What NYT should’ve asked before publishing its Palestinian rape story | The Australian - "The lies and editorial failures of The New York Times are too regular to be coincidental. You can read about them in its longest-running serial, under the headline, “Correction”, on page two. Last week it went barking mad. One of its most celebrated writers, Nicholas Kristof, who has worked on the newspaper since 1984, wrote that “Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have … cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners”. The newspaper’s headline writer took that at face value and wrote above Kristof’s report, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians. This report stated that “in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children – by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards”. I have edited major newspapers and written for them all my life. I know how newsrooms work. Among the problems with The New York Times’ staff is that they don’t. If some deviant genius in the Israel Prison Service has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, that’s page one. It’s the splash. It is not a throwaway line 2500 words into a 3750-word report. Now there are questions to be asked by an editor of the reporter who wrote that. The New York Times did not bother, so I will:
Can a dog be trained to rape a human?
I interviewed on Tuesday a dog behaviour expert of 34 years’ standing and he told me that “canine erection is a reflexive neuroendocrine response to female reproductive pheromones – it is not a voluntary behaviour and cannot be trained or reliably triggered on command”. He added: “The specific act alleged is not biologically plausible.”
What sort of dog does the Israel Prison Service use?
They must be big, powerful and aggressive to rape an uncooperative prisoner. The Israel Prison Service primarily uses a local Middle Eastern species known as Canaans. They are a medium-sized breed first used as seeing-eye dogs, so very calm – more your golden retriever that rottweiler...
What was the command the Palestinian prisoners recalled hearing so often?
It seems Kristof forgot to ask.
What was the source of these extraordinary claims?
According to the author, it was Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
Who is behind that organisation?
Kristof would have known this, but must not have been asked. The answer is Ramy Abdu, a Gaza-born Palestinian activist, who is its founder and chairman. The Middle East conflict has divided many reporters who cannot agree on who is the aggressor or even who is to blame.
Does the reporter have a dog in this fight?
You bet he does. He once launched a campaign to be the Democratic governor of Oregon. But Kristof lives in New York, not Oregon, so did not meet the residency rules. From the other side of the Earth I’d have figured that out. Almost 70 per cent of America’s progressive Democrats, including New York’s Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who does not recognise Israel’s right to exist, are opposed to Israel’s defensive war to eliminate Hamas in Gaza after its young fighters stabbed, shot, blew up, beheaded, raped, set fire to at least two people, and sodomised innocents. Even a dog wouldn’t do that... One claim he highlights is by a prisoner he tells us is a Palestinian freelance journalist. Palestinian freelance journalists have been behind many of the absurd lies about Israel published by The New York Times and broadcast by the BBC since October 7, 2023. This man apparently claimed he was stripped and abused. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots’,” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. Kristof adds, as if fact, “then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners”. The Palestinian recalled smelling cigarette smoke. “I realised it was their smoking break,” he said. Smoking is banned in Israel’s prisons, which are monitored by cameras. There are no smoking breaks. The Australian would never have published such a piece. Had we ever done so, both the reporter and the editor who oversaw it would have been sacked for vile bias and/or unpardonable negligence. To write that it is a standard operating procedure of Israel’s prison guards to rape, sexually humiliate or otherwise mistreat Palestinian prisoners is an incendiary charge that should have had behind it deep research and verified gathered evidence. His newspaper responded to questions about the Kristof column by saying that it was “deeply reported”. Notwithstanding my 51 years in newspapers, I don’t know what that means... The New York Times insists Kristof’s words had been “rigorously and meticulously fact-checked”, and pointed out that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. These are long discredited. Last year The Washington Post won the “breaking news” Pulitzer for its coverage of the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump beneath the headline “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally”. Also last year, the Pulitzer board saw fit to award Palestinian activist Mosab Abu Toha the prize for commentary for his essays on the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza”. He is careless and nasty, Toha. This is how he described one of the innocents, Emily Damari, held by Gazan savages in a tunnel for 471 days after they shot her. She lost two fingers and had festering open wounds: “How on Earth is this girl called a hostage?” The New York Times is the newspaper that has won the most Pulitzer Prizes. I rest my case."
The Implausibility of the New York Times ‘Dog Rape’ Lie is the Whole Point - "A leftist cover-up to distract attention from Islamic atrocities. There are two ways to smear someone.
