How ‘The New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy (Israeli Dog Rape)

Time to ban the Daily Mail and Fox News for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation 

I still see terrorism supporters claim that October 7th was Israel executing the Hannibal Directive, so definitely people still deny it happened 

How ‘The New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy
Matti Friedman and Dan Senor on how Nicholas Kristof’s ‘New York Times’ column reflects a press corps that increasingly sees activism as its core mission. 

On Monday, The New York Times published an opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, Kristof recounts allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinians committed by Israeli soldiers, prison guards, and interrogators. The column swiftly provoked a firestorm, as many of its claims were revealed to be misleading, unverified, or demonstrably false. (For more on this, read Eli Lake’s “Nick Kristof’s ‘Dog Torture’ Claim About Israel Doesn’t Pass Muster,” and Haviv Rettig Gur’s “The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear.”)

But how does a piece like this end up in The New York Times in the first place? That’s the question Free Press columnist Matti Friedman explores in a recent interview with Dan Senor on the Call Me Back podcast. According to Friedman, the column reflects a broader shift in modern journalism: a media culture that, in his view, has traded its credibility to become “a weapon in the fight for justice.” It’s an essential critique—which is why we’re publishing a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. 
—The Editors

Dan Senor: I want to start by going through the main claims that Nicholas Kristof makes in his New York Times piece. What are these claims? Which ones are lies? Which are unfalsifiable? And which may have legs?

Matti Friedman: Kristof gives us a list of terrible abuses that he claims were directed at Palestinian detainees. He says he spoke to 14 people, most of whom are not named, and some of the material is sourced from anti-Israel NGOs. He does not seem to know the identities of some of the people he’s describing. He describes male detainees being raped with objects, a female detainee being raped over the space of two days in an Israeli prison, and sexual assault of another female detainee by Israeli guards. He describes one incident of sexual assault by a settler—not by a uniformed soldier, but an Israeli civilian in the West Bank. That one, as far as I know, is accurate, much to our shame. And the incident receiving the most of the attention is Kristof’s description of a sexual assault perpetrated against a Palestinian prisoner using a dog.

When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees.

But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being credulous about charges that are much, much harder to believe. After all, the facilities are equipped with cameras. There are commanders, there are lawyers. A much more effective piece would have stuck to what is plausibly true, but that would have been less viral.

DS: For those who haven’t read the piece, Kristof charges that Israeli authorities have trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

MF: The writer is staking his credibility on that anecdote, which really comes from the world of the darkest conspiracies. There are multiple anti-Israel conspiracies that involve animals. This is one subcategory, and it’s been floating around for quite a while.

It’s kind of like drug use, in that you need to constantly up the dosage. So, if you once could say Israel is an apartheid state and that got people agitated, at some point it stops delivering the same effect. So you start saying that Israel’s a genocidal state.

The dog charge has been floating around. It’s been ignored by mainstream press outlets until now, for good reason. But this article shows that the walls between the world of conspiracies and the world of the mainstream press have largely come down. Kristof has dismantled the wall between the insane stuff floating around online and the world of legacy media.

DS: You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sources are used, how the editorial decision-making works, and what the checks are on a reporter. Walk me through how a piece like this gets through.

MF: I was a correspondent for the AP from 2006 to 2011, and one thing that often isn’t clear to readers is the role NGOs play in creating the reporting readers actually see. The press corps is much weaker than it used to be—smaller staff, less experienced reporters, poor pay—and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle are much greater.

Into the vacuum created by that change come political NGOs, who have a lot of money and an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. When I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as smaller ones operating around this conflict, were mostly funded by European governments and progressive foundations. They became, essentially, the source of information for reporters. Human Rights Watch, for example, would come out with a report, and the AP would write it up as news.

When I read Kristof’s article, I saw this machinery right away. Kristof was handed a package by NGOs. He mentions Euro-Med [Human Rights Monitor], which has proven ties to Hamas and has openly claimed that Israel is using weapons to “vaporize” Palestinians and that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euro-Med is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. Kristof also mentions an anti-Israel activist named Sari Bashi, who is based in Ramallah. So local activists handed him the story, introduced him to his sources, and fed him the inflammatory, unverifiable material.

