The Committee to Protect Journalists, the New York, based nonprofit that major newsrooms treat as a neutral authority on press freedom worldwide, employs multiple staff members with documented histories of anti-Israel activism, according to research published by the Israeli media watchdog HonestReporting and reported by the Washington Free Beacon. The findings land as CPJ's own board is consumed by infighting over the organization's list of "journalists" killed in the Gaza war, a list that critics say includes operatives for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The revelations span nearly a decade of social media posts, student manifestos, protest photos, and published articles tied to at least three CPJ staff members. Taken together, they raise a pointed question: Can an organization credibly adjudicate who counts as a journalist in a war zone when its own researchers and editors have spent years calling Israel's existence a colonial project and endorsing "revolutionary violent pressure" against it?
HonestReporting's research centers on CPJ Levant researcher Rama Sabanekh, specialist editor Yasmine Mosimann, and Levant program coordinator Joud Hasan. Each holds a role that directly touches CPJ's Middle East coverage, and each brought a trail of activist history into the building.
Sabanekh, described on CPJ's own website as a "third-generation Palestinian refugee based in Amman, Jordan," surfaced as an anti-Israel student activist around 2017 at SOAS University of London. She ran for a student union position on a platform backing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. A year earlier, she helped orchestrate a protest at University College London against a speaking appearance by former IDF commander Hen Mazzig, a protest that, per the Free Beacon's account, ended with police called, Jewish students barricaded inside a room, and protesters breaching the space. Sabanekh uploaded a Facebook photo celebrating the lecture theatre being "shut down."
More striking is a since-deleted 2017 Facebook post, preserved in archived images accessed by HonestReporting. In it, Sabanekh wrote:
"Justice will never be achieved through political and diplomatic 'efforts'... But, it is a collective people's effort towards resistance and revolutionary violent pressure to the Zionist occupation by all means possible."
That is not the language of a neutral press-freedom researcher. It is the language of someone who endorsed violence, "by all means possible", against a nation-state whose journalists CPJ is supposed to defend alongside every other country's. By 2022, Sabanekh was authoring articles decrying "the settle[r] colonial project of Israel over Palestinian waters" and "Zionist expansionist ideology." In February 2024, she delivered a lecture on the "Zionist occupation of Palestine."
Mosimann, who joined CPJ in 2025 as a specialist editor for the Middle East and North Africa, carried her own activist résumé from McGill University in Montreal. As a student, she was affiliated with Solidarity for Palestine Human Rights and lent her name to the BDS movement's official website. She backed a 2016 vote by McGill undergraduates to support anti-Israel boycotts, and since-deleted photos show her celebrating the outcome. In 2018, she posed for a group photo with SPHR McGill, holding a bullhorn during what was described as "a vigil for Gaza." She also authored articles for the McGill Daily about "voices of Palestine" and "understanding state violence in Palestine."
The pattern of activist histories surfacing among staffers at ostensibly nonpartisan organizations is becoming a recurring theme in American institutional life.
Hasan, the Levant program coordinator, shared pro-Palestinian content across LinkedIn and Facebook, including a post encouraging people to "unite against 'genocide, apartheid, and occupation'" by participating in Palestine Cinema Days. Between 2021 and 2024, she uploaded images documenting her attendance at multiple "Queers for Palestine" rallies. She also shared a post praising the Meta Oversight Board's 2024 determination that the phrase "from the river to the sea" does not violate the platform's hate speech policies, a phrase widely understood as a call for the elimination of the Jewish state.
The staff-level activism does not exist in a vacuum. CPJ's senior leadership has its own record.
Sara Qudah, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa regional director, gave an exclusive interview in October 2025 to the Tehran Times, an outlet controlled by the Iranian regime. In it, she described Palestinian reporting as "not just a job, it's a form of survival, resistance, and witness." She also called the "resilience" of Palestinian journalists "both heartbreaking and deeply inspiring," saying it "reminds us of the essential role of journalism in documenting human suffering, injustice, and resistance."
On LinkedIn, Qudah accused Israel of perpetrating "industrial-scale mass killing," a "literal genocide," and a "systemic descent into unrestrained brutality." In a separate 2024 post, she wrote that the "current violence" between Israel and Hamas "is not an isolated incident but rather a symptom of underlying conditions such as apartheid and oppression." She also referred to a Palestinian man killed while trying to seize an IDF officer's weapon as a "martyr."
In April, 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." 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 fifteen years in prison and served seven before his release in 1993.
That is the man CPJ's regional director held up as a model journalist.
CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg, meanwhile, reposted a message from Anas Al-Sharif in October 2024 in which Al-Sharif claimed Gazan reporters face "silence or death" from Israel. Five days later, Israel released extensive evidence that Al-Sharif was a Hamas squad leader and a member of its elite Nukhba forces. Ginsberg never removed the post, nor did she acknowledge the evidence. Al-Sharif, who died in an Israeli airstrike, remains listed as a "murdered" reporter on CPJ's website. In November 2024, Ginsberg posted a statement accusing Israel of "smearing journalists as criminals," calling it "a tactic prevalent in autocracies, and one used frequently by Israel."
Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, CPJ's chief global affairs officer, reposted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in May when Kristof claimed that "Israel's mass slaughter in Gaza, enabled by the US, was a moral outrage." Kaiser wrote above the repost: "The facts. #ThisIsJournalism." Later that same month, she promoted a Kristof column, described by the Free Beacon as a "widely discredited report" alleging Israeli soldiers committed sexual violence against Palestinian journalists, with the caption: "Facts matter. #ThisIsJournalism."
CPJ's board has not been immune to the fractures. Last week, the board voted 17 to 1 to affirm its existing definition of who qualifies as a "journalist", a definition broad enough to include people working for organizations affiliated with militant groups. Fox News cast the sole dissenting vote.
The vote came as CPJ is undergoing a review of its documentation of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war since 2023. A CPJ spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that the review is expected to be completed "sometime this month." The list has been cited by major media outlets worldwide, and its accuracy has become a flashpoint, particularly given allegations that it includes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives alongside legitimate reporters.
The board itself features figures with their own track records. Vice chair Lydia Polgreen, a New York Times writer, has been described in prior Free Beacon reporting as holding "pronounced anti-Israel sentiments." Nobel laureate Maria Ressa also sits on the board. And Nika Soon-Shiong, the 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 institutional drift visible at CPJ mirrors a broader pattern across progressive-aligned organizations, where ideological commitments increasingly override stated missions. The same dynamic has played out in academic institutions branding themselves as nonpartisan while operating as vehicles for one side's agenda.
Founded in 1981, CPJ's stated purpose is to defend journalists worldwide, regardless of nationality or political alignment. That mission requires, at minimum, the appearance of neutrality, the ability to say with a straight face that the organization evaluates press freedom without a thumb on the scale.
HonestReporting CEO Jacki Alexander put it bluntly:
"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 added: "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."
CPJ did not respond to the Free Beacon's request for comment on the staff revelations.
The organization's silence is itself instructive. When your Levant researcher endorsed "revolutionary violent pressure" against Israel, your regional director calls a man who tried to seize an IDF officer's weapon a "martyr," your CEO amplifies a Hamas operative and then accuses Israel of "smearing journalists," and your board votes 17, 1 that militant-affiliated media workers count as journalists, the question is no longer whether bias exists. The question is whether the organization can credibly function at all.
This kind of institutional capture, where an organization's workforce reshapes its mission from the inside, is not unique to press-freedom nonprofits. It has become a defining feature of progressive movement politics, from newsrooms to city councils to university administrations.
The consequences, however, are unusually concrete here. Every time a major news outlet cites CPJ's Gaza casualty list as authoritative, it is relying on the judgment of staff members who have spent years signaling exactly where their sympathies lie. Reporters and editors at those outlets may not know that the person compiling the list once celebrated shutting down a Jewish speaker's event, or that the regional director gave an exclusive interview to an Iranian state propaganda organ.
They should.
Lost in CPJ's internal drama are the people the organization was built to serve: actual journalists facing real threats. Reporters imprisoned by authoritarian regimes, cameramen targeted for documenting corruption, editors jailed for challenging state narratives, these are the people who depend on organizations like CPJ to speak for them without an ideological agenda.
When CPJ spends its institutional credibility defending the classification of militant operatives as journalists, it cheapens the term for everyone who earns it honestly. When its staff members use their platforms to accuse a democratic nation of genocide while granting exclusives to Tehran's propaganda arm, they compromise the organization's ability to advocate for press freedom anywhere.
The growing willingness of left-aligned institutions to tolerate, and even celebrate, this kind of ideological capture within their own ranks has consequences that extend well beyond any single organization.
CPJ's review of its Gaza casualty list is expected this month. The results will tell us whether the organization still has the capacity for honest self-correction, or whether the activists have already won.
An organization that cannot distinguish between a journalist and a militant has no business telling the rest of us who deserves protection.
