Top Egyptian Film Critic Booted From Golden Globes Voting Body Over Antisemitic Writings

Shiryn Ghermezian

The 80th Golden Globes Award ceremony in Jan 2023. Photo: Screenshot

An Egyptian film critic writing for her country’s main newspaper has been removed from the voting body behind Hollywood’s prestigious Golden Globes ceremony, which honors the best US film and television productions in the eyes of foreign entertainment critics.

Howaida Hamdy — the deputy editor-in-chief of the state-owned news outlet Al-Akhbar, Egypt’s largest — was booted from the roster of voters last Sunday after the production company that stages the Golden Globes determined that she and two fellow members had violated the organization’s code of conduct “following investigations into complaints about their behavior.”

Hamdy’s frequent use of antisemitic tropes in her writing was highlighted by the pro-Israel media advocacy group CAMERA in a report published in August. In one review published last March, Hamdy attacked Palestinian-Dutch filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad for his portrayal of Palestinian terrorist operations against Israelis. “This is a fallacious and fraudulent view of Palestinian resistance and of the resistance and the martyrdom-seeking operations,” she wrote in a piece discussing Abu-Assad’s films Paradise Now and Huda’s Salon.

In the same piece, Hamdy accused Abu-Assad of not understanding “the difference between the terrorist and the self-sacrificing warrior” and for failing to appreciate that Palestinians engaging in violence were “defending a stolen homeland.”

Additionally, CAMERA’s investigation uncovered a number of incendiary tweets posted by Hamdy on the X/Twitter social media platform. In one post, she recycled a classic antisemitic trope by describing Hollywood as a “Zionist stronghold,” while in another, she pushed a popular conspiracy theory in the Middle East concerning the roots of Islamist terror, claiming that “[B]ehind every Islamist terrorist there is a Zionist-American planner who wiggles him. Removing the Islamists will not eliminate terrorism, the Islamists are just an instrument.”

As well as writing for Al-Akhbar, Hamdy has contributed to the entertainment magazine Akhbar Al-Nogoum, the online platform Akhbar Al-Youm, the London-based news outlet Al-Arab, and the Beirut-based online media platform Raseef22.

According to her biography posted on the Golden Globes website — which has since been deleted — in 2020, Hamdy “relocated to Los Angeles to continue her career as a reporter and movie critic specializing in international cinema.” She joined the Golden Globes voters roster in 2021, as part of an initial effort by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the ceremony’s sponsoring organization, to diversify its membership. The voters roster was expanded again in 2023 to include journalists and critics from Cameroon, Serbia, Cuba, Tanzania, and several other countries, boosting its present total membership to 310.

CAMERA welcomed the news of Hamdy’s expulsion from the Golden Globes’ voting roster.

“There are plenty of honest and gifted Middle Eastern journalists who deserve to be included. Unfortunately, Hamdy isn’t one of them,” CAMERA Executive Director Andrea Levin said in a statement.

“Far too often we’ve noticed Arabic-language media personalities concealing their bigoted commentary from English-speaking audiences. Hamdy’s duplicitous reviews are a perfect example of this ongoing problem which our staff has repeatedly exposed,” she added.