DS: As you say, Euro-Med—which has been flagged for ties to Hamas—is cited multiple times. How does a group like that become a primary source for the most influential newspaper in the world? How does it slip through the Times’ fact-checking process?

MF: It’s important to understand that the adults who were there 10 or 20 years ago are largely gone. The Times op-ed section once had an excellent journalist running it—James Bennet—who was pushed out in 2020 after a mob uprising over a conservative senator’s op-ed. So the show is now being run by activists. Things that would not have been journalistically viable 10 years ago now sail through, because much of the press has come to consider itself a weapon in the fight for justice.

So when Euro-Med comes to a guy like Kristof, it’s plausible that he sees information that helps him make the point that he wants to make, and decides not to look into it. If the Israeli government came to him with information that seemed equally hard to believe, he would vet it 100 times, and the New York Times’ fact-checkers would go over it with a fine-tooth comb. But because we’re working with a pretty obvious ideological script, this stuff gets in. There is a very large, very well-funded ideological campaign against Israel, and it’s being waged through dozens of NGOs. It’s being waged by arms of the United Nations. It’s being waged by parts of the academy and parts of the press, which have become activist in nature.

DS: Several reporters in the news section of The New York Times told me that this piece—which was published on the opinion page—would never have made it through the news process. Can you explain the difference between something on the opinion page and the news page?

MF: I don’t really buy the distinction between the opinion section and the news section. The news section of The New York Times reported early in the war that Israel had hit a hospital in Gaza and killed more than 500 people. In reality, a misfired rocket from Gaza had exploded outside the hospital, killing a much smaller number of people. That’s just one example of many.

My experience is that much of what is presented as news coverage is kind of passive-aggressive opinion. So instead of saying, “I think,” you have to write, “experts say.” Nicholas Kristof is honest enough to present this piece as opinion, but I don’t see much difference.

DS: In your piece in The Atlantic in 2014, you wrote, “The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it.” Twelve years later, The New York Times runs this piece in which Kristof himself writes, “There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” and “It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.” And yet he still concludes that sexual violence is standard operating procedure in Israel.

MF: I’m not saying I’m happy to be right about this, but the trends that I wrote about in 2014 are not only still relevant—they’ve been supercharged. The Times piece is an extreme example of a problem that I’ve been noticing for a long time. There are too many people inside legacy institutions who have a vision of journalism that does not include trying to understand what’s going on in very complicated corners of the world. It doesn’t include trying to grasp context, and it certainly doesn’t include rigorous confirmation of information before publication. All of these things are now seen as barriers to truth and justice. And by making that leap, these institutions have really committed suicide.

In the world of disinformation and social media, these institutions could have been islands of sanity. Instead, my colleagues decided that they didn’t want to cover the circus—they wanted to be in it.

DS: On the same day that Kristof’s column ran, The New York Times was allegedly sitting on the most comprehensive report ever assembled on Hamas’s sexual crimes on October 7. It is called the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, and it consists of 300 pages, 10,000 photographs, and 400 testimonies. Most of the content comes from actual Hamas videos and photographs. The report ran on CNN and in the Israeli media, but The New York Times published nothing on it until some 24 hours after Kristof’s column was published. How do you explain the timing?

MF: The timing seems unlikely to be coincidental. I don’t know exactly what the Times had and when they had it, but I think it’s safe to assume that Times staff had the report, which was distributed in advance.

I should say, the report doesn’t excuse everything that Israel has done since October 7. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t investigate credible allegations of sexual assault. I remain concerned about the people in charge of detention facilities and law enforcement in Israel. I do not have complete faith that the right people are running this, to be honest, or that we’re pursuing every allegation of misdeeds by our own soldiers.

At the same time, Kristof is very clear about the motivation behind his piece. He repeats several times that these allegations of sexual assault against Israel are meant to even out the allegations of sexual assault and rape against Hamas. Or, in his words, “Think of it this way. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” So he’s saying: Not only is what I’m writing all true, but it actually balances out the charges of, or the descriptions of, mass sexual assault and rape that we saw on October 7.

I recently had the opportunity to write an essay in The Free Press about new books coming out about the Gaza war, and I described how these books very explicitly do two things: They try to downplay October 7, and they make the case that Israel is so bad that October 7 was justified. These charges don’t make sense once you look at them. But they’re not meant to describe reality, just as Kristof’s essay is not meant to describe reality. It’s meant as an ideological weapon to enable the war against Israel.

