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Alex Soros, just named as father George’s successor, is a longtime donor to liberal Jewish causes
(JTA) — When George Soros gave control of his vast charity to his son, Alexander, it was clear that the new 37-year-old chairman would follow in his father’s footsteps in many ways.
Alex Soros is known to work well with George, the billionaire hedge funder, liberal philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who turns 93 next month. “We think alike,” George Soros said about his youngest son when naming him in June as his successor at the Open Society Foundations, which distributes roughly $1.5 billion per year to an array of causes.
But some departures are already evident. Alex Soros revealed one himself on the day of the handover announcement, saying, “I’m more political.” Another is less prominent but no less apparent: Alex Soros’ deep and public embrace of his Jewish identity.
George Soros, born in Hungary in 1930, was hidden as a child during the Holocaust and, as an adult, has always openly identified as Jewish — in addition to being one of the most prominent targets of right-wing antisemitism. But he is not active in any Jewish institutions, has given relatively little to Jewish nonprofits and, in 2007, wrote, “I am not a Zionist, nor am I a practicing Jew.”
Alex Soros is more vocal about his Judaism and once organized a convening to address rising antisemitism. He regularly posts pictures from his holiday celebrations, and has long been active in Jewish philanthropic causes. The first donation made by his own foundation, established in 2012, was $250,000 to Bend The Arc, a progressive Jewish group on whose board he remains today.
Alex Soros declined an interview request, as did other OSF staffers. But he has written and spoken extensively about how Judaism has shaped him, how he believes the Jewish community is developing, and how he hopes to shape Jewish philanthropy.
“Progressive causes, like the civil rights movement, are a part of the Jewish legacy in the United States,” he said in 2012. “Bend The Arc for me has a lot more to do with preserving this legacy than with anything else.”
Alex Soros’ ascendance at the Open Society Foundations was hardly a given. For many years, George Soros’ older son from his first marriage, Jonathan, was long presumed to be his heir: His middle name, Tivadar, comes from George Soros’s beloved father, and he was president of the elder Soros’ investment firm for nearly a decade. But he left after a clash with his father over hiring decisions and has launched his own investment firm, though the two reportedly remain friendly.
Alex is the older of two sons from George’s second marriage, to the Jewish historian Susan Weber. While Alex praises his father and, in a recent social media post featuring a grinning photo, called him “the greatest,” he described his upbringing as difficult to the Wall Street Journal. The elder Soros has a reputation for being controlling and for plowing through senior staff, both at his hedge fund and charitable endeavors. Alex, who grew up in New York City and a northern suburb, told the Journal he spent his childhood longing for his father’s attention.
“I was very angry at him, I felt unwanted,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”
In 1998, Alex Soros became George’s first child to have a bar mitzvah. (In addition to Jonathan, George Soros had a daughter and another son with his first wife, who was not Jewish.) He told Yediot Aharonot in 2018 that his father pulled him aside after the ceremony with some advice: “If you’re serious about being Jewish, you might want to consider immigrating to Israel,” he recalled being told. In a photo he shared with the Wall Street Journal, his father is handing him a Torah scroll as father and son wear the same kippah, black and patterned with white Stars of David.
An undated photo of George Soros handing his son Alex a Torah scroll at his bar mitzvah. (Courtesy of the Soros family)
Alex has said he grew close with his father after his mother filed for divorce in 2004, when Alex was starting out at New York University. But his trajectory toward heir apparent at first appeared uncertain, as he came into the public eye as a partier.
In 2008, the summer after his graduation, CityFile, a now-defunct New York City gossip site, mined his Facebook pages for photos and said he spent the time “chilling at dad’s house in Southampton, drinking 40s while cruising on the family boat, and making out with the babes at places like La Playa and Pink Elephant.”
Alex Soros deleted the photos and set about involving himself more intensely in his father’s charity. He traveled to the Amazon to meet with indigenous leaders and joined the board of Global Witness, a human rights group that focuses on victims of mining.
