Pulitzer for Imam Feature Called ‘Outrageous'

A feature by a New York Times reporter, Andrea Elliott, that this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize has come under fire from critics because it did not mention that a murderer who committed a 1994 terrorist attack had been incited by a former imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, as well as for portraying a succeeding imam as moderate when he had praised the leader of Hamas and a female suicide bomber.

"The article is not complete," a Middle East terrorism specialist at the American Jewish Committee, Yehudit Barsky, said. In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on March 12, 2006, Ms. Barsky raised the fact an anti-Semitic sermon of a former imam was cited as motivation for the killing of a rabbinical student, Ari Halberstam.

Pulitzer Prize entrants are supposed to tell jurors about any "significant challenges" to their work, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Sig Gissler, said.

Asked if the Pulitzer board did review any challenges, Mr. Gissler said the deliberations are confidential. "We don't disclose what does or does not come before the board," he said.

In addition to Ms. Barsky's letter to the editor, the New York Post and The New York Sun ran articles critical of Ms. Elliott's work.

In reference to Ms. Barsky's letter to the editor, the metropolitan editor of the New York Times, Joe Sexton, said yesterday via e-mail, "We did not and do not regard that letter to the editor to be a significant challenge to the accuracy and or fairness of the series."

Ms. Barsky told the Sun yesterday that the terrorist attack on the rabbinical students in 1994 "was not a small event. It was frontpage headlines."

Mr. Sexton added: "The second article in Andrea Elliott's series squarely examined Reda Shata's and the mosque's circumstantial connection to the 2004 case of an alleged plot to blow up the Herald Square subway station. The article candidly explored how Mr. Shata has wrestled with the need to be alert to possible terrorist threats inside his mosque."

The mother of the murdered rabbinical student, Devorah Halberstam, called the award "outrageous."

The director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, whose column appears in the Sun, said, "Just from the between-the-lines information Elliott provides in her articles, it is clear that the imam is no moderate but an Islamist."

Mr. Sexton also added that Ms. Elliott's series "is a portrait of a religious leader who first arrived in Brooklyn one year after 9/11. Neither he nor the articles had any relevant connection with a killing on the Brooklyn Bridge eight years earlier."

The executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Steven Emerson, said, Ms. Elliott "took at face value" what the imam said.

A journalism professor at New York University, Robert Boynton said "her intent was very self-consciously to humanize the world of the imam as well as balance off some of the more incendiary portraits we've been reading."