Palestinian “poet” and writer Mosab Abu Toha, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, is scheduled to appear at an upcoming anti-Israel conference alongside several radical speakers with ties to terror groups.
Abu Toha, who defended the atrocities of Oct. 7 and disparaged Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, will address the People’s Conference for Palestine, held in Detroit on Aug. 29-31.
Other featured speakers include Hussam Shaheen, who spent 27 years in prison for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder until he was released in February as part of a deal to swap Israeli hostages for Palestinian terrorists. Omar Assaf, a former member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, and Lama Ghosheh, a Palestinian journalist from East Jerusalem, will also deliver speeches. Assaf spent eight years in jail for serving with the DFLP, which is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, while an Israeli court sentenced Ghosheh to three years in prison in 2023 for inciting violence and praising terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
The speaker list caught the attention of the Trump administration, which is preparing to block “terrorist sympathizers” who apply for visas to speak at the conference, a senior State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon.
“Given the public invite lists seem to include a number of terrorist sympathizers, we are going through and ensuring all international speakers slated to attend the conference are being placed on a ‘look out’ status for visa applications, so we are alerted if a request is submitted and can ensure they are appropriately processed,” the senior official told the Free Beacon.
Abu Toha, for his part, has repeatedly come to the defense of Hamas.
The Palestinian was awarded the Pulitzer for his essays in the New Yorker for documenting the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza” in a way that combined “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”
Soon after, his extremist anti-Israel social media posts surfaced.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Abu Toha wrote on Facebook on Jan. 24, 2025. “This is Emily Damari, a 28 [year-old] UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed [sic] on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.’”
Damari was abducted from her home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz on Oct. 7 and spent 471 days in Hamas captivity. She denounced the Pulitzer Board for giving Abu Toha the prize, calling out the Pulitzers for elevating “a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
Abu Toha, who is currently a “visiting scholar” at Syracuse University and was previously a “visiting poet” and “librarian in residence” at Harvard University, also targeted Agam Berger, an Israeli violinist and former Gaza border scout who spent 482 days in Hamas captivity.
“The Israeli ‘hostage’ Agam Berger, who was released days ago participates in her sister’s graduation from an Israeli Air Force officers’ course. These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army! These are the ones whom CNN, BBC and the likes humanize in articles and TV programs and news bulletins,” Toha posted on Feb. 3, 2025.
Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson, who served on the jury for a different Pulitzer Prize category, raised Abu Toha’s rhetoric with the awarding organization—which includes acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman as a board member. In response, the Pulitzer board falsely accused Johnson of violating a confidentiality agreement rather than explaining whether it knew of Abu Toha’s social media activity.
The People’s Conference for Palestine, its second annual iteration, is expecting over 3,000 attendees who will “prepare for the next phase of struggle,” according to the Palestinian Youth Movement, a conference sponsor. Other sponsors include National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Al-Awda: the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and the American-Arab Discrimination Committee, among others.
“We know that it is our duty to continue organizing relentlessly for Gaza, even though and especially as the Palestine movement is being targeted and repressed,” the group posted on X. “This is why we convene at this critical juncture—to continue building and strengthening a mass movement in North America.”
Several U.S.-based speakers with deep ties to the global anti-Israel movement and protests on American college campuses are scheduled to participate. Among them is Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley, professor and a prominent figure in the SJP movement. Shortly after Oct. 7, Bazian claimed Israel “is a creation of Western powers and they collectively fund and support the destruction that have [sic] befallen Palestine and its people.”
Infamous anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, who has compared Zionism to “white supremacy in America” and publicly supported terrorism, will also deliver remarks. So will Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian native and Algerian national anti-Israel campus activist whose leadership role in the protests at Columbia earned him detention from the Trump administration until a federal judge ordered his release in June of this year.
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