Jeff Bezos’ Employee was Kidnapped, His Paper Promotes Hamas

On Oct 7, Sasha Troufanov, an Amazon engineer, was abducted by Hamas and his father was murdered. The massive international tech giant has maintained its silence about him despite urgings from Sasha’s fellow employees and family members to speak out.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s first Jewish CEO, tweeted briefly on Oct 9 that “the attacks against civilians in Israel are shocking and painful to watch” and claimed that he had “been in touch with our teammates there to make sure we do everything we can to help support their family’s (sic) and their safety, and to assist however we can in this very difficult time.”

He also promised to be “in close contact with our humanitarian relief partners on the ground and will be supporting their efforts. Hoping that peace arrives as soon as possible.”

After that glib message, there have been no further updates.

Amazon has refused to comment because it would be “too controversial” to speak out against the kidnapping of one of its employees. Not only Sasha, but his mother and his 73-year-old grandmother were also kidnapped. They were eventually traded for terrorists, but not Sasha.

The company has made public statements of support for Ukraine, after George Floyd’s death, and on other trending political issues, but avoided making any mention of the attack on Israel.

When Amazon Web Services, which Sasha worked for, held its ‘re:Invent 2023’ conference in Vegas, some of his friends hired billboard trucks to remind AWS of its missing member who should have been there at the product launch, but was instead being held captive by terrorists.

Again there was no corporate response.

“We shouldn’t even have to…ask management to acknowledge that we have an abducted employee,” a fellow worker said.

Internally, Muslim employees at Amazon have expressed support for terrorism and the company has refused to recognize Jews as an “affinity group” alongside black, gay, indigenous, Latinos and “body positive” corporate affinity groups.

After George Floyd’s death, Amazon denounced what it claimed was the “inequitable and brutal treatment of black people”. Founder Jeff Bezos posted a customer’s email complaining about the retail monopoly’s support for Black Lives Matter and sneered, “you’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose.”

Which kind of employees is he happy to lose? Whose lives don’t matter?

While Amazon has remained silent, the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by its executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, has never stopped attacking Israel or spreading Hamas propaganda.

The Washington Post has spent the Oct 7 war uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda while promoting the false claims that Israel is guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide”.

While media coverage has been terrible in general, the Post still managed to be worse.

On Oct 7, the Washington Post framed the mass murder of Israelis as a response to Israelis provoking Hamas by living in Jerusalem and visiting the Temple Mount: the holiest site in Judaism. In November, the paper used distorted numbers to smear Israel as being engaged in “killing children at a rate unprecedented in 21st-century conflict.” CAMERA senior research analyst Sean Durns accused the paper of contending that “the Hamas-run Health Ministry can sometimes be trusted with casualty counts”.

The Post’s obsessive propaganda left no stone unturned and so when Israel provided free medical care for newborn Arab Muslim babies from Gaza, the paper headlined it as “Israel’s war with Hamas separates Palestinian babies from their mothers.”

When the Post wanted to find an example of “brutal voyeurism” from the war, it did not lead with the Hamas footage of terrorists brutally murdering and kidnapping civilians, but with an Israeli Navy unit shooting Hamas terrorists trying to attack Israel, which the paper described as “using assault rifles and grenades to blast away at people floating in the water.”

When the article finally got around to mentioning the footage of the Hamas atrocities, it depicted it as Israeli propaganda being distributed to “enrage” Americans and American support for Israel was described, in another article, as due to the “decades-long influence of a powerful lobby.”

Earlier in 2023, the Washington Post crossed a line when it ran a story describing how its reporters had embedded with a “branch of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is listed as a terrorist group by Israel and the United States.” In exchange for the propaganda, the paper agreed “that full names and specific locations be withheld” meaning that the newspaper was collaborating with an Islamic terrorist group.

But there are larger concerns about the Washington Post that encompass not only the paper, but Bezos, and the state sponsors of Hamas in Qatar. The most vocal pro-Islamist figure at the Post is Karen Attiah. Attiah, the daughter of African immigrants, serves as the paper’s Global Opinions Editor, and its all-around propagandist waging war on the non-Muslim world.

Attiah rocketed to fame during the Jamal Khashoggi hoax in which the old friend of Osama bin Laden was falsely depicted as a journalist and human rights campaigner, when in reality he was an Islamist terrorist supporter who was promoting material created for him by his sponsors in Qatar. Editing has since been halted on her book about the terror supporter for unknown reasons.

But rather than paying a price for her involvement in the Khashoggi hoax, Attiah used it to boost her prominence even while spreading lies to benefit Islamists.

Attiah attacked France for trying to crack down on Muslim terrorism by falsely claiming that President Macron “wants to give Muslim kids ID numbers to go to school.” Rather than suffer any consequences, the Washington Post allowed her to write an article complaining that France was responding to Muslims beheadings of its people with “feverish fragility.” She claimed that Brexit was motivated by “Islamophobia” and so was fighting “honor killings” among Muslims.

So it comes as little surprise that Attiah has spent the Hamas war in a state of endless fury.

Attiah ranted that she would “never forgive” Biden for supporting Israel, and claimed a week after the Hamas attacks that “people are showing themselves to be okay with genocide”.

“This is not a war against Hamas. This is Israel waging a colonial-style, punitive massacre against Palestinians,” she argued. “What Israel and the US are doing in real time to Palestinians activate very recent, unhealed trauma around Western violence against Africans,” she claimed.

Israeli Jews, she contended, were colonists. And she suggested that Jews were perpetrating a Holocaust against Muslims. “Israel’s barbarity knows no bounds,” she shrieked.

By December, Attiah’s desperate hunger for pro-terrorist propaganda had reduced her to attacking Beyonce for not boycotting Israel. “When it comes to speaking out about Israel and Gaza, her silence says a lot about the immense cultural power — and structural powerlessness — of black women.”

Attiah’s presence at the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos remaining silent while one of his employees is in Hamas captivity form part of a pattern. After the Post’s Khashoggi hoax, Bezos claimed that nude photos of him had been hacked by Saudi Arabia; supposedly offended by the paper’s support for the Qatari regime change operation using the Post as a platform.

The bafflingly tawdry story of a billionaire’s peccadillos had larger implications. It wasn’t just a rogue editor who was promoting Qatari interests, it was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

And Qatar stands behind Hamas.

Why won’t Amazon address the kidnapping of one of its employees by Hamas? Is it because of its executive chairman and his paper’s ties to the state sponsor of Hamas?

Jeff Bezos claims to be a humanitarian, but neither he nor his company have anything to say about his own abducted employee. While Bezos’ company has nothing to say about Sasha Troufanov, his paper promotes Hamas propaganda.

The lives of his employees don’t matter to Bezos, those of Hamas do.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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