He also dove into therapy. “Growing up on the Upper East Side, going to a psychologist is like going to Hebrew school,” he told The New York Times in 2012. “It’s expected.”
That year, he launched his own eponymous foundation. His first donation was $250,000 to Bend The Arc.
Speaking to Philanthropy News Digest at the time, he made the case that his philanthropy did not mark a departure from his father’s.
“Given my dad’s history and given the values that led to the creation of OSF, it can be argued that OSF is a Jewish foundation,” he said.
“His Jewish identity has had a major impact,” he added. “I see it as formative in what he does, especially in his philanthropy, and probably my own concern with the Jewish community comes from him as well.”
As he grew his philanthropic profile, Alex Soros also followed in his mother’s footsteps, earning a doctoral degree in history. His 2018 dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, had a title that, according to the Wall Street Journal, delighted his father: “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature.”
Today, Alex Soros does not belong to a synagogue but observes Passover and the High Holidays with his mother, a source close to the family told JTA. In addition to Bend The Arc, he is on the board of the Center for Jewish History, based in New York City.
Over time, the younger Soros also built a social media presence that, rather than showing off his displays of wealth, features his Jewish identity, alongside a litany of encounters with world leaders. On Hanukkah in 2020, he posted on Instagram what he said was “one of the greatest bar mitzvah gifts I received,” a menorah made of dancing robots. He routinely posts Jewish holiday photos, usually focused on food. Passover is the Jewish holiday that is most important to him, and he hosts large meals with his mother, inviting both Jews and non-Jews. Challah, he once wrote, is his “favorite (leavened) bread.”
Alex Soros has also brought up his Judaism when posting to social media about his politics. Earlier this month, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democratic majority leader. “With the man, many, including Robert A. Caro have called the Jewish LBJ,” he wrote, referencing President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s biographer, who is also Jewish. He also posted an encomium for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died at the onset of Rosh Hashanah in 2020, writing that according to Jewish tradition someone who dies on the holiday “is a person of great righteousness or a tzaddik.”
Simon Greer, who founded Bend the Arc, told JTA that Alex Soros’ Instagram presence is typical of his generation, and not just because younger Jews tend to live more online. George Soros was never apologetic about his Judaism, Greer said, but was typical of an older generation who tended not to speak publicly about it. Alex is of a generation that is happy to broadcast identity, Jewish and otherwise.
“Think about that generation of Jews who immigrated here and they wanted to be American. … They wanted us to believe in being Jewish, but they weren’t going to practice it the way maybe they had as kids,” he said. “And then as young adults, we were like, ‘Well wait, I love Passover. I’m happy to talk about the Exodus story.’”
Comments by Alex Soros suggest that he is attuned to fault lines within Jewish communities.
In the 2012 Philanthropy News Digest interview, he lamented what he saw as “a bit of an existential crisis happening for many American Jews” in which “many are turning to religious orthodoxy to get answers.”
He added, “While this in itself is not inherently negative, it is often coupled with more conservative political beliefs and a tribal outlook. Eventually, I think there will be a split, with the secular, universalist Jews on one side and the more Orthodox and religious on the other.”
Alex Soros has also had his Jewish outlook shaped by antisemitism, including attacks on his father. Greer said in an interview that he first met Alex when Greer and George Soros were being targeted by Glenn Beck, the right-wing provocateur who was then a Fox News host.
Alex Soros was young but already steeped in the history of antisemitism, which stemmed in part from his devotion to his father, recalled Greer, whom Alex Soros has cited as an influence.
“Beck had used the puppet-master stereotype against his dad,” Greer recalled. “Alex was well versed in the puppet-master trope. He studied antisemitism in Europe so he was totally clear that that’s from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He had no no illusions about it.”
Alex Soros, he said, convened a meeting in 2017 at Chatham House, a research institute in London, to tackle rising antisemitism.
