rape column, writing, “Facts matter. #ThisIsJournalism.”

The CPJ did not respond to a request for comment.

The Free Beacon recently reported on pronounced anti-Israel bias by CPJ board members such as New York Times writer Lydia Polgreen, the board’s vice chair, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel laureate known for employing antisemitic tropes.

The anti-Israel biotech heiress Nika Soon-Shiong, daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, was ousted by the board last week after an argument over the Free Beacon’s coverage, according to her own posts.

The Free Beacon has been unable to identify any staff or board members of the CPJ who are vocally supportive of Israel.

The drumbeat of revelations about the CPJ’s bias, centered primarily on its oft-cited list of journalists slain in Gaza, has thrown the organization into turmoil and infighting as it becomes increasingly clear that list often includes active combatants affiliated with Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

A CPJ spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that, following the contentious board vote affirming that Arab militants can also be journalists, it “is continuing to undertake review of its documentation of journalists killed in [the] Israel-Gaza war since 2023” and expects that effort to be completed sometime this month.

But questions remain about the impartiality and mechanisms underpinning that review, particularly since it may be overseen in part by several staffers who have evidenced strong bias against Israel.

HonestReporting CEO Jacki Alexander said the body of evidence on the CPJ’s staff cast a shadow over any anti-Israel report in mainstream media that uses the CPJ as a credible source.

The notorious Kristof rape piece employed the CPJ as a key source, calling it “a respected American organization.”

“These revelations are not surprising for the staff of an organization that considers Hamas terrorists journalists and is contemplating considering state-sponsored propagandists as journalists,” Alexander told the Free Beacon.

“CPJ is meant to protect journalists. They appear to be neglecting that duty in order to promote an anti-Israel narrative at the expense of actual journalists.”

The post Committee to Protect Journalists’ staff packed with anti-Israel agitators amid boardroom feuds over list of ‘journalists’ killed in Gaza appeared first on World Israel News.

As major media outlets who sit on the CPJ’s board remain mum following the vote, it appears the ongoing controversy has fomented more chaos than the advocacy group is letting on publicly.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

The internal chaos roiling the Committee to Protect Journalists deepened, when the embattled advocacy group’s board of directors—under fire for the anti-Israel bias of several members, including the vice chair—voted to affirm that “organizations affiliated with militant groups” meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet “provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect.”

The CPJ’s board voted 17 to 1 in favor of keeping this contentious definition, according to one person familiar with the situation, with Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote.

The CPJ’s influential list of “Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War,” which has been used by news organizations to discredit Israel’s war effort, contains dozens of names of military operatives for Hamas and other terror groups.

In recent weeks, a drumbeat of revelations—often from Hamas itself—that slain “journalists” on the list were active combatants has thrown the New York-based CPJ into turmoil and infighting.

This week the board expelled anti-Israel heiress Nika Soon-Shiong after a heated meeting centered on a Washington Free Beacon article on the group’s woes, according to Soon-Shiong’s public tweets.

The CPJ declined to comment on the board’s vote or provide any information on which members opposed altering the organization’s criteria, only telling the Free Beacon that it “cannot comment on board deliberations and [has] no further comment” beyond a Wednesday evening statement.

None of the major media outlets that sit on the CPJ’s board—including the New York Times, Fox News, Reuters, NBC News, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times—responded to Free Beacon questions about their position on the vote or whether they, too, consider “organizations affiliated with militant groups” to be legitimate journalistic actors.

The CPJ was founded in 1981 to defend press freedom worldwide, but in the last few years, it has evolved into a group focused narrowly on the war in Gaza, with many board members having evinced strong anti-Israel or even antisemitic views and with its list being used as a key source for a hotly contested May Times article that made outlandish claims about Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog.

Wednesday evening’s board vote marked a decisive win for a large cohort of CPJ board members who are vocal anti-Israel activists and who pressured the organization to stand firm against a torrent of criticism over its Gaza list, which has included dozens of confirmed military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups.

Those who celebrated the decision included Soon-Shiong, daughter of the pharmaceutical billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and board vice chair Lydia Polgreen, the anti-Israel Times polemicist.

But as major media outlets who sit on the CPJ’s board remain mum following the vote, it appears the ongoing controversy has fomented more chaos than the advocacy group is letting on publicly.

