I woke up this morning to find this Substack commentary written by my friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry.

Few things have shocked me more than the open acquiescence—or even outright support—of the international “humanitarian” community for Egypt’s decision to seal, and even reinforce, its heavily fortified border with Gaza throughout the war. Early on, Israel tried to negotiate with Egypt to allow Gazan civilians out of harm’s way so it could target Hamas more effectively. The international “humanitarian” community reacted with outrage to the very suggestion. Meanwhile, Egypt threatened to tear up its peace treaty with Israel and declared that it was “ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody would approach a grain of sand [in Sinai].”

You expect that kind of cynicism toward “fellow Arabs” from a corrupt and authoritarian regime. But from self-proclaimed Western “humanitarians”? Apparently, they’d rather keep Gazan civilians trapped in an active war zone, where Hamas could exploit them as human shields, because evacuation would supposedly amount to “ethnic cleansing.” And all this while they were hurling the obscene “genocide” libel at Israel. Because that’s obviously how you would behave if you sincerely believed a genocide was taking place, right? Prevent people from escaping? It’s either callousness, mendacity, or both.

By way of analogy, imagine that Poland had sealed its border with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, telling the world: “Why should we let in Ukrainian civilians? We don’t want a bunch of Nazis in our country.” Bad enough. Now imagine the “humanitarian” community supporting that stance—insisting that Poland bore no responsibility for Russia’s aggression, and that admitting Ukrainians would amount to “ethnic cleansing” because Moscow might never allow them to return.

In this brilliant article, my good friend Shany Mor uses a series of clever thought experiments to expose the revealed preferences of the “humanitarians” in the Gaza war. The conclusions are deeply disturbing. They reveal an astonishing level of indifference—whether intentional or not—to the very people these organizations claim to care about. If they have to chose between demonizing Israel and helping Palestinians, they always chose the latter.

I will never, ever, ever donate to any of these organizations again—even though I supported many of them regularly in the past.

I’ll mention below which organizations Maarten deems not worthy of donations. But you’ll want to read Shany Mor’s piece, which I discuss below.

Note as well that Maarten has two related articles. One, published in The Jewish Chronicle in January (Maarten is not Jewish) is called, “Europe’s silenced scholars: the forced Gaza genocide ‘consensus’,” which has this paragraph:

In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

And a very nice essay on his substack site (originally published in Quillette) called “They don’t believe it either,” which is mostly about how those who accuse Israel of “genocide” don’t believe that accusation. An excerpt:

The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?

The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.

Shany Mor is described by Tablet as “an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a Research Fellow at the Chaikin Center for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa. He served as a Director for Foreign Policy on the Israeli National Security Council.” His Substack, “Roter Faden“, began in April, and you can subscribe to help get it off the ground.  The article mentioned by Maarten is otherwise free to access, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below.

Mor considers the “epistemic community of nongovernmental organizations, activists, experts, scholars, and even a few formal intergovernmental bodies united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice,:” and divides what he calls these “Humanitarians” into four groups.  He then performs a thought experiment on the groups, to wit:

Take everything you know about the course of the war which began on October 7, about the capabilities and actions of the belligerent parties, about the war’s duration and casualties, and about the terms of the various ceasefires, but pretend you know nothing about the claims and calls to action of the Humanitarians. And ask yourself what you might expect them to say and do under each of the following four hypotheses about the rough overlapping consensus of their collective preferences.]

H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.

H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.

H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas’ power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel’s freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.

H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war’s strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel’s essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.

Mor then says what one would expect from each group if the characterization were true. (Of course he’s operating with the wisdom of hindsight here, but that doesn’t negate his argument.)