DS: What he’s basically saying is Hamas is a sick, depraved society, and now we know Israel is a sick, depraved society. Isn’t it a shame that both societies are so broken and deviant and barbaric? It is the quintessence of moral equivalence.

MF: That’s the way of dealing with October 7. The anti-Israel campaign is vast. Billions of people see it as a priority to rid the world of Israel. October 7 poses a problem for those people, particularly in the West, because it was so obviously heinous and couldn’t be covered up easily. And when people can’t deny that it happened, the only other option is to make an argument that the Israelis deserved it, or that there’s no real difference between Israel and Hamas. I’m not sure how much Kristof understands about the use that’s being made of him. But he’s participating in a political campaign whose goals are obvious.

DS: You’ve explained the cost of this kind of work to journalism. What do you think the cost is to Israel?

MF: Israelis have come to realize that much of the criticism coming at them is not designed to make Israeli society better; it’s designed to make Israeli society go away.

It would be nice to be able to trust The New York Times. If there was an accurate exposé on human rights abuses in Israeli prisons, it would be good for Israelis to see that and say, This is real. This is something we need to take seriously. But we can’t, because the information has become ideological.

Even worse, the Israeli organizations that were created to police human rights in Israel—organizations like B’Tselem, or Breaking the Silence—have been co-opted by the international anti-Israel campaign. Today, despite being staffed by Israelis, they’re funded almost completely from abroad, and have effectively become franchises of the international left.

We need, as Israelis, to be able to have a discussion about the moral quality of our military and our detention facilities and the way we prosecute this war. We need to be able to have this discussion without cooperating with the forces trying to destroy the country. It is very hard to do that. And this reality ends up serving the people in Israeli politics who have no interest in human rights, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and others in the ruling party.

This has neutralized human rights discourse inside Israel at a moment when we really need it. One of the main challenges for us in this moment is preserving our soul and our morality and our moral compass amid this war. That would be much easier if we had trusted organizations that spoke to us in a language that we could understand and trust. And we don’t have that, in large part, because of the ferocious nature of the anti-Israel campaign.

DS: One of the members of our team recently wrote: “The hard part is that even if the worst claims in the piece are distorted or false, that doesn’t make the real failures”—meaning in the Israeli prison system—“any less painful.” I think that sentiment is shared by many in Israel and in the diaspora. What do you say to those listening who are concerned about problems in the Israeli prison system, but don’t know what or who to believe?

MF: We need to be able to have a discussion about Israel’s very real problems without playing into the hands of people trying to destroy the country. I always try to ask: Is this person trying to make Israel better, or make Israel go away? If the discussion is about how to make Israel go away, I’m not interested in it. If the discussion is about how to make Israel a better country, a more moral country, a more successful country, a better place to live for Jewish citizens, for Muslim citizens, I’m very interested in having the discussion.

In some ways, it’s easier, in this regard, to be Israeli than to be a Jew in the diaspora. Israelis have a pretty loud discussion about the right way forward for Israel, because we know it’s about making the country better. But in the diaspora, Jews need to acknowledge that a lot of criticism is not being made in good faith, and a lot of the actors trying to push it are giving us information that is fictional.

At the same time, we have to be able to look at our prison system and our military and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard, and we’re clearly failing. Terrible things are happening, as they are in the carceral systems in New York, or in Iraq. I wish Israel could say that we’re better than everyone else. I’m not sure that we can say that. We need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.

DS: Abuse happens in prison systems all over the world—that’s a conversation worth having. But that is not the conversation Kristof is having. When one responds to his framing by conceding ground on a different argument, one legitimizes what I think is blood libel.

MF: I agree. We need to be able to differentiate very clearly between two different discussions: One is how to make Israel better, the other is how to make Israel go away.

There is a very powerful, well-funded ideological campaign—which you might call anti-Zionism—waged across the Islamic world for a century and now increasingly through Western institutions: Columbia, Harvard, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the Times, the AP. We have to be able to name it as a campaign.

The wrong response to an essay like this is to say, “Well, this is true and this isn’t true.” The right response is to ask: Why does this exist, who’s driving it, and what effect it is having on our society?