The internal feud first spilled into public view on Monday evening, when Soon-Shiong, the publisher of the far-left outlet Drop Site News, revealed that she was booted from the CPJ’s board in the wake of the Free Beacon report on her anti-Israel activism.

A few days prior, the CPJ announced that it is conducting a “full review of its database” after Hamas and other terrorist groups publicly claimed many of the slain “journalists” as their own, though the status of that review remains unclear given the board’s Wednesday vote.

The board’s public statement after the vote did not mention its previously announced “full review.”

Though the CPJ has acknowledged deleting at least 20 names from its list following confirmation that those individuals were armed terrorist operatives, others remain.

Mohammed Samir Washah, a correspondent for Qatar-controlled Al Jazeera, is still touted as a working reporter on the CPJ’s website, even though he was killed in April by Israel for acting as “a key terrorist in Hamas’ rocket and weapons production headquarters,” according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Washah’s brother, fellow Al Jazeera photojournalist Ahmed Samir Muhammad Washah, was killed late last month in a similar strike for planning “advanced sniper attack plans and additional terrorist activities against IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip.”

The CPJ’s decision to stay the course earned a defiant statement from Polgreen, who declared Wednesday evening on X that the organization’s “mission and the work remain unchanged.”

“There has been a great deal of false and speculative information about @pressfreedom in the past few days,” Polgreen, an opinion columnist and former Times associate managing editor, wrote.

“Today, the board voted to affirm our definition of who is a journalist. The mission and the work remain unchanged: protecting journalists everywhere.” Associate managing editors, known as “masthead,” are the most senior editorial officials at the Times.

Soon-Shiong also celebrated the decision online.

“This is fantastic news,” she wrote on X. Soon-Shiong also retweeted a post from veteran anti-Israel activist and former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who claimed, “It is a dangerous business to exclude journalists because they work for a designated ‘terrorist’ organization.”

The Wednesday evening statement posted on the CPJ’s website made clear that the board voted to “affirm the organization’s existing definition of who is a journalist and rejected claims it planned to change its definition to exclude particular groups.”

The organization added, “CPJ’s longstanding policy has been to include journalists working for state-backed media and those working with media organizations affiliated with militant groups, provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have an imminent effect. This approach is anchored in international humanitarian law. CPJ has never included, and removes from its lists, anyone found to be engaging in combat or inciting imminent violence.”

Watchdog groups like HonestReporting, however, have cited dozens of examples in which the CPJ included confirmed terrorists on its list and, in some cases, quietly removed those names without contemporaneous acknowledgment.

CPJ board chair Jacob Weisberg, the husband of former Times style editor Deborah Needleman, said the organization never even considered altering its definition, though former board member Soon-Shiong suggested on Monday that this was the case in light of the Free Beacon’s previous reporting.

“It is not true that CPJ planned to change our definition of who is a journalist to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press killed in the Israel-Gaza war,” Weisberg said in a statement

. “Such unsubstantiated allegations undermine the rigorous documentation of our Middle East and North Africa program over many years while endangering Palestinian and Lebanese journalists documenting events on the ground today.”

Weisberg added that the board “stands fully with the staff of CPJ, whose difficult daily work of documenting attacks on journalists is today more important than ever, and with all journalists wrongly smeared and maligned for doing their jobs.”

The CPJ would not explain when asked if this statement referred to the dozens of Gaza journalists who are now known to be active members of Hamas and other allied terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

HonestReporting, a media watchdog group that has documented the CPJ’s inclusion of confirmed terrorists on its slain journalists list, said the organization is employing a definition “so broad as to include almost anyone.”

“What do professional journalists think of the notion that anyone who comments anywhere, on anything, in any medium, is a journalist? In CPJ’s estimation, someone who writes a terrorist manifesto on the back of a napkin and posts a picture to their 6 followers on social media is as much a journalist as someone who has spent 20 years honing their craft, breaking stories and informing their readers,” HonestReporting said in a statement to the Free Beacon.

“CPJ may believe that saying journalists and terrorists are one and the same will protect everyone, whether a legitimate civilian or a terrorist operative. In reality, it does the opposite. It takes a situation where only terrorists are in danger and places all journalists in harm’s way.”

The post CPJ in turmoil after 17-1 vote upholding tangled definition of ‘journalist’ for Gaza list, Fox News is sole ’no’ vote appeared first on World Israel News.