“It was still early in the Trump administration, and Alex really saw ahead on it,” Greer said. “I think he saw the rising tide of antisemitism. It concerned him and he funded and attended a convening where we brought experts from the U.S.”
He has also said his father’s experience in the Holocaust has guided his philanthropic work, inspiring him to continue his father’s commitment to human rights advocacy and political activism.
“My father, George Soros, lost family members in the Holocaust,” he wrote in a CNN op-ed last month applauding the Biden administration’s plan to combat antisemitism. “And for him, those experiences — of being ‘the other,’ of being hated for something that he couldn’t control — helped fuel his philanthropic career, and his dedication to help others fight for a life free from fear.”
The elder Soros’s philanthropy has focused on pro-democracy efforts in the former Communist bloc and elsewhere, and has focused on Democratic politics and criminal justice reform in the United States. His critics have taken aim at his advancement of progressive politics at the local and national level, as well as at the influence he wields as one of the most prominent megadonors in the world.
Unlike his son, George Soros has rarely donated to explicitly Jewish causes, and some of his pronouncements on Jews and Israel have sparked backlash from Jewish leaders.
In 2003, George Soros told a gathering of the Jewish Funders Network that there was “a resurgence of antisemitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the [Ariel] Sharon administration [in Israel] contribute to that.” Those comments elicited outrage from some Jewish figures such as then-Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman, who said Soros was “blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.”
In a 2007 essay in the New York Review of Books, Soros wrote that he has “a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel.” But he also wrote of the “pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee” and added that the group’s conduct lent “some credence” to antisemitic claims of an “all-powerful Zionist conspiracy.” A year later, he would provide approximately $750,000 in seed funding to J Street, founded as a liberal alternative to AIPAC. Last year, he donated $1 million to J Street’s Super PAC.
Alex Soros shares his father’s opposition to right-wing politics in Israel and some of the country’s policies.
“I worry when Jews in America start to support policies in Israel which they wouldn’t support in America, which don’t allow for separation of church and state, which don’t give full rights to people who are technically living under occupation, and which don’t allow for immigration of people who aren’t Jews, or for non-Jews to become citizens,” he said in the 2012 Philanthropy News Digest interview.
In 2016, years after his role in his father’s charitable giving had intensified, hacked emails showed that the Open Society Foundations backed groups that aimed to work on “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies.” The foundation’s Arab regional office in 2015 praised a 2007 initiative to create a binational constitution for Israel. (In his interview with Yediot, Alex Soros said he opposes the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, known as BDS, and said the Open Society Foundations’ Arab office makes funding decisions autonomously.)
Two years later, in his Yediot interview, Alex Soros lacerated Netanyahu for forcing the foreign ministry to qualify its prior condemnation of a Hungarian government anti-Soros campaign that the country’s Jewish community had deemed antisemitic. (His father suggested that he speak to the Israeli newspaper after it initially asked George Soros for an interview, the paper reported.)
“I was disappointed by the Israeli prime minister’s cynical conduct, his failure to help Jews and to stand behind them,” Alex Soros said. “This isn’t Israel, this is Netanyahu. His ties with radical right-wing, antisemitic and corrupt elements contradicts Israel’s commitment as a Jewish state.”
In his recent CNN op-ed, Alex Soros criticized the current Israeli government — led again by Netanyahu — for “increasingly aggressive and hostile policies towards its Arab population, elevating extremists to cabinet rank, authorizing new settlements in the occupied West Bank and proposing dramatic new curbs on the independence of the judiciary.” He has visited the country several times, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Israel may be unlikely to be a centerpiece of Alex Soros’ philanthropy, but democracy is one.
In addition to being elected chairman of OSF in December, he is also president of Democracy PAC, George Soros’ powerhouse political action committee that made him the leading donor to Democrats in last year’s midterm elections. Alex is also the only family member on the committee overseeing Soros Fund Management, the family’s investment office, which is worth $25 billion.
