One of The Washington Post’s most vehemently anti-Israel writers revealed on Monday that she has been fired after posting an incorrect quote and making incendiary statements about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Karen Attiah, a columnist and former global opinions editor at the Post, claimed in a Substack post that she was fired the previous week for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards and America’s apathy toward guns.”
According to Attiah, the newspaper said that a series of posts she made in the wake of the killing of Kirk on Sept. 10 were “unacceptable” and “gross misconduct” and constituted “endangering the physical safety of colleagues.”
Attiah, who is black, wrote that her removal was “part of a broader purge of black voices from academia, business, government and media,” citing one of her own columns.
She also claimed that her only direct reference to Kirk was from “his own words on record,” but she incorrectly quoted him as disparaging “black women,” a phrase that Kirk did not use in the underlying quote.
A Washington Post spokesperson told JNS that the paper would not comment on personnel matters.
During her tenure as a writer and editor at the Post, Attiah was one of the most prominent anti-Israel voices at the paper.
On Oct. 7, 2023, while the Hamas attacks in southern Israel were still ongoing, she reposted a tweet asking about the terrorist massacre: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? losers.”
About one-third of her columns since Oct. 7 have been about the war against Hamas, with headlines that include “We cannot stand by and watch Israel commit atrocities”—published six days after the attack—and “destroying Gaza’s cultural heritage is a crime against humanity.”
She also frequently attempted to connect American racial politics to claims about Israeli “colonialism” and “oppression” of Palestinians.
“It should be no surprise that there are black solidarities with the Palestinian plight,” she wrote in an October 2023 column. “Many of us remember when, in 2014, Palestinians gave protesters of U.S. police brutality advice on how to deal with tear gas. After all, police in the United States were using the same tactics and equipment against protesters that the Israeli security forces were using.”
Attiah said that after her firing, she will focus on publishing a newsletter on Substack.