Did you decide which was the most accurate characterization of the worldwide “humanitarian” response to the war? In light of what Maarten said above about the border with Egypt, and the total neglect of Hamas’s stealing of humanitarian aid to Israel, as well as the distortions about the “starvation” situation in Gaza and the push to stop Israel from taking military action, I guessed correctly. Yes, it’s H3. Here’s what Mor “retrodicted” under that scenario:

H3 would see immediate demands for Israel to forgo any military offensive against Hamas at all, effectively locking in the tactical gains Hamas made on October 7, and opening the door for future October 7-style operations as a means to securing political advances for the Palestinian cause. Humanitarians would do nothing to get Palestinians out of a war zone, and they would boycott aid mechanisms that threatened Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza. They would pressure Western governments to cut off weapons supplies to the IDF and to suspend trade relations with Israel. They would mobilize international courts to try to stay Israel’s hand on the battlefield in order to limit Hamas’ defeat. And they would use their influence to push governments to hand the Palestinians tangible diplomatic achievements that could have been secured for decades with a peace agreement for free as a reward for the war launched on October 7.

That is pretty much what happened: the calls for Israel to not retaliate, or calls for a cease-fire, began even before Israel attacked and entered Gaza to retaliate. The lack of criticism of Egypt for sealing its borders was deafening to some of us, though most people—perhaps on purpose—didn’t even consider the implications of that silence.  The pressure on Israel is obvious: Douglas Murray said something like, “Israel is the only country in the world that is not allowed to win a defensive war.” Many apologists said that Hamas’s attack was justified retaliation for Israel’s oppression of the territory, despite the fact that Israel booted the Jews out of Gaza in 2005 and handed it to Palestinians.  They had, in effect, a state, but then elected Hamas, which ruined whatever valid governance Gaza had. (Don’t forget that the Palestinians had rejected a two-state solution half a dozen times before.)

Mor’s conclusions:

The war has provoked a lot of anguished discussion about the role of international law and global civil society, to say nothing of the role of international norms and the “rules-based order.” But the epistemic community that claims for itself the role of protector of those values is due for a serious moral reckoning too.

And once that reckoning begins, it shouldn’t limit itself just to the Humanitarians’ actions following October 7. Critics of Israel’s government often point to its role in supposedly propping up the Hamas regime in Gaza in the years before October 7, supposedly as a counterweight to the more moderate Palestinian Authority operating in the West Bank. It’s a legitimate critique, voiced domestically in Israel as well. But it’s worth remembering that Israel’s role in propping up the Hamas regime was tiny compared to that of international organizations such as UNRWA, MSF, and others who took care of crucial governance functions for the de facto Hamas statelet during its two-decade reign in the Gaza Strip, freeing it to hijack all the Strip’s resources for tunnel digging and weapons smuggling and manufacture. And these were joined by the experts and agencies who invented bespoke international norms after 2007 that meant that any Israeli action that we now know could have prevented October 7 would have been decried as a war crime.

Oh, and what were the NGOs that were in group 3? Maarten got a list from Claude that you can see here; it includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights.  The question he posed to Claude was this:

Which international humanitarian NGOs or organizations have criticized the Israeli proposal early in the recent Gaza war to evacuate Gazan civilians to the Sinai peninsula, worrying that it might amount to ethnic cleansing, or arguing that Egypt has no responsibility to help Israel’s war efforts? Give me names and links please.

Maarten added, “Amnesty was appalling, as usual.”  Amnesty International has gone the way of the ACLU and SPLC: ideologically captured by “progressives.”

As for the “g-word”, I write off those who accuse Israel of genocide as either ignorant blockheads or antisemites.

If you’re getting weary of the endless but necessary attacks on Nicholas Kristof for his misleading and almost antisemitic column about Israel’s “policy” of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners, Roy K. Altman has written in the Free Press the definitive critique of Kristof’s column—that is, until investigations by Israel reveal more information.

Wikipedia identifies Altman as “a Venezuelan-American lawyer and jurist who serves as a United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida” and also identifies him as Jewish.

You can read Altman’s column by clicking below—if you subscribe to the Free Press.

The “miscarriage of journalism” is, overall, the promulgation of “fake news” by Kristof: accusations that are improperly vetted (if at all), which come from questionable sources, and which are contradicted by existing Israeli policy and behavior. Altman’s thesis is that this kind of journalism subverts the “marketplace of opinions” that, it’s been said, is necessary for the American public to judge what is true. Excerpts from Altman and others are indented; prose that is flush left is mine:

. . . we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

Today, this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false information—especially on the internet. But it’s one thing to have our geopolitical and ideological enemies—whether China, Russia, or the Muslim Brotherhood—pushing unverified claims about our closest allies into our cell phones. It’s another thing entirely for The New York Times, a supposed “paper of record,” and one of its Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to offer a story that—in its disregard of basic evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing side’s position, and its inversion of common sense—violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.