He is already making changes at OSF. At the end of June, he announced 40% cuts to the foundation’s staff of about 500, Bloomberg News reported, in the name of “generating a nimbler organization.” He also told the Wall Street Journal that he plans to invest more heavily in political causes such as abortion or voting rights.
That’s in line with his long-standing giving. In 2012, the year he broke into philanthropy, he gave $200,000 to a Jewish super PAC responsible for the “Great Schlep,” a campaign that originated in 2008 to convince elderly voters in Florida to back Barack Obama in that year’s presidential election.
In 2016, he urged Hillary Clinton to embrace progressive policies to win the Florida Jewish vote — and in so doing offered a glimpse into his looming future as one of the world’s most influential philanthropists.
“As a community, our response to improved fortune has been to do whatever we can to cast a wider net for other Americans,” he wrote in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel op-ed. “When one looks through the history of progressive battles in the U.S. from labor to civil rights, one has seen American Jews on the front lines.”
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The post Alex Soros, just named as father George’s successor, is a longtime donor to liberal Jewish causes appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why the Shtisel Prequel ‘Kugel’ Is Sweet and Savory
A screenshot from “Kugel.” Photo: Courtesy of Abot Hameiri/Menuetto Film.
Many fans of the show Shtisel wanted that show to continue, but I jumped for joy when I heard that a prequel called Kugel was being made. Available on the streamer Izzy, the show is clearly part of the Shtisel universe but is a little different.
There is still romance, and there is still a lot of heart, a respect for religion, and a wild sense of humor. But before we get to the actors, let’s look at the characters.
The two main characters brought over from Shtisel are Nuchem and his daughter Libbi.
For Nuchem (Sasson Gabai) we learn what made him so cheap, what makes him bitter, where he gets his humor from, and how he came up with his catchphrase “cursed-evil doers.” For Libbi (Hadas Yaron), we see there is more to her than her desire to get married.
One of the most crucial storylines is that Libbi is a writer — and she is persistent. Her short stories garner a following, which may explain why she later appreciates that Kive is an artist in Shtisel.
The main new character is Yiddes (Mili Avital), who becomes involved with Nuchem.
It is no surprise that Gabai, Yaron, and Avital have all won Ophir Awards, which is Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars. The acting is stellar and one benefit of having fewer characters is that we can zero in on the lives of a few people. It was a good choice to put Nuchem and Libbi in another country: Belgium.
Gabai is tremendous and we don’t see him smoke in the first three episodes or hear his famous catchphrase. Nuchem is a flawed character; he does some bad things, but he also does good things. There are a few curveballs you won’t see coming. Overall, the show teaches us that we can find love in the places we least expect — even on a tram. Many fans will miss Michael Aloni not being on the show, but Kugel is well baked and stands up on its own.
Creator and writer Yehonatan Indursky is still on point, and he is able to pull at your heartstrings. Yes, perhaps the notes sound familiar, but slightly different. Yaron is outstanding and we believe it when a prospective husband is blown away by her kind soul. From seeing the first three episodes, it is clear that it was a mistake of Netflix to take Shtisel off the air and not do another season or this prequel — but it is Izzy’s gain.
Just like a burnt piece of kugel, all three characters feel burned in some way, but who will come out of it in the best position? Gabai and Yaron each have a great moment of acting simply by facial expression. For Gabai, it’s when he realizes a trick won’t work, and for Yaron, it’s when she feels insulted by an author who suggests that she take one of her workshops. And Avital has a fine scene where we think she might have an emotional explosion, but is restrained and it makes for a more interesting watch.
While unmarried men and women are forbidden to touch, there is a scene where a date rubs his fingers over her name on a siddur so it is as if he is connecting to her. Seeing Nuchem riding his bike is absolutely hilarious. This is a show that electrifies your kishkes, with the type of acting that is clever, nuanced, and unforgettable. If you are in love, you’ll find much to relate to on the show. If you’re not in love, it will likely make you want to go out on dates — and as long as you’re not cheap, you can take someone out for more than a piece of kugel.
