Freed Hamas Hostage Slams Pulitzer Board for Awarding Prize to Activist Who Denied Her Captivity

Former Hamas hostage Emily Damari on Thursday condemned the Pulitzer board for awarding a prize to a Palestinian poet who publicly questioned her captivity and defended Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.

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Columbia’s Pulitzer Disgrace

The increasingly irrelevant Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on Monday to a slew of left-wing news reports, chronicled by our colleague Andrew Stiles here. 

The prize for commentary went to the “Palestinian poet” Mosab Abu Toha for his work in the New Yorker—“deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir,” as the Pulitzer board put it—chronicling the evils of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

It took just more than 24 hours for Abu Toha’s public statements defending the atrocities of Oct. 7 and assailing the Israeli victims of those attacks to surface. ("How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he wrote of Emily Damari, a 28-year-old IDF soldier abducted by Hamas. He objected to the media’s humanization of Israeli “hostage” Agam Berger: “These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!”)

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Israel To Surge Troops in Expansion of War on Hamas

Israel is poised to escalate its military campaign in the Gaza Strip after nearly 19 months of war. 

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday approved plans to surge thousands of troops and expand military operations in the coming days, an Israeli official said, confirming Hebrew media reports. The security cabinet was scheduled to vote on Sunday to give final authorization to the plans.

Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.

A spokesman for the military confirmed that earlier this week preparations began for a large-scale mobilization of reservists to support the escalation in Gaza. Reserve commanders were called to duty and notified their brigades to prepare for deployment starting as early as next week—in some cases to Gaza and in others to replace active-duty troops who have already begun to redeploy to the strip from the West Bank and Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon.

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Harvard Law Review Asked Prospective Editors To Disclose Their Race Days After It Was Hit With Civil Rights Probes

The Trump administration announced on Monday that it was investigating the Harvard Law Review over allegations of race discrimination. 72 hours later, the journal asked prospective editors to disclose their race as part of the application process, writing in an email that it would use this information to select candidates from "diverse … backgrounds."

The email, which was sent to all first-year law students, included a memo that encouraged applicants to "convey aspects of their identity," including their race, through an optional "holistic review" statement.

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Scathing Harvard Report Details Pervasive Anti-Semitism Driven By 'Politicized Instruction'

Harvard University, in the midst of its funding fight with the Trump administration, released its long-awaited anti-Semitism report on Tuesday. It provides a scathing account of life at the Ivy League institution in the wake of Oct. 7, finding that "politicized instruction" in four Harvard schools "mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism."

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Harvard Students Ordered To Enter Pretrial Diversion Program Over Assault of Israeli Classmate

The two Harvard University students who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel "die-in" protest will take an in-person anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service as part of a pre-trial diversion program, court filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

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Trump DOJ Strips Terrorist-Tied UNRWA of Immunity in US Courts in Reversal of Biden-Era Policy

The Trump administration has stripped the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of its immunity in U.S. courts, overturning a Biden-era policy and opening the door to a lawsuit from families of Hamas victims.

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Harvard Tells Trump To Pound Sand, Loses $2 Billion in Federal Funds

Going for broke: The Trump administration sent a clear message to Harvard: implement a series of policy changes, several aimed at combating campus anti-Semitism, or lose up to $9 billion in federal funds. The Ivy League school is choosing the latter.

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Finding Solace and Strength in Israel

I got to know Douglas Murray in the worst week in modern Jewish memory. Hearing him speak was, without question, the best moment in that week, a bright beacon in dark days.

I had been scheduled to speak in October 2023 in a London synagogue, at an event about my recent book. Following the horror of the 7th, with more terrible revelations emerging every day, it was decided to transform the event into a reflection on what had occurred. Douglas was the first asked to speak. Over 10 minutes of astonishing eloquence—in a speech that has been viewed over a million times on YouTube—Douglas told the British Jews assembled in the sanctuary that they were not alone and that there were many around the world who stood with the Jewish people against the barbarians. I will never forget his final words.

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How a Lawsuit From Oct. 7 Victims, Including Bibas Family Uncle, Could Cripple Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera has long courted controversy for platforming terrorists across the Middle East, where it is banned from operating in Israel and some Arab countries for promoting extremist ideologies. But the Qatar-funded network's support for Hamas terrorists isn't just confined to the region, according to a new lawsuit from October 7 victims, which alleges for the first time that Al Jazeera's American arm directly supports the terror group's operations.

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