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Researchers say Japan has exaggerated the story of Chiune Sugihara, the ‘Japanese Schindler’
YAOTSU, Japan (JTA) — Three years before the Olympics began in 2021, Tokyo was already developing the national image it would display as the world looked on.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education issued a handout to the city’s public schools in 2018 highlighting “the outstanding achievements of our predecessors” that were meant to “raise [students’] self-awareness and pride as Japanese.”
Occupying a majority of the four-page handout was the story of diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who wrote thousands of life-saving visas for Jews fleeing Europe in 1940. The pamphlet recreates a dramatized version of Sugihara’s life and actions, bolstered by quotes from nameless descendants of the Jewish refugees he saved.
“Sugihara should be remembered and honored as an amazing hero who sacrificed his profession and family to save strangers from a different ethnicity and culture,” one of the quotes reads.
Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania from 1939 to 1940, helped thousands of Jewish refugees flee wartime Europe by issuing transit visas that allowed them to travel across the Soviet Union to Japan. Today, his name and story can be found all over the country, from his supposed hometown in Yaotsu to a museum at the northern Tsuruga port where Jewish refugees landed.
His likeness is found in memorials in Tokyo and in manga series and films, in addition to nearly every modern history school textbook. In 2017, the Tokyo Weekender magazine dubbed Sugihara the “best Japanese person ever.” Some Catholics have even expressed hope that Sugihara will be officially canonized by the Catholic church as a Saint.
But over the past few years, a growing number of researchers — in addition to his own son — have publicly challenged Sugihara’s superhero status and many details of the version of his story pushed in Japan and around the world. Some researchers say that Japan has used him as a symbol of humanitarianism in the face of criticism of Japan’s World War II record.
And some note that Japan is taking the nationalist narrative one step further, by boosting another World War II-era figure whom they believe can achieve a similar level of national fame and hero status — whether or not his story is verifiable.
A Sugihara visa seen at the Sugihara Chiune Memorial Hall museum in Yaotsu. (Jordyn Haime)
The Sugihara story
Issuing visas was not part of Sugihara’s job description. He was stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1939 to keep an eye on Soviet military activity in the region.
But when rumors spread of a Japanese diplomat issuing transit visas, Sugihara one day found a crowd of Jews lined up outside of his home hoping they would be lucky enough to get one. They were running from the Soviets; no one had yet predicted the havoc that would be unleashed on them by the Germans when they finally invaded one year later.
Sugihara issued some 2,140 transit visas, some used for entire households. But Meron Medzini, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Department of Asian Studies, wrote in his 2016 book “Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era” that “Not all of the visas were used, and this makes it difficult to substantiate the claim that Sugihara was instrumental in helping [the commonly accepted number of] between 6,000 and 7,000 Jews leave Lithuania.”
Sugihara’s act was also only one step in a series of events that led to the refugees’ escape. Tokyo required them to have a final destination permit as a condition of their transit through Japan, and those were provided by Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch consul in Kaunas at the time who stamped thousands of Jewish passports to visa-free Dutch Curacao. Jewish organizations stepped in to pay for the refugees’ transit across the Soviet Union, which was miraculously granted by Soviet authorities.
Andrew Jocubowicz, whose parents escaped wartime Europe with the help of a Sugihara visa, emphasized the importance of Zwartendijk’s role in an interview. In recent years, the Dutch consulate has also attempted to boost the profile of their own Holocaust hero, who is often “hidden” in the shadow of Sugihara.
“The critical person in the whole game was really Zwartendijk,” said Jocubowicz, a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney who has spent four decades researching the conditions of his family’s survival. “Without those visas, it would not have happened at all. There’s no way Sugihara could have cooked up something that didn’t have people moving on from Japan.”
After arriving in Japan, Jews left for Australia, Canada, the United States and other countries. Others were later deported to Japanese-controlled Shanghai, where authorities imprisoned them in a ghetto for the remainder of the war.
A view of the Visas for Life monument in Yaotsu, Japan. (Jordyn Haime)
The hometown museum that isn’t
Claims that Sugihara helped several thousand Jews; that his requests for visas were rejected “three times” by his superiors; and that he was dismissed and punished for his actions are all important details that make Sugihara a hero. But they are also all claims that researchers have debunked.
Jocubowicz said his father barely met Sugihara, whose visa was just one chapter in a long journey to safety. The survival of this group of Jews was “almost pure luck at every point,” he said, especially their allowance by the Soviets to cross through Russia. After several months in Kobe, his family spent the remainder of the war in the Shanghai ghetto before boarding a ship to Australia, where Jocubowicz was raised.
