NYT/ PULITZER PRIZE DISGRACE

Another Pulitzer Prize Disgrace by Jonathan Tobin (JWR)
Puff piece on mosque that inspired murder further tarnishes the 'Times'

The 2007 Pulitzer for Feature Writing announced this week went to Andrea Elliot, the author of an 11,000-word, three-part story, "An Imam in America," about Sheik Reda Shata of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The series, which first appeared on March 5-7, 2006, is touted on the newspaper's Web site as the story of "the inner life of a mosque in Brooklyn, and the dynamic, creative, conflicted and fearful imam at its center: Sheik Reda Shata. Through study and conversation, persuasion and persistence, Elliott achieved an intimate, tough-minded exploration of the lives of immigrant Muslims after 9/11."

However, a few things were missing from these "tough-minded" pieces, which sympathetically portrayed the Egyptian-born Shata.

The most important was Elliot's failure to mention anything about the role of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in the murder of 16-year-old Ari Halberstam in a van filled with Jewish children on the Brooklyn Bridge. Not one of her 11,000 words refers to the fact that it was this same mosque that was the forum for the sermon that inspired one of its congregants, Rashid Baz, to go out and try to murder as many Jews as he could in March of 1994.

At Baz's trial, it was revealed that Mohammed Moussa — Shata's predecessor at the mosque — was quoted as saying the following in a sermon heard by the killer on the day of the rampage: "This takes the mask off of the Jews. It shows them to be racist and fascist as bad as the Nazis. Palestinians are suffering from the occupation and it's time to end it."

How, you may ask, could one write about any religious institution and ignore the most notorious aspect of its recent history?

In a subsequent article in The New York Sun, Halberstam's mother, Devorah, related that she called Elliot to ask why she had omitted the story of her son's murder from the feature on the mosque. Elliot replied that "she knew nothing about it."

This was, at the very least, an indictment of the reporter's research skills, which ought to have earned her the humiliation of an editor's note acknowledging the mistake, not journalism's greatest prize.

But there is more wrong here than just one missing fact. It is that the entire thesis of Elliot's work (which ironically concluded on the 12th anniversary of Ari's death) was to portray Shata and his mosque as a force for moderation.

Setting up her subject, Elliot insists that "imams like Shata — men who embrace American freedom and condemn the radicals they feel have tainted their faith — rarely make the news."

While Shata did not give the sermon that inspired Baz, he did praise the Hamas terror group, and spoke of its leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as a "lion of Palestine [who] has been martyred." As even Elliot was constrained to note, Shata had also praised a Palestinian female suicide bomber, Reem Al-Reyashi, as a "martyr."

Absent from the feature is any attempt at a serious discussion of how a religious leader who praises terrorists can, at the same time, pretend to be fostering interfaith dialogue with Jews and Christians. Shata utters coded responses such as, "What I may see as terrorism, you may not see that way," without follow-up from his interviewer.