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Ex-New York Times writer Bari Weiss lashed out at her former employer for citing pro-Palestinian experts who praised Hamas for the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre.
Weiss took aim at the Gray Lady for employing a “Hitler-loving reporter in Gaza” — a reference to Soliman Hijjy, a Palestinian filmmaker who in years past hailed the Nazi leader in social media posts.
“If you thought that the Hitler-loving reporter in Gaza was the only scandal @nytimes, think again,” Weiss wrote on her X social media account Monday.
She then posted a link to a New York Times story published last week “about the atmosphere in Saudi Arabia post-Oct. 7 massacre,” which quotes Sultan Alamer, a graduate student at Harvard’s Center for Mideast Studies.
Weiss noted that Alamer “is presented as an expert by the Times.”
“But it took about five seconds for me to discover that he is also a person that celebrates the mass murder of Jews,” Weiss wrote.
She cited an X post from Alamer from the morning of Oct. 7, when he wrote: “What a sweet day.”
The tweet was posted as the world learned of Hamas’ surprise cross-border assault that left more than 1,400 dead in Israel. More than 200 others were kidnapped and are being held in Gaza.
The Post has sought comment from Alamer.
Weiss then posted a link to a 2021 profile of a Palestinian professor, Refaat Alareer, who teaches Israeli poetry at Islamic University in Gaza City.
She noted that the Times invited Alareer to write an op-ed in May 2021 during an Israeli aerial bombardment campaign against the Gaza Strip.
Weiss attached a screenshot of an X post by Alareer in which he joked about whether an Israeli baby rumored to have been burned alive in an oven by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attacks was cooked “with or without baking powder.”
“What’s going on here? Pretty simple,” Weiss wrote.
The conservative writer said that “institutions” like the Times “are a reflection of their people.”
“This is what happens when a newspaper is overrun by reporters and editors, trained at elite schools, who have embraced a ‘decolonial’ worldview,” Weiss wrote, adding: “Reader, beware.”
The Post has sought comment from Alareer and the Times.
Weiss resigned as an opinion writer and editor from the Times in July 2020 after calling out “bullying by colleagues,” which created a “hostile work environment” that included calls for her removal on the internal Slack channel.
The Times last week was criticized for continuing to employ Hijjy, who hailed Hitler as recently as 2018 in a post on Facebook, when he shared a photo of himself captioned that he was “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust,” per a translation from Arabic by pro-Israel media watchdog site HonestReporting.
That same year, Hijjy was hired by the Times as a freelance journalist and worked on a slew of “visual investigations” published by the organization through 2021, including one on an Israeli airstrike that killed 44 people.
Hijjy’s 2018 post — including a 2012 Facebook post where he wrote, “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic alongside a Photoshopped image of Hitler seemingly taking a selfie — were unearthed last year, when pro-Israel outlets called out the Times for hiring antisemitic journalists as freelancers.
At the time, Hijjy didn’t appear to be working for the Times anymore, and had since taken down his controversial pro-Hitler posts.
However, the Times rehired Hijjy as a freelancer earlier this month.
A Times spokesperson defended the outlet’s decision to rehire Hijjy.
“We reviewed problematic social media posts by Mr. Hijjy when they first came to light in 2022 and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us in the future,” the rep said.
The Times has also been pilloried for its Oct. 17 coverage of the explosion at Gaza’s Al Ahli Hospital.
The newspaper admitted that it relied too heavily on Hamas claims of Israeli responsibility for the blast.