DC Museum Backtracks: Won’t Honor Slain Gaza Cameramen

When Is a Journalist Not a Journalist?

Faced with growing condemnation from the Israeli government and its affiliated lobbies, the DC-based Newseum, a museum chronicling the history of journalism, has announced that it will rescind its inclusion of two cameramen from the memorial honoring slain journalists of 2012.

The two cameramen were working for the al-Aqsa TV station in the Gaza Strip when Israeli warplanes deliberated bombed their media van, killing them. Israel insisted that since al-Aqsa TV is state-run, and the Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, it makes all al-Aqsa employees de facto Hamas and therefore “terrorists.”

The attacks came as part of November’s Israeli war on Gaza, and the targeting of journalists as well as newspaper offices was a subject of much criticism. The ADL insisted that including the slain Gazans in a list of journalists killed during the line of duty was “advancing their agenda.” Media watchdogs have uniformly included them on similar lists.

The Newseum, however, insists that they are now backtracking because of the controversy, and that they are no longer sure if the slain were “truly journalists.”

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.