In a tweet on Tuesday evening, columnist and editor John Podhoretz called HuffPost senior correspondent Akbar Shahid Ahmed “Hamas Boy,” a post he’s since deleted.
Podhoretz’s post was in response to a tweet from Ahmed about a recent article Ahmed penned on Congress’s vote to “shield Israel from human rights scrutiny.”
On Jan. 16, the Senate rejected a proposal that would have required the State Department to document Israel’s human rights offenses as a way to condition aid to Israel, a position Podhoretz apparently took offense with.
“I’m just going to call you Hamas Boy from now on,” Podhoretz tweeted at Shahid. “Hamas Boy.”
Though Podhoretz has since deleted the tweet, he has received backlash for his insensitive comment.
“Way too comfortable calling a brown man ‘boy,’” Imraan Siddiqi tweeted.
“John Podhoretz is … vile,” Dylan Williams said.
Others took aim at Podhoretz’s career in response to his “Hamas Boy” tweet. Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary Magazine, a publication focused on conservative Jewish perspectives. His father, Norman Podhoretz, was once the outlet’s editor-in-chief.
“I’m going to call you, feckless Mama’s boy whose parents gave him a magazine!” Vilde Chayeh tweeted. “Because John Podhoretz has never accomplished anything on his own in his life!”
“John Podhoretz is a grown man employed by @Commentary which was once edited by his father. (So much for merit,)” journalist Wajahat Ali said. “But his history of bigotry is tolerated and overlooked bc the targets have been Palestinians and Muslims, and because he’s a conservative. He will always fail up.”
Podhoretz’s Tuesday evening tweet also wasn’t the first time he has associated Ahmed with Hamas: In November 2023, Podhoretz tweeted that Ahmed was a “correspondent: for Hamas. He has also said that Muslim journalists Shadi Hamid and Ali Veshi were a terrorist and part of Hamas, respectively.
Podhoretz previously quit Twitter in 2019, though he returned in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Ahmed and Podhoretz for comment.