1. You make up a plausible story, e.g.. he’s having an affair, he embezzles money.
2. You make up something shocking, insane and unbelievable, e.g. he has a thing for gerbils.
The gerbil story is “sticky.” It’s not plausible, but that doesn’t matter. The shocking and disgusting nature of it is such that it was forever associated with Richard Gere. It’s something people repeat and then laugh about. Fast forward to now and just as Israel was about to release a report on atrocities and rapes by Hamas, some pro-Hamas groups coordinated with the New York Times to preempt it with a bizarre column accusing Israel of getting dogs to rape imprisoned terrorists... mission accomplished. Rather than talking about the Hamas sexual assaults that happened, everyone is talking about the Times’ own version of the gerbil story. Islam obsessively hates dogs, so it naturally picked dogs over gerbils, but Islamic terrorists and propagandists put out a lot of fake animal stories involving Israel.
Hamas arrested a dolphin who was caught spying for the Jewish State. Hezbollah busted an eagle working for the Jews, Sudan took down a spy vulture and Egypt arrested a Zionist duck (or possibly a Zionist stork). Iran nabbed 14 squirrels for spying for Israel.
None of this third world conspiracy slop was exciting enough for the New York Times which knows that the story needed to have a shocking sexual angle. And now the sort of thing we used to see in MEMRI clips from Iraqi TV runs in the New York Times as a cover-up effort to suppress the actual story... *October 7 atrocities* That is Islamic culture. Lying about it is leftist media culture."
David Harsanyi on X - "These statements just scream guilt. Read this closely and you'll understand that they have zero corroboration for any of the actual claims. In the story of the 23 year old woman, for example, Kristof conveniently fails to provide a single fact that would allow any follow-up investigation. No place or time or name or reason for detainment. This should be a glaring red flag for any editor. And if corroboration of the events already exists in the public record, why the anonymity and a complete lack of detail? Now, that's just dealing with the existence of the accuser, not even her claims. What part of the dog rape story was fact checked? It's so nonsensical that any real editor would have a million questions. And the named accusers in the "opinion" piece-- I notice they stressed this to wrongly insinuate that the basic ethical guidelines for reporting are different -- are violent activists (and an accused sex pest and crank with zero connections to any of this other than spreading conspiracies.) Failing to give that context or possible motivation is another huge red flag, as any real editor knows, as well. I doubt even the Times would have published something so incredibly shoddy if it wasn't written by a big-name columnist aiming at the left's favorite target (tho, who knows these days?). It doesn't meet the minimal standard of ethical journalism. Probably because most, or all of it, is a lie."
Is this the most ridiculous lie about Israel ever? - "No sensible person could possibly believe the appalling claim, promoted by The New York Times this week, that Israel is “training dogs to rape Palestinians”. Still, this is far from the first time that nonsensical allegations have been made about Israel’s supposed use of animals. In 2015, for example, Hamas announced that it had captured a dolphin – which, it claimed, was working as an Israeli spy. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of impugning the integrity of these deranged terrorist maniacs. None the less, I can’t help harbouring certain doubts about this assertion. A dolphin, it seems to me, would make a less than ideal candidate for the role of intelligence agent... Mind you, dolphins are not the only animals that have been accused of spying for Benjamin Netanyahu. Others include eagles, lizards and even cows. In 2023, a Palestinian villager told the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper: “These are recruited and trained cattle.”"
