The Washington Free Beacon is of course a deeply right wing site, but my policy has been, as you know, to judge stories by their content and not by who publishes them. This story is about a bit of a schism at the New York Times involving Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape column” (archived here), in which he argued that Israel was guilty of widespread systemic sexual abuse, mostly of prisoners or detainees. There was widespread pushback against Kristof’s claims (see my posts here and here),
The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.
The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel.” It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.
“It wasn’t edited by the newsroom,” Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, “we probably wouldn’t have.” Then he provided a more definitive answer: “No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece.”
Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, “Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?” she answered, “Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.”
Kingsbury did also make the point that “The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column.”
There’s more, but that’s the gist. It’s hard to know what to make of this save that a big news-editor at the NYT says he wouldn’t have run that story. But he does qualify it as “that exact piece”, which leaves room for interpretation. Which “facts” would he have published as news? The rape of prisoners by trained dogs? The systematic rape and torture of Palestinian women who were detained? Since Kingsbury asserts that there were “no errors” in Kristof’s reporting, why did the news side of the paper neglect this story completely? Did they deem it sufficiently unsupported to not be worth publishing? Who knows?
What it does show is a crack in the Times‘s armor, to the extent that factual assertions made and vetted by the op-ed side of the paper wouldn’t pass muster with the news side. What’s surprising is that Kahn still has his job.
Here’s Kristof’s reporting on the dogs, the part that got the column all that attention. I hope Israel has investigated or is investigating these claims. If they’re true, someone needs to be punished:
“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
The fact that the New York Times published Kristof’s piece at just the right moment to blunt the impact of the Civil Commission’s 298 page report on sexual violence by Hamas* tells me much of what I need to know. I am not at all surprised that some are trying to distance themselves from the incident. Who would want to be associated with the kind of journalism that detonates an evidence-free flash-bang grenade in order to erase the record of the worst single attack against the Jewish people in 80 years? No person of good will would want to be so associated.
*
https://www.civilc.org/silenced-no-more
Sorry, Jerry, I don’t mean this to be rude, but what does it mean to be “deeply right wing” as opposed to just “conservative”? I feel like the term conservative has become passé, and that the Left favors “right wing”, which seems to carry overtones of fascism. I like the Free Beacon, although I don’t look at it regularly.
That’s one dumb Israeli official warning a journalist no less, “not to report… if you want to stay alive!” Makes a very weak case imo that the dog rape is true. It boggles the mind how you would train a dog to do that and do it without being noticed.
I would not exclude all that being said that human rights violations may have or not been committed.
I’m reminded of the cases that came out of Iraq and the US military police abuses.In those cases there were photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves.
I’m still struggling to get my head around how it would be physically possible for the act in question to occur, given dog anatomy…
Colin Wright, a biologist you can trust in a foxhole, addressed this dog issue.
I’m not a biologist, just an (adorable, btw) dog owner: it didn’t pass my smell test.
Further… Kristof has been the laughing stock of that newspaper for decades on a plethora of other issues. A class clown.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
{{ adorable dog } owner }, or { adorable { dog owner }} ?
🙂
Follow David’s X account and you’ll have your definitive answer. Little Davey is a long-haired heartthrob!
So the dog is a small long-hair (aka a “mop”) named Davey ?
Hopefully he doesn’t shed much.
🙂
The story sounds like the ship is deserting the sinking rat.
Or simply CYA.
The ludicrous trained rape dog fantasy is a particularly lurid product of an Arab Islamic mindset where dogs are regarded as “unclean” – therefore to be raped by one (as if that were even possible) would mean being banned from Paradise forever. Similar claims were made by Muslim men against US soldiers during the Iraq war. If Kristof’s dad was a Nazi he would probably be proud of his son for pushing sensationalist made-up garbage to blunt the impact of the detailed report on the sexual atrocities committed by Hamas.
Kristof doubled down on Piers Morgan’s show recently, claiming there are at least 3 medical cases of humans suffering rectal damage from being raped by dogs! He knows that the cases he was referring to were cases of rectal damage in dogs raped by humans, not the other way around. Kristof knows exactly what he is doing.
Let’s put this in the context of various Arab media blaming mossad for trained dolphins, sharks (in sharm el Sheik, Egypt), trained bees, of monstering the umma at various times.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Let’s put this in the context of various Arab media blaming mossad for trained dolphins, sharks (in sharm el Sheik, Egypt), trained bees, of monstering the umma at various times.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Without lies, Palestinian myth dies.
Did Kristof or any other worker wrote a piece on bodycams pictures recorded by terrorists on October 7th? Just saying.