“My feeling is that it was an extraordinary wormhole that opened up through these essentially conflicting empires, and as they crashed into each other, this little hole opened up and people were able to scurry into it,” he said.
Yaotsu’s claim as Sugihara’s birthplace is also disputed, said Nobuki Sugihara, the consul’s only surviving child. Nobuki said that according to family documents, his father was born in Mino, about 30 miles away from Yaotsu.
“It’s shocking. People come from around the world to visit Yaotsu [but] my father was not born there, he has never lived there,” Nobuki told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “They made a story that he was born in Yaotsu in order to get tourists because in that village there is nothing.”
The memorial and museum in Yaotsu, despite its distance from a major city, receives 20,000 tourists per year both foreign and domestic, according to Ito Yuko, who works in Yaotsu’s regional development and promotion division. She said the Sugihara family once lived in their small town, and elderly townspeople still remember them.
“For our museum, we are telling the truth that we know. Not exaggerated, not right or left, we just tell the story that we think is true,” she said.
Local tourism officials have also promoted a “Sugihara Remembrance Route,” part of a multimillion-dollar effort promoted widely in Israel that is described as “a nostalgic journey of discovery that will take you to places associated with the great man and areas where the Japan’s [sic] original landscape and traditional culture remain strong.” Although sometimes referred to as the “refugees remembrance route,” the route curiously excludes the city of Kobe, where Jewish refugees lived for months before leaving Japan for other destinations.
Sugihara had no connection to many of the areas on this route, Nobuki said. He explained that much of the common narrative about Sugihara comes from his mother Yukiko’s memoir, published in 1995.
“She didn’t know exactly what happened in Kaunas, in Europe. So she asked a ghostwriter. She wanted to make a novel, not a documentary. So she put here and there some fiction stories. And this became famous in Japan,” he said.
A memorial to Chiune Sugihara was established in 2018 outside of Sugihara’s former high school in Nagoya, Japan. A project of Nagoya’s board of education, the memorial space has hosted ambassadors from Lithuania and Israel. (Jordyn Haime)
The rise to stardom
A decade or two ago, a much smaller portion of Japanese society knew the Sugihara story. Today, he is a household name.
In a recent article for the academic journal American Historical Review, University of Haifa professor and prominent Japan scholar Rotem Kowner examined how Sugihara became a “Holocaust paragon of virtue.” Sugihara, he wrote, “was not the only consul to issue visas to Jews during this period, and not every consul who issued visas turned into a hero.”
As Japan rebuilt and rebranded into a peace-loving nation after the war, said Chiharu Inaba, a professor who researches Jewish refugees in Japan, “The people didn’t know what a hero was anymore. They needed a new hero.”
The legacy of Japan’s wartime actions, including its military’s sexual “comfort women” system, continues to hinder its relations with China and South Korea.
The start of Sugihara’s rise to hero status can be traced back to his nomination as one of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations in 1968. According to Kowner’s research, Sugihara did not earn the honor for 16 years after his initial nomination because of Yad Vashem’s initial doubts over whether he risked his life or professional position to help Jews — normally a requirement of Righteous Among the Nations status. Instead, Sugihara was at first given a certificate of recognition for his actions.
Eventually, though, when a panel was presented with new evidence and testimony from survivors, it determined that Sugihara had taken a career risk, and his Righteous status was granted in 1984. Authorities also saw it as an opportunity to improve Israel’s image in Japan, Kowner argues, as Japanese public opinion about Israel had sharply deteriorated amid the conflict with Lebanon at the time.
A former head of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations department recently disputed the claim that political considerations were involved in Sugihara’s nomination.
Recognition of Sugihara remained scant within Japan until 2000, when the Japanese government for the first time officially recognized him at a centennial celebration of his birth. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — known throughout his 2012-2020 tenure for his conservative politics, revisionist views of Japan’s World War II activities and desire to ramp up Japan’s military — embraced Sugihara more than any other Japanese leader.
In Sugihara, Abe saw an opportunity to not only boost diplomatic relations with Israel and Lithuania, but to make Sugihara a positive representative of the Japanese people in its darkest historical period.
But the process had already started before Abe’s tenure. In the 2000s, revisionist writers began adding Sugihara’s name into texts that denied the Nanjing Massacre — a Japanese attack on the Chinese city in 1937 that resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths — “to show that wartime Japan did not resemble Nazi Germany,” Kowner wrote.
Sugihara has been a key component of what some have called Asia’s “memory competition” to have documents and memorials receive recognition from UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage authority. In 2017, Japan nominated Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall, the museum at Sugihara’s supposed hometown in Yaotsu, for UNESCO Memory of the World status; the bid failed.