The anti-Jewish fever dream of The New York Times - "It’s now clear that we are living through a civilisational emergency. Just as the Palestinian Arabs tried to bring about the destruction of Israel in the attacks on October 7, 2023, so the Islamic world has deployed the cultural apparatus of the West to destroy the Jews. The spurious distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is no longer even being deployed as a fig-leaf. Attacks on Jews are out of control in both Britain and America. In London, such attacks are now taking place almost daily. In New York last week, a mob of Islamists and leftists besieged Park East synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; this week, another such mob set upon Jews outside a synagogue in Brooklyn... We are witnessing a reversion to primitive, pre-modern forms of Jew-hatred... The allegation that dogs were used to rape prisoners, said by experts to be anatomically impossible, is as ridiculous as it is obscene. Tellingly, it combines certain hallmarks of the Palestinian Arab mindset — the belief that dogs are filthy, that Jews are also filthy, and the habitual and false projection onto the Israelis of crimes that the Palestinian Arabs themselves commit against them. Indeed, Kristof has drawn upon precisely this poisonous Palestinian thinking. The “dog rape” claim has been pushed since 2024 by the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Kristof treats this source as credible. It’s anything but. It’s previously claimed that the Israel Defence Forces harvested the organs of Palestinian corpses, another disgusting fantasy drawn from the depths of the deranged Palestinian mind. The Israelis have listed the group’s founder, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative. The day after the October 7 slaughter and kidnapping of 1,200 Israeli innocents, Abdu posted on X that the perpetrators were “knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud”. Kristof produced not one shred of evidence for his claims. His sources were either anonymous or belonged to the echo chamber advocating the mass murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel. He quoted terrorism supporters whose own claims of abuse had changed over time. Honest Reporting noted that Sami al Sai, introduced by Kristof as a “freelance journalist,” has a long record of celebrating terrorists on social media and was jailed twice for incitement. The claims he made to Kristof about his alleged abuse differed in key details from the story he fed the Israeli “human rights” group B’Tselem last year. More seriously still, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused Kristof of misrepresenting his words so that he was made to appear falsely as validating these allegations. In short, the article was a nauseating travesty. But this wasn’t merely recycled Hamas propaganda demonising Israel. The “dog rape” allegation was a psychotic fever dream straight out of medieval, Nazi and Soviet anti-Jewish demonology. Kristof wrote that some may wonder whether Palestinian witnesses might fabricate accusations to smear Israel, but this struck him as “far-fetched”. Just think about that. To Kristof, it wasn’t “far-fetched” that a dog could be trained to rape a man. What was instead “far-fetched” to him was the suggestion that the Palestinians might be lying to harm Israel. But that’s exactly what they do all the time. Kristof, his editors and other Israel-haters believe Palestinian lies — however absurd and impossible —because they want to believe them. They regard the Palestinians as the wretched and oppressed victims of the Israelis. That’s why it’s considered as “far-fetched” to believe that the Palestinians could do anything monstrous to the Israelis as to believe that the Israelis could be the Palestinians’ victims. That’s also why so many of the Israel-haters have denied the sexual violence done to the Israelis on October 7. The day after Kristof’s travesty, the results were published of a two-year Israeli commission of inquiry into the gender-based atrocities committed during the October 7 massacre and subsequent captivity of some 251 people, even young children, dragged that day into the Gaza Strip. The commission, founded by legal scholar Cochav Elkayam-Levy, drew upon more than 10,000 photographs and video segments; more than 1,800 hours of visual material; and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members... This report constitutes meticulously sourced, authoritative research that throws an even more shocking light on Kristof’s warped and malevolently sourced message. The New York Times has been accused of running the Kristof article the day before in order to diminish the Israeli report. Whether or not this was so, Kristof himself suggested that his aim was to diminish, relativise and downgrade what happened on October 7. His article, he said, showed that “the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day”. No other country is treated like this. Only Israelis are to be denied the unique reality of their suffering. Abuse happens in all prisons, and Israel is surely no different. But only Israel is subjected to psychotic lies about it. That’s because Israel is the world’s only Jewish country, and the way Israel is being abused is the way Jews alone have always been abused. The claim that dogs are trained to rape Palestinian Arab men is merely a modern version of ancient blood libels — that the Jews were poisoning the wells, or murdering Christian children to bake their blood into Passover matzah. Today’s starvation libel, the genocide libel, the baby-killers libel, the harvested organs libel — and now the “rape dogs” libel — all transmit the same message as the murderous blood libels of old: that the Jews are evil, demonic, inhuman. They are therefore to be excluded from the field of human empathy. They are to be branded as monsters and their suffering is to be denied... “You rape men, you rape children,” screamed the mob outside Park East synagogue. “You f**king sociopath, I see it in your eyes.” Jews are being hunted down on the streets of Western cities just as they were once hunted down in medieval Christian towns. Rampaging mobs were then driven by bloodlust, inflamed by the Catholic Church which told them that the Jews were the devil. Astoundingly, Jews are now facing the same kind of religious mania — this time driven by Islam and left-wing ideology."