In his explosive essay, Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of “standard operating procedure.” Kristof’s claim is thus not merely that a few rogue Israeli prison guards sometimes behave illegally—as happens in all Western democracies, including our own. It is, instead, that the Israeli government has implemented a systemic policy of deploying sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners on a massive scale.

Altman also faults the timing of the column, which came out the evening before the Civil Commission’s issued its 298-page report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that the Commission offered this report to the paper but the paper wasn’t interested.  The paper denies this, so for the time being we have a “he said/she said” situation. Regardless, Altman avers that the “psychological doctrine of primacy” argues that “a fact finder is often most persuaded by the story he hears first”, implying that Kristof, regardless of the deficiencies of his piece, should at least have held off publishing it until the Civil Commission’s report came out.  We won’t go further into this issue, as Altman finds three major faults with the column:

On the merits, Kristof’s article violates three central precepts of our legal system: It disregards basic rules of evidence gathering; it refuses to investigate the opposing side’s views; and it ignores logic and common sense.

Within this list of three there are buried two other sub-lists, which makes the piece a bit confusing. But Altman’s claims and his accusations of Kristof are pretty clear.  I’ll number the main claims as 1, 2, and 3, with sub-lists given letters as well as numbers.

1.) The column is unfair by making uncheckable claims.  

Let’s start with fairness. One of the fundamental rules of our justice system is that a man should be permitted to confront his accuser. Whether in civil or criminal cases, we have for hundreds of years rejected the English Star Chamber’s technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in secret. This principle is so essential to any basic system of fairness that it appears repeatedly throughout our laws—from the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause and its guarantee of public trials to our hearsay rules, which preclude out-of-court statements the accused never had an opportunity to cross-examine. But Kristof’s article relies mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility—much less their political or ideological affiliations—cannot be tested and thus cannot be known.

Here we have four sub-points that expand on this claim:

Kristof justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major problems with this excuse.

1a. There is no evidence of retribution against prisoners who claimed to be sexually assaulted, and some claims changed over time:

Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems with al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he was treated badly,but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing.

. . . But the point here is that, far from suffering any retribution for complaining about his detention, al-Sai was later freed, and Kristof never suggests that he’s since been subject to any form of punishment.

1b. Israel has in place an often-used system for registering and adjudicating prisoner’s complains about mistreatment

Two,any cursory review of Israeli legal databases would reveal that Israeli prisons allow Palestinian prisoners to file complaints about the conditions of their confinement—and that these complaints do get filed. Indeed, since 2023, Israel has received 182 such complaints filed by Israel Prison Service detainees from the Gaza Strip. . . But the point is that Kristof offers not a single shred of evidence that any of the Palestinian prisoners who filed complaints has ever been subjected to retribution—much less that this speculation about retribution has ever been a feature of the Israeli prison system.

1c. Kristof’s insistence on anonymity makes his allegations uncheckable. 

Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses. No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims.

1d. The accused has a right to the details of accusations, which gives them a chance to defend themselves. “The accused” here include onot just IDF soldiers and prison officials, but Israel itself, which is threatening to sue the paper.

Four, we should acknowledge that it’s always hard for victims of sexual assault to advance their claims publicly. But any system committed to basic fairness recognizes that the accuser’s preference for anonymity must bend to the accused’s right to confront the claims against him. And that’s not just because we want to allow the accused to test the reliability of the accuser’s claims. It’s also because we presume that the mere act of declaring something publicly itself evinces some degree of credibility.

Kristof fails to mention, for example, that Euro-Med, one of his principal sources, is  an organization with known ties to Hamas and has made false claims about Israel before, including the blood libel that Israel harvests organs of prisoners.

