Committee to Protect Journalists, Key Source for Kristof's 'Rape' Claims, Has Board Stacked With Anti-Israel Figures Who Accused Israel of 'Apocalyptic' Destruction, 'Genocide,' 'Apartheid'

The Committee to Protect Journalists, the Manhattan-based advocacy group that's a key source for the controversial New York Times exposé on "sexual violence" against Palestinians in Israeli detention, has a board of directors brimming with anti-Israel sentiment and virtually no dissenting voices. Two prominent members—Maria Ressa and Nika Soon-Shiong—have compared Israel to Nazi Germany and accused it of "genocide" and a "war on children," according to a Washington Free Beacon review.

Meanwhile, the organization's vice chair, Times opinion writer Lydia Polgreen, claimed last year in the Times that Israel assassinated a "Pulitzer prize-winning journalist." Even though Israel has released voluminous documentation that the dead man was a Hamas fighter—even producing a picture of him with late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—Polgreen insisted there was "no credible evidence" that the man fought for the terror group.

None of the CPJ's 29 board members appear to have publicly supported Israel's response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks or supported the United States' providing military and diplomatic support to the Jewish state, calling into question the journalism group’s objectivity as it inserts itself into the debate over the Gaza war. The CPJ was recently caught quietly removing terrorists' names from its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza. The CPJ's separate allegations that Palestinian journalists detained by Israel are subjected to sexual violence was a lynchpin of the lurid Times piece by Nicholas Kristof, which quoted two "Palestinian journalists," one named and one anonymous, claiming they were raped by a carrot and a dog while in Israeli detention. (Kristof cited CPJ stats extensively to bolster his case against Israel. It's unclear if CPJ connected him with the men telling the carrot and dog stories.)

The CPJ board is packed with members who strongly—often vehemently—oppose Israel's military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran and also oppose American military, logistical, and diplomatic support for Israel. It is controlled by New York establishment figures tied to publications that have been harshly critical of Israel, most notably the Times. Polgreen—who works alongside Kristof at the Times' embattled Opinion section—has called Israel's actions in Gaza "the most brutal military operation for civilians in the 21st century" that has created an "apocalyptic reality … a moonscape of total devastation and unfathomable loss." She has also compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.

Another CPJ board member, longtime New Yorker editor David Remnick, wrote last year about "Israel's Zones of Denial," likely a reference to the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest about Auschwitz. Remnick's New Yorker also last year won a Pulitzer Prize for work by a "Palestinian poet" who was widely denounced for mocking Israeli hostages (Remnick, a darling of New York's media scene, is also on the Pulitzer board).

The Israeli media watchdog group HonestReporting, which first exposed the CPJ for erasing terrorists from its list of "journalists" killed in Gaza, said the organization has sacrificed its credibility to champion anti-Israel narratives.

"The CPJ rot starts at the top and spreads throughout the organization," HonestReporting editorial director Simon Plosker told the Free Beacon. "We've uncovered members of CPJ's staff who have histories as prominent [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] advocates, including one who led an actual riot on campus in an effort to assault and silence an Israeli influencer from speaking to Jewish students. How is it possible that someone who tries to silence voices they disagree with can find themselves working for an organization that claims to promote freedom of expression?"

CPJ board members Ressa and Soon-Shiong have emerged as perhaps the most virulent anti-Israel voices, with the former publishing an editorial, a month after October 7, that compared Israel's "disproportionate response" to "genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler."

Israel's "intention is not simply to retaliate, but to launch an all-out war," Ressa's editorial said. "In the intensity of Israel's godlike technology, its paleolithic instincts can be seen in the lack of effort to differentiate between civilians and its enemy Hamas."

Ressa's publication, the Rappler, also accused the Free Beacon of mistranslating the piece, but a translation from the former executive director of the Commission on Filipino language confirmed that it indeed likened Israel's actions to Hitler's.

When the piece prompted criticism ahead of Ressa's 2024 Harvard University commencement speech, Ressa used her platform to attack her critics, accusing them of chasing "money and power." Harvard's Chabad rabbi walked off the stage during her address.

During her address, Ressa lamented that "people are dying from genocide" in Gaza and other war-torn areas.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), a Harvard graduate, said at the time that "in a sad, but fitting end to their school year of disgrace, Harvard doubled down on their heinous path when they invited a known antisemite as their 2024 Commencement speaker, who then spewed antisemitic rhetoric at the Commencement ceremony."

Ressa has used her perch at CPJ and other activist groups to accuse Israel of intentionally killing journalists in Gaza, a position shared by CPJ itself. She signed a January 2024 letter condemning the "unabated killing of journalists in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war." The missive called for an "immediate end to the bombardment of journalists and apparent targeting in some cases of our colleagues in Gaza and the region."

Soon-Shiong, the heiress, Drop Site News publisher, and daughter of the South African biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, shares Ressa's views on Israel, employing the charged language of "genocide."

When the Times declined to endorse Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election—a decision that sparked mass revolt in the left-wing newsroom— Nika Soon-Shiong, who at the time had an amorphous but powerful role at the paper, took it upon herself to claim that pulling the endorsement had to do with opposing the Biden administration's support for Israel.

"This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process," she told the New York Times. "As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children."

Soon-Shiong elaborated in an October 2024 X thread, writing that "genocide is the line in the sand."

"The temptation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue the international courts have called a plausible genocide," she wrote. "This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children."

Soon-Shiong adopted a similar editorial posture as the publisher of Drop Site News, a far-left outlet that has repeatedly come under fire for publishing outlandish accusations against Israel and adopting Hamas's own language about the conflict.

"For media institutions that downplayed genocide, ignored apartheid, and fail to cover America's role in foreign wars—the verdict of history will be merciless," she told Semafor in September of last year, when she assumed her role at Drop Site News.

Elsewhere on X, Soon-Shiong has bemoaned "the genocide in Gaza," claimed "a Palestinian child is being murdered every ten minutes," and written that "apartheid, illegal settlements, and genocide in Palestine are profitable." She also produced a documentary, Shooting the Messenger, that purports to expose Israel's intentional targeting of journalists in Gaza.

HonestReporting, the media watchdog group, said that it is "hardly surprising that the [CPJ] cannot tell the difference between bona fide media workers and terrorists when its board includes figures like Nika Soon-Shiong, the publisher of the extremist anti-Israel Drop Site News."

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