Eitan Fischberger on X - "In 2014, Nicholas Kristof had to write a humiliating blog post titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” He admitted he’d spent years promoting Somaly Mam’s graphic “trafficked-as-a-child” horror story, only to discover she had apparently fabricated much of it. Kristof conceded he got played, added editor’s notes to his old columns, and said he wished he’d never written about her. Fast-forward to today, and he’s publishing an article based on interviews with 14 Palestinians claiming Israeli guards raped them with batons, carrots, and even dogs. They offer no corroborating evidence. Any chance they’re lying or exaggerating? Kristof responds that “To me that seems far-fetched.” But back in 2014, he wrote “We journalists often rely to a considerable extent on people to tell the truth…. We’re less suspicious if someone claims something stigmatizing, like being trafficked into a brothel.” Except this time, the alleged victims are claiming sexual abuse in Israeli prisons — the furthest thing from stigmatizing in elite media circles. In fact, it’s a golden ticket to instant sympathetic coverage in the New York Times, global headlines, and virtually no risk of being called a liar. The man got burned by unverified trauma porn once, and now he seems eager to do it again to satisfy his insatiable lust for fictitious Israeli atrocities."
Maarten Boudry on X - "I wouldn’t have cancelled my subscription over one idiotic column. What clinched it was the fact that @NYTimes unequivocally “stands by” the story and considers its journalism as rigorous as any other news report. Fuck you, NYT. "All published Opinion pieces must meet high standards for accuracy and fairness. Nick’s column met those standards. The distinction between Times newsroom articles and Opinion pieces is not a distinction of reporting or rigor. It is a distinction of form and purpose.""
Meme - Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby: "BREAKING: A massive civil war has reportedly emerged within the New York Times, with many journalists questioning the credibility of Kristof's piece. One NYT journalist stated: "I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.""
Craig Iskowitz @craigiskowitz: "just now they're embarrassed? this has been going on for decades."
"Number of Articles in the NY Times Expressing Empathy
*2.2-24x as many pro-Palestinian as pro-Israeli/pro-hostage articles*"
Talking Point IL | Facebook - "In case you have missed it: On May 11th, the New York Times has published an ‘opinion’ column accusing Israel, among other things- of letting trained dogs to “violate bodily autonomy” of detainees. If I rephrase it politely… You did not misread that. After you are done laughing (or crying), I perhaps should remind you that it is by far not the first time that Israel was blamed for controlling the animal kingdom. The list below is for your entertainment and perhaps reassessment of the credibility of some mainstream outlets.
➡️ 2010 “Assault Sharks”: The BBC quoted an accusation alleging that Israel is behind the shark attacks in Egypt.
➡️ 2013 “Spy Kestrel”: The BBC reported of a Kestrel “detained” in Turkey and X-Rayed for Israeli espionage equipment.
➡️ 2014 ”Sabotage boars”: The Palestinian News Agency WAFA, Reported accusations against Israel of using wild boars against the Palestinians.
➡️ 2015 “Mossad Dolphin”: The BBC quoted a report about “Seizing an Israeli spy dolphin by the shores of Gaza”.
➡️2018 “Intelligence reptiles”: The Times of Israel quoted Iran’s ex military chief blaming Israel for using lizards and chameleons to spy on the Iranian nuclear facilities.
➡️2019 “Hyena squads”: A Palestinian NGO coalition- indirectly funded through partner NGOs by the EU, and named “Stop the Wall”- accused the Israeli authorities of “setting hyenas” on the Palestinian populations.
➡️ 2021 “Surveillance cattle”: The Palestinian newspaper “Al Quds” published a story about Israelis “training cattle” to spy on Palestinians.
➡️ 2022, “Zionist Bees”: The Gaza-based “Shehab” news agency, Reposted claims by pro Palestinian NGOs that Israel uses genetically modified bees and drones disguised as bees- to monitor activities in Gaza.
Also, one should also not forget about the
• “Zionist poison-resistant rats” brought up by mainstream Palestinian news agencies in 2008 and 2023.
• The Islamic Republic of Iran “detaining” 14 squirrels in 2007. And other cases of detaining “Zionist spy” vultures and eagles in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. ✏
️🗒️ Apparently claims that would normally be considered ridiculous- for many people become very plausible once the word “Israel” is attached to them."
