A former New York Times freelance photographer is complaining publicly about being ousted from the paper after a watchdog group exposed his social media posts expressing support for Palestinian terrorism.

And some journalists affiliated with other American newspapers are rallying around him.

On Yom Kippur, October 5, the photographer, Hosam Salem, tweeted a thread saying, “After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times, I was informed via an abrupt phone call from the US outlet that they will no longer work with me in the future.”

Salem wrote that “Not only has Honest Reporting succeeded in terminating my contract with The New York Times, it has also actively discouraged other international news agencies from collaborating with me and my two colleagues.”

He added, “What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army.”

HonestReporting cited a 2014 Facebook post by Salem in which he reacted to an attack that killed four rabbis and a police officer in a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem. HonestReporting said Salem “encouraged his followers to ‘smite the necks’ of unbelievers.” HonestReporting also said that Salem “repeatedly eulogized Mohammed Salem and Nabil Masoud,” who “were responsible for a 2004 suicide bombing that killed ten workers at the Ashdod port, Israel’s second-busiest harbor.”

A foreign affairs columnist at the Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor, retweeted Salem’s Yom Kippur thread with the comment, “today in cancel culture.”

Abdallah Fayyad, an opinion writer for the Boston Globe and a member of the Boston Globe’s editorial board, called it “a disgraceful move by the Times.”

HonestReporting’s executive director, Gil Hoffman, praised the Times for ending its relationship with Salem. “Kudos to the @nytimes for stopping to employ a photographer who publicly glorified Palestinian terrorist attacks that killed a total of at least 35 innocent Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Praise for opening fire in a synagogue and killing people at prayer is not fit to print,” Hoffman said.

In an article on the Honest Reporting website, Hoffman likened the Salem tweetstorm to the sneak attack on Israel in 1973, the Yom Kippur War. “HonestReporting was attacked on the media battlefield on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar,” Hoffman wrote. “Our team was off observing the holiday… HonestReporting’s editorial team could only respond when Yom Kippur ended.”

Salem’s thread attracted a lot of attention. His initial tweet attracted 55,000 likes and has been retweeted more than 12,500 times. The Times has said the actions it took in response to the disclosures by HonestReporting were “appropriate.”

My own view of it is that the main problem is what appears in the Times itself, not what appears on the social media accounts of Times freelancers. But the episode is useful in illuminating that the appearance of objectivity (or of not cheering on deadly terrorist attacks) remains at least somewhat important to the New York Times, if not, alas, to the Washington Post’s Tharoor and the Boston Globe’s Fayyad.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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