Kristof's Credulity

I am not equipped to judge Nicholas Kristof's allegations - but those who are say that his article is uniquely inaccurate, unfair, and dishonest.

We all recognize that some of the United States’ most well-known media outlets seem overly credulous when it comes to assertions that paint Israel in a negative light.

I will never forget a tweet sent by the New York Times on October 17th, 2023 - a mere ten days after October 7th: “At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.” Israel did not immediately respond because - in the interest of telling the truth - it first wanted to investigate what had happened. When it soon became clear that the rocket that hit the hospital was fired by Islamic Jihad rather than Israel, CNN changed its headline to read, “Hundreds likely dead in Gaza hospital blast, as Israeli blockade cripples medical response” - thereby still implicating Israel despite the updated report. When the full story eventually came out, we learned that not only was Islamic Jihad responsible, but the rocket actually hit the hospital parking lot rather than the hospital, and nowhere near 500 people were hurt, never mind killed. But by then, the original, libelous story had already been transmitted around the globe; the retractions, if they ever came, were largely ignored.

Yet, as the wisest of men once explained, there is nothing new under the sun - and two examples of that appeared in the New York Times on Monday.

The first, milder story was headlined “How Israel ‘Co-opted’ Eurovision — and Nearly Broke the World’s Biggest Song Contest,” strongly implying that Israel was doing something sinister and underhanded to unfairly influence the Eurovision results.

The Times’ reporting was not inaccurate; Israel did, for example, spend about $800,000 in advertising to help its 2024 entrant, Eden Golan, win the popular vote. (She ended up coming in second place.) Yet what remained unexplained was why the Times did not also provide an exposé of other countries which also used similar financial muscle to influence the vote - countries like Poland, Malta, France, Greece, the UK, Ukraine, and others - and instead focused exclusively on the dastardly Jews and their suspicious tactics. Moreover, even the Times acknowledged that Israel broke no rules and violated no Eurovision norms. But the framing strongly and wrongly implied that something insidious was taking place - so much so that the headline was eventually altered to “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.”

The story is almost silly and in some ways laughable. In the context of widespread media demonization of Israel, however, it represents yet another troubling example of looking for Israeli misbehavior… and when it does not surface, nevertheless reporting on the supposed misbehavior as if it were uniquely evil, rather than the normal, typical, and legal conduct that it actually is. It doesn’t matter that such reporting encourages the millennia-old stereotype of the shifty and sneaky Jews, working through their secret cabals to influence the non-Jewish world in their favor; in fact, stories like these, dripping with barely veiled implication, feed offensive stereotypes at the same time as they are fed by them.

But the supposed Eurovision exposé is positively mild compared with the extreme accusations leveled by Nicholas Kristof in his opinion column, “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians.”

(Photo by Ajay Suresh at https://flickr.com/photos/83136374@N05/48193462432)

The opinion piece, filled with horrific allegations against Israeli prison guards, is painful to read.

Yet almost immediately, the reader notices that the most frequently cited source in the article is the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, founded and chaired by Ramy Abdu - the keynote speaker at a 2013 conference entitled, “Hamas Movement Within the International Context.” That year, Israel named him as one of Hamas’ main European operatives, and his brother was arrested in Italy in 2025 for involvement in a financial network that funneled money to Hamas.

Then the reader notices that Kristof spoke to a total of 14 Palestinian prisoners, and he establishes three categories of corroboration: those who had witnesses; those who told family members; and those for whom there was no corroboration. Nevertheless, Kristof suggests that the lack of corroboration - typically a reason to doubt the veracity of the claim in question - may be “because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.” He also relates numerous other excuses for why Palestinians do not speak up: because the Israelis threaten the prisoners, because of a desire to avoid hurting Palestinian morale, because of conservative mores and culture that discourages such discussion. All of these are possible reasons for a lack of corroboration; but that’s also not how responsible journalism works.

One cannot help but wonder if, perhaps, the biggest reason is that many of the allegations are, in fact, false. After all, even Kristof acknowledges that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.”

Soon, the reader is presented with the false equivalence between Israel and Hamas: “The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women.” Read further and Israel is portrayed as worse than Hamas: “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” The differences, of course, are vast - including the not insignificant fact that the allegations against Hamas were documented in far, far greater detail in a 300-page report released only hours after Kristof’s column appeared. The curious timing of the two releases - the independent Israeli investigation had already been scheduled for release before Kristof’s article appeared - raised eyebrows among those attuned to media bias against Israel.

Towards the end of the article, the reader learns that Israel has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. One Gazan journalist - and let’s recall how many of these journalists are actually Hamas operatives - reported to Kristof that “he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him… He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.”

The sensationalist claim has rightly been derided as biologically dubious, to say the least. As Eli Lake reported in The Free Press:

The story of trained rape dogs does not hold up. Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible. “When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

The fact that Kristof credulously recorded these claims without indicating how suspicious they are tells the reader everything he needs to know about the rigor of Kristof’s research.

Finally, “to try to make sense of what I found,” Kristof called former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard. ‘Do I believe it happens?’ he asked. ‘Definitely. There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,’ he added.”

But Olmert himself reported that Kristof misrepresented his viewpoint: “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. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

In other words, Olmert acknowledges that some soldiers commit war crimes - inexcusable, of course, but common to every army on earth. But placing Olmert’s quote after the allegations deliberately created the impression that Olmert was substantiating Kristof’s specific allegations - and Olmert insists he never intended anything of the sort. His troubling but otherwise bland statement was turned, contrary to his intention, into a cudgel with which to bash Israel and its practices.

There are simply too many reasons to doubt the veracity of many or most of the claims in this article for it to be considered even slightly objective and newsworthy. As Haviv Rettig Gur, one of Israel’s most astute and discerning analysts (and someone who has no interest in defending the current government) related:

My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes. I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?…

Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation… No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?…

A wild religious frenzy has taken hold… And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.

Have Israeli prison guards ever abused prisoners? There can be no doubt - for abuse is a tragic reality in every prison service in the world. But when a columnist like Nicholas Kristof expands a terrible, unacceptable, yet typical phenomenon into a uniquely evil one - making Israel look worse than those who actually perpetrated atrocities to a far greater degree - he is, intentionally or otherwise, peddling the world’s oldest hatred. And in so doing, he follows the lead of the New York Times, which has made such shoddy reporting a habit.