The author is a writer based in New York.
The post Why the Shtisel Prequel ‘Kugel’ Is Sweet and Savory first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Retribution in Syria: What It Means for Israel and the Region
Syria’s newly appointed president for a transitional phase Ahmed al-Sharaa meets Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salam, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 2, 2025. Photo: Bandar Algaloud Saudi Royal Royal Court/Handout via REUTERS
The carnage in Syria is terrifying, horrifying, and gruesome — particularly if you are a member of a Syrian minority group — Christians, Druze, Kurds. Or Alawite.
Did no one think there would be retribution after the ouster of the brutal Alawite Assad regime?
When Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) commandeered Damascus in December, no one seemed very upset. After all, Bashar al-Assad had been responsible for more than 500,000 deaths during the Syrian civil war — including from starvation and chemical attack — plus creating 6 million refugees inside the country and another 5 million outside and wrecking the country from top to bottom.
But HTS has been sitting in Damascus — and Assad had tens of thousands of soldiers in historic Alawite territory around Latakia, where fighting recently broke out.
Some of those ousted soldiers appear to have attacked government forces, and they are paying for it. So are the other minority groups that Assad allowed to live in relative peace for a while with Iranian protection because they, like he, feared the majority, Sunnis.
And, as always, civilians are the victims, because once the forces of retribution are unleashed, they are hard to control — particularly as HTS is not the only armed terror group in the country.
HTS is Sunni, ISIS-adjacent, Al Qaeda-adjacent, and armed by and aligned with Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey.
HTS evolved from Jabhat al-Nusrah, or “Nusrah Front,” Al-Qaeda’s former branch in Syria, which was designated a terror organization by the US in 2012, None of that appeared terribly important in the West.
HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) is an international jihadist. He broke with Ayman al-Zawahiri — the leader of Al-Qaeda — in 2016, and HTS received its own terror designation from the US in 2018. He has no loyalty, moving from an alliance with Al-Qaeda in Iraq to the Islamic State in Iraq, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, to Al-Qaeda in Syria, to his own brand.
Al-Sharaa talked a fairly moderate game, but his alliance with Turkey should have been a tip-off. Turkey has been waging an ugly war against Kurds in the north of Syria — bombing towns and cities, and at one point cutting off water to a million people.
The history should have made you think that al-Sharaa was not going to be a peaceful neighbor to anyone. Anywhere.
Israel wasn’t taking chances.
Immediately, the IDF struck Syrian chemical weapons depots and “research facilities.” It struck the ports of Al-Bayda and Latakia, taking out dozens of sea-to-sea missiles with ranges of 80–190 km, each with significant explosive payloads. The Israeli Air Force targeted anti-aircraft batteries, airfields, and dozens of weapons production sites, neutralizing Scud missiles, cruise missiles, surface-to-sea, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, plus UAVs, fighter jets, attack helicopters, radars, tanks, hangars, and more. And the IDF conducted strikes on 130 ground assets in Syria, including weapons depots, military structures, launchers, and firing positions.
The IDF estimated it had eliminated 80 percent of the Assad arsenal. Voices were raised in the UN, the EU, and in the Middle East over Israel’s declaration that it would continue to hold slivers of the Syrian Golan. Syria’s Druze and Kurdish communities, however, asked for Israel’s protection, and at least one southern village asked to be annexed to Israel.
Still in December, the Biden administration started a conversation with HTS leadership in Damascus. Turkey promoted its ties with HTS and with al-Sharaa. As recently as last week, parts of the Washington “policy wonk” community were promoting an “alliance” between Turkey and Israel, led by the US, to cement a “moderate” Syria and pave the way for reconstruction funds to flow.
Try again.