“Sugihara posthumously allowed his country to shed a long-lasting self-justifying policy of victimization and, instead, rebrand itself as possessing proactive humanitarian values,” Kowner wrote. “Critically, Japan could cast itself in the role of a ‘good’ country that helped the Jews rather than that of an Axis villain.”
An undated photo of Kiichiro Higuchi. (Wikimedia Commons)
The next Sugihara
Sugihara’s vast fame has also paved the way for a new World War II-era Japanese hero to emerge: Kiichiro Higuchi.
Higuchi, a general, allegedly defied orders from his superiors to allow between 2,000 and 20,000 stranded Jewish refugees to cross the Russian border into Manchukuo, according to media reports and his supporters in Japan. This path to safety is now known as the “Higuchi route.”
Though far lesser known than Sugihara, efforts to attract attention to Higuchi have received mild success: through a manga series, media reports, and other commemoration efforts, such as a statue in his hometown of Awajishima. The Japanese embassy in Israel has reportedly been in discussions with Yad Vashem since 2005 about Higuchi’s Righteous Among the Nations status, but efforts have been unsuccessful.
When researchers began looking into the Higuchi story, it started to fall apart. Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien, a doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego, has found that Higuchi likely facilitated the entrance of “at least 18 people” into Manchukuo. “There’s just no record” of more than that, O’Brien said.
“It just doesn’t add up that you have thousands and thousands of people flooding in and then there’s no record,” he said. “Especially when there are records of other Jewish refugee groups, [that have] receipts, letters, communications, and there’s just nothing for this group that supposedly went the ‘Higuchi route.’”
The website for the General Higuchi Association, an organization created to encourage the commemoration of Higuchi in Japan and pursue donations from abroad, is saturated with nationalism and false statements. Hideaki Kase — a right-wing politician who advised Shinzo Abe — chaired the association until his death last year.
“What would have happened if [Anne Frank’s] family knew of the ‘Higuchi Route’?” the website asks. “Perhaps the family would not have lived in the attic but instead would have sought passage for Manchuria, like so many other Jews did, and survived. At the time, neither the United States nor Britain accepted Jews; Japan was the only country in the world that opened its doors to Jews.”
The goal, O’Brien argued, is to promote the idea that Japan had a policy of racial harmony — in this case, of helping Jews during the war.
Madoka Sugihara says “the way the government changed their attitude” to her grandfather is “a very cynical thing.” (Courtesy of Madoka Sugihara)
The consequences
Japan is far from the only country that has faced criticism for promoting Holocaust narratives for nationalist ends that historians disagree with. Poland has been widely derided for denying the part that many Polish citizens played in the killing of local Jews throughout the war. And in China, Shanghai’s history as a former home to thousands of Jewish refugees has been used as a diplomatic tool, at times to deflect from international accusations of genocide against Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Small inconsistent details or a selective use and omission of certain facts can be dangerous, Jocubowicz said. Holes in Holocaust stories give antisemites and Holocaust deniers ammunition for their arguments that Jews were not in danger, he argued.
“What happens if something is inaccurate and could be corrected is then the readers have no idea whether anything in the story is accurate,” Jocubowicz says. “So anything could be a fake. Maybe it’s all a fake, and maybe this is a signal that the whole Jewish story about the Holocaust is rubbish.”
Rabbi Mendy Sudakevich, a Chabad-Lubavitch movement emissary who has been living in Tokyo since the 1990s, sees the narrative differently. He thinks that the Sugihara story — whether it is 100% true or not — has a positive effect on people and endears them to Jews.
“Kids in Japan grew up not knowing what Japan did in the war. They don’t know the story. And Japan tried to build up a new story,” Sudakevich said. “I want the new generation of Japan to know that saving Jews is an important task. I want them to know that. And if that’s what they know about World War II, it is a good result for me.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many in Japan ventured out to Yaotsu, Kobe or Tsuruga to learn more about Sugihara. Invoking his memory, Inaba and his university students have organized a 5 million yen ($37,490) donation drive for Ukrainian refugees dubbed “donations for life.” The Visas for Life organization, founded by the Sugihara family in 2000, has raised 1.7 million yen ($12,746) for Ukrainian evacuees now living in Japan.
Madoka Sugihara, Chiune Sugihara’s granddaughter and soon-to-be-director of Sugihara Visas for Life, noted the dramatic change in the government’s reception of Sugihara in the past several years.
“The way the government changed their attitude is a very cynical thing,” but “it is a good thing that they regard Sugihara-san’s act very fairly. I’m convinced that it’s a good thing,” she said.
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The post Researchers say Japan has exaggerated the story of Chiune Sugihara, the ‘Japanese Schindler’ 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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