Would Robert F. Kennedy Have Honored This NYT Photographer?

Key Takeaways:

• New York Times contributor and photojournalist Saher Alghorra is the most recent recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his work documenting Gaza in the course of the warfare between Israel and Hamas.
• Alghorra is understood for utilizing his work to echo Hamas speaking factors and to craft an anti-Israel narrative for consumption by the mainstream media.
• The irony: Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Israel extremist who was influenced by propaganda much like that which Alghorra spreads to Western audiences.

 

New York Times photographer and contributor Saher Alghorra is having a banner yr.

First, the Gaza-based Palestinian photojournalist was named a finalist within the World Press Photo contest. Then he received the celebrated Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his pictures documenting life in Gaza throughout greater than two years of warfare between Israel and Hamas.

Now, Alghorra has been named the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award’s International Photo Award.

That newest accolade raises an unavoidable query: would Robert F. Kennedy have accredited of his title being hooked up to this honor?

As HonestReporting famous when Alghorra obtained the Pulitzer, his work shouldn’t be with out critical controversy.

During Hamas’ October 7, 2023 bloodbath – the assault that ignited the present warfare – Alghorra posted pictures of rockets being fired into Israel, accompanied by a caption echoing Hamas’ personal justification for its assault.

Less than two years later, he lined Hamas’ grotesque “release ceremony” for the our bodies of Oded Lifshitz and the Bibas household, referring to the murdered Israeli octogenarian and the 2 Bibas youngsters, aged 4 and simply 9 months, as “prisoners.”

This shouldn’t be merely a matter of poor phrase alternative. It raises basic questions on journalistic impartiality and in regards to the narratives Alghorra chooses to amplify.

The pictures featured in Alghorra’s Pulitzer-winning portfolio current Gaza’s devastation by way of a fastidiously curated lens: one designed to position Israel on the heart of the tragedy whereas obscuring Hamas’ central position in creating it.

Absent is the context that Hamas initiated this warfare with the October 7 bloodbath. Missing too is any acknowledgment of the phobia group’s systematic embedding of navy infrastructure inside civilian areas, a method designed exactly to provide the type of imagery that dominates worldwide headlines.

This is visible storytelling stripped of context.

And it’s exactly this one-sided, Hamas-adjacent framing that the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center has now chosen to have fun.

The award’s namesake was one among America’s most steadfast supporters of Israel.

Robert F. Kennedy’s help for the Jewish state dated again to its founding. In April 1948, he traveled to Mandatory Palestine as a special correspondent for the Boston Post. His dispatches, printed two months later, after the institution of the State of Israel, lauded the pre-state Zionist militias’ “undying spirit” and “unparalleled courage” and celebrated the Mandate’s Jewish inhabitants as “an immensely proud and determined people.”

His admiration solely deepened over the next twenty years.

While campaigning for the Senate in 1964, Kennedy repeatedly emphasized his pro-Israel credentials. Speaking to a Zionist girls’s group, he advocated for a rise in navy assist to Israel and argued that the United States “must continue to make clear to those who threaten Israel that she is not alone.”

As a senator in 1965, he publicly advocated for Soviet Jewry and, in 1968, he pressed the Johnson administration to approve the sale of fifty F-4 Phantom fighter jets to Israel after France refused to promote fighter jets to the Jewish state within the wake of Israel’s victory in the course of the 1967 Six-Day War.

That help got here at a lethal value.

Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian-Palestinian who was enraged by Kennedy’s backing of Israel, notably his help for the fighter jet sale.

Sirhan was born in Jerusalem in 1944, however his household had moved to Jordanian-controlled territory in the course of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and later emigrated to the United States in 1956, when he was 12 years previous.

According to reports, Sirhan was closely influenced by anti-Israel propaganda each throughout his time within the Middle East in addition to following his transfer to the U.S.

Having examine Kennedy’s push for the sale of fighter jets to Israel within the native newspaper, Sirhan was decided to kill him earlier than June 5, 1968, the primary anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War.

He waited within the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles for Kennedy to go him by after delivering a victory speech following his win within the California Democratic major. Shortly after midnight, as Kennedy exited the resort by way of the kitchen, Sirhan emerged and shot Kennedy 4 occasions at point-blank vary (together with one behind the top), mortally wounding him and injuring 5 others.

Sirhan’s hatred was fueled by anti-Israel propaganda.

That historic reality makes right now’s award particularly jarring.

In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered partially due to his help for Israel.

In 2026, his title is getting used to legitimize a photographer whose work advances a story that erases the context of anti-Israel terror whereas amplifying imagery that serves its political goals.

The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award was established to honor fact, ethical readability, and human dignity.

By awarding Saher Alghorra, it dangers changing into one thing else solely: one other establishment lending its status to a distorted narrative that Robert F. Kennedy himself would possible have rejected.

 

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