Now, with the death toll mounting — and gory and heartrending videos from Syria flooding the Internet — al-Sharaa declared it necessary to “preserve national unity and domestic peace; we can live together.”
And where is the US? President Donald Trump, in his first term, directly punished the Assad regime for a chemical attack, and CENTCOM has been active in striking ISIS positions in Syria in his second. There appears to be no decision on whether to withdraw the roughly 2,200 American troops remaining in northern Syria.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, appears to be giving al-Sharaa a bit of wiggle room. “The United States condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days … Syria’s interim authorities must hold the perpetrators of these massacres against Syria’s minority communities accountable.”
Good idea, but al-Sharaa and HTS are themselves radical Islamists. It is unclear that he can or wants to kill his Sunni allies on behalf of the Alawites, who decimated Syria’s Sunni population.
Retribution is a nasty game.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
The post Retribution in Syria: What It Means for Israel and the Region first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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How Reuters and Getty Images Platform a Gaza Photojournalist Kissed by Hamas’ Sinwar
Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian terror group Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City on April 14, 2023. Photo: Yousef Masoud / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
On October 7, 2023, Gazan photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah held a grenade in one hand and a camera in the other, documenting Hamas’ massacre inside Israel. His exposure by HonestReporting, which brought to light a cozy photo of Eslaiah and former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, led to the end of his employment at CNN and the Associated Press.
Yet more than a year later, his work was still being offered for sale by Reuters and stock photo agency Getty Images, along with other compromised photojournalists in Gaza. (Getty only removed his work last week after an initial version of this story was published on HonestReporting’s website — and it remains available on Reuters).
Hassan Eslaiah (r) with former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (l)
An HonestReporting investigation revealed that the two media companies have been distributing the tainted content in collaboration with state-run Turkish agency Anadolu — an arrangement that seems to enable their profit without liability. Both companies have a global reach, with Reuters as one of the world’s largest news agencies and US-based Getty Images as one of the world’s largest image licensing companies.
Their databases also present images by Anadolu freelancers Ashraf Amra and Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, who Reuters officially distanced itself from after HonestReporting’s investigative team exposed Amra’s close relations with former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and his shared call with Abu Mostafa to invade Israel.
One of Abu Mostafa’s images, which is still for sale on the Reuters platform, has, according to Anadolu, been used as evidence in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Unethical Content Distribution
Reuters partnered with Anadolu, which also collaborates with AFP and DPA to distribute its content, back in 2019. Reuters said that “these partnerships will help us create the most comprehensive collection of real-time, multimedia news content anywhere in the world.”
Anadolu’s partnership with Getty Images started in 2013, with Getty’s Senior Director of photography for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa saying at the time: “I am very excited at the prospect of seeing the Anadolu Agency represented by Getty Images around the world … I believe that the Anadolu Agency and Getty Images will benefit greatly from this partnership.”
Indeed, the partnership proved useful not only for the companies, but also for the compromised Gazan photojournalists who can no longer work directly for Western media.
Currently, Reuters offers for sale over 200 Anadolu photos by Hassan Eslaiah (spelled Hasan Eslayeh on their platforms). Most of the photos show Hamas’ hostage release ceremonies, including the barbaric handover of terrified Israeli hostage Arbel Yehud amid a mob of terrorists (which other Western media also picked up):
Eslaiah’s easy access and proximity to the action isn’t surprising. He enjoyed the same conditions on October 7, 2023 when he infiltrated with Hamas into Israel:
And here is footage of Eslaiah after he crossed into Israel and took photos of a burning Israeli tank. He then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.
Note that he is not identifiable as a member of the press. But AP & CNN deemed it acceptable to use his services. pic.twitter.com/fA0VI2df2i
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 8, 2023
The fact that Eslaiah was fired from CNN and AP after we exposed him in November 2023 seems not to have affected his livelihood, with Reuters and Getty Images distributing his propagandist material under the cover of the partnership with Anadolu.