On to the second major point:

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2.) Kristof failed to investigate “the opposing side’s position”, including systemic aspects of Israeli law that would make widespread abuse improbable.  Again Altman breaks this down into a sublist of three items:

2a. Kristof doesn’t mention Israeli laws prohibiting sexual abuse of prisoners. 

First, in advancing his claim that Israel permits or encourages sexual abuse of detainees as a matter of state policy, Kristof fails even to mention that sexual offenses are strictly prohibited under Israel’s penal code. Indeed, the Israeli legal system imposes enhanced penalties when sexual offenses, including by security personnel, are motivated by race, skin color, or national origin. And Israeli military forces are bound by a host of additional directives, which further protect prisoners from state-sponsored violence, including sexual violence.

Altman implies that Kristof was trying to hide this fact.  Well, yes, probably, but shouldn’t we know that this conduct is against the law? What’s worse is that Kristof also fails to mention that similar Palestinian prisoners’ allegations of abuse have led to serious prison sentences for over a dozen Israeli abusers.

2b. Kristof fails to mention that there’s a special unit of Israeli police designed to investigate claims of prison misconduct. 

Kristof likewise fails to disclose that there’s an elite unit in Israel’s police force, called Lahav 433, tasked with investigating misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service. Now, it’s entirely possible that Israel created this unit inside what’s known as the “Israeli FBI” and filled it with elite servicemembers who do nothing but sit in an office all day, twiddling their thumbs and happily allowing misconduct to go unchecked. The far more plausible inference, I submit, is that Israel didn’t create this elite investigative unit simply to do nothing. But the point is that we don’t know—and cannot know—the answers to any of these questions from Kristof’s “opinion” piece because he never bothered to mention this unit, never thought to interview its members, and never investigated the extent to which it actually enforces Israeli law.

Well, the existence of such a unit doesn’t prove that there wasn’t misconduct, but it does show that there were quite a few deterrents to misconduct.

2c.  A quote from a former Prime Minister of Israel was presented, but a later clarification of that quote by the PM was ignored. Perhaps worse than the two omissions above is Kristof’s shoddy (indeed, slimy) treatment of a comment by a former Israeli Prime Minister. Here’s what Kristof said.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.

Of all people to ask! Olmert had been convicted of corruption and bribery as Israel’s finance minister and served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence. Kristof doesn’t mention this, and Kristof might have added, post facto, this clarification by Olmert:

Olmert clarified, in a statement to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, that “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”

Surely this should have been an addendum to Kristof’s piece. It wasn’t, The NYT hasn’t responded directly to this clarification save to say that Olmert’s statement was tape-recorded and presented accurately “in context”. But when when Olmert later denied that he was not validating claims of sexual abuse, that was no deemed worthy of a mention or correction by the NYT.

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3.) The “dog rape” claims is pure blood libel, in line with previous anti-Israel claims. (And there’s no evidence for it. Indeed, many have deemed the “trained dog rape scenario” to be impossible (I’m not ruling it out with complete certainty, and it will surely need investigating. But I do find it stupid.)

Which brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts: his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab, laughed at the absurdity of the claim.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards, ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?

Altman’s claims add up to a serious indictment of Kristof’s column, which, though presented as an op-ed piece, could easily have run as a news piece, but the paper was apparently too lazy to check its claims. To me, the most serious accusations are twofold: the failure of Kristof to document the accusations so they could be checked, even making the complainers anonymous; and also Kristof’s failure to mention the anti-Israel jostpru of some of the individuals and organizations (especially Euro-Med) making the claims.  It is a one-sided column, even for Kristof, who in the past hasn’t done due diligence in checking claims.

The more I think about this, the more I think Kristof should be fired, as the op-ed is a serious lapse in standards, even for an op-ed. If op-ed editor James Bennet could be fired (as he was) for allowing Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that the military might be used to quell post-George Floyd riots, surely Kristof should also be forced to resign. After all, Cotton was just giving an opinion that didn’t rest on facts, while Kristof made many allegations that he didn’t bother to either qualify or investigate.

But of course Kristof is a golden boy for the NYT, and the his column buttresses the NYT’s well known stance against Israel. The NYT is standing behind his column (it has no public editor), and don’t expect it to fact-check his claims. That will be up to Israel.