And until last week, Getty Images had no qualms about charging $175-499 dollars for each photo, presumably also including a cut for Anadolu and Eslaiah himself.
Reuters keeps the pricing confidential, but adds a disclaimer distancing itself from the content. The disclaimer seems like a cop-out because on its collaborations page, where Anadolu is listed, Reuters praises its partners’ “compelling content.”
In other words — Reuters and Getty Images make a profit, while abdicating responsibility for spreading the manipulative photos of a Hamas sympathizer, whose pockets are presumably also lined.
Platform for Manipulation
The same business model also seems to work for Gazan photojournalists Ashraf Amra and Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa. Reuters officially cut ties with them after we exposed in January 2024 that Amra was honored by former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and hosted an Instagram Live with Abu Mostafa in which they called on Gazans to infiltrate into Israel on October 7.
Here’s Amra getting a kiss from Haniyeh in 2023 and receiving an honor from the unlamented Hamas leader in 2012. pic.twitter.com/VdWXN6wB32
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 23, 2025
But as Anadolu contributors, Amra and Abu Mostafa are both featured on the Reuters platform — Amra with over 5,000 photos and Abu Mostafa with over 300. On Getty, Amra is less prominent but over 150 photos of Abu Mostafa are offered for sale, including video clips.
These photos don’t just sit in the databases. Reuters and Getty are among the world’s largest digital distribution platforms used by thousands of media clients worldwide.
Recently, Getty clients like The Times of London and the Daily Express were happy to buy Amra’s Anadolu photo showing the moment when Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov “kissed” the head of his Hamas captor:
CNN did the same with Amra’s Anadolu photos of Israeli hostages Eli Sharabi and Or Levy via Getty Images.
And last year, Anadolu weaponized one of Abu Mostafa’s photos — still on sale in the Getty Images and Reuters platforms — as evidence at the ICJ case accusing Israel of committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
According to Anadolu, the photo “shows the mass burial of the Fatayer family members in a designated area in Gaza due to the lack of available space in some cemeteries.”
Fayq’s photo in Getty Images database
Fayq’s Photo in Anadolu website
Fayq’s Photo in Reuters Database
Sadly, the court didn’t know the photo was taken by a “journalist” who was thrilled by the massacre of Jews and called on Gazans to infiltrate the border, to enjoy the abduction of “settler” women.
But more Reuters and Getty’s own responses, it may be time for US Attorney General Pam Bondi to take an interest. In December 2023, following HonestReporting’s exposure of photojournalists who infiltrated Israel on October 7, 14 state attorneys general wrote a letter to The New York Times, AP, CNN, and Reuters calling them out for using hires with ties to Hamas and reminding them that providing material support to terrorists and terror organizations is a crime.
The letter even specifically mentions the case of Hasan Eslaiah and ends by calling on the media outlets to “ensure that you are taking all necessary steps to prevent your organizations from contracting with members of terror organizations. We urge you in the strongest terms to take care that your hiring practices conform to the laws forbidding material support for terror organizations.”
Despite whatever action may be taken, these propagandists have found a deceitful way to continue spreading their lies to the international media.
And the international media can, for at least the time being, enjoy the “goods” without getting their hands dirty.
UPDATE
Within a few hours of publication of this article on HonestReporting’s website, Getty Images, to their credit, removed all content that was flagged by HonestReporting, including a Ramzi Adel video that called Jews “dogs,” and content from Hassan Eslaiah, Ashraf Amra, and Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa.
The same cannot be said for Reuters, however, which gave us the following statement referring to the Connect platform it operates: “Reuters Connect is a commercial marketplace with content from more than 100 news organizations, allowing media customers the option to select the content that is most relevant to their news cycle. This content is clearly labeled and is not endorsed by Reuters.”
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post How Reuters and Getty Images Platform a Gaza Photojournalist Kissed by Hamas’ Sinwar first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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