Israeli rape dogs? The New York Times is barking mad

Was it a coincidence? Yesterday, the most comprehensive independent report so far into the sexual violence carried out by Hamas and other Palestinians on 7 October 2023 and afterwards was published. Based on more than 430 filmed interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and videos taken by the perpetrators, and evidence from the scenes, it laid bare the depths of the savagery meted out on that day.

There is no need to repeat all the details of the depravity. Suffice to say it included rape while slicing off body parts, extreme sadism, the mutilation of corpses, playing with severed limbs and heads, forcing relatives to commit sex acts on each other and necrophilia. The full dossier is available online, as are media reports about it.

At the same time, the New York Times, formerly America’s most respected title, published an inflammatory column with the headline ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kristof, who, like many of his colleagues, has a long track record of antipathy towards the Jewish State (once, for example, he shared a post comparing a pro-Israel group to ‘pigs’). The column received immediate scrutiny and was quickly branded an example of ‘grotesque journalistic malpractice’.

Its centre of gravity was the testimony of Euro-Med, an advocacy group with close ties to Hamas, according to watchdog NGO Monitor. (The fact that its founder, Ramy Abdu, and chairman, Mazen Kahel, had posed for a picture with late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh didn’t seem to be a problem for Kristof.) To this was added various anonymous and apparently unverified testimonies, as well as the evidence of former Palestinian prisoner Sami al-Sai – described as a ‘freelance journalist’ – who has publicly celebrated terrorism against Israel and shifted his story repeatedly. On this occasion, he claimed that he had been raped with ‘sticks and carrots’.

The central and most ludicrous allegation, and the one that has understandably attracted most attention, is that Israeli forces somehow trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. This assertion, which obviously lacks credible evidence, has been repeated by the likes of Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israelophobic firebrand academic who left the University of California, Los Angeles, after he was accused of repeated sexual harassment of minors.

Euro-Med included the dogs shtick – without forensic evidence or independently verifiable corroboration – in a report in 2024, after which it was picked up by Al Jazeera. In April, it was repeated in a second Euro-Med paper and amplified by that distinguished online outlet, Middle East Eye, before being seized upon by the left-wing agitator Owen Jones, who included it on his Substack. Francesca Albanese, the swivel-eyed Israelophobe employed by the United Nations, repeated it, followed by Kristof at the New York Times. In an illustration of the feedback loop of bullshit, Owen Jones has now posted a Substack article entitled ‘New York Times confirms Israel using dogs to rape’.

It is worth recalling that two months after October 7, Jones watched a video of the brutality and concluded that ‘if there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera’, even though the Israel Defence Forces said that it only included footage that ‘preserved the dignity’ of the victims and their families. The body of a partly burned female corpse with no underwear was ‘not what you would consider conclusive evidence of rape’, Jones insisted. But sex dogs? That he found convincing.

Kristof’s column also included a quotation from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, appearing to confirm that his reporting was true. That came tumbling down after publication, when Olmert sent a statement to the New York Times protesting that he had been misrepresented. ‘I did not validate these claims’, Olmert told the Free Press. ‘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.’

But the man won a Pulitzer Prize, I hear you cry! Well, so did the Gazan photographer, Saher Alghorra, who was awarded the bauble this month. This is the snapper behind the famous image of a Palestinian child, Mohammed al-Mutawaq, who was emaciated due to his cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, being cradled by his mother. The picture was falsely presented as evidence of starvation in Gaza… and printed on the front page of the New York Times in July last year.

Aside from the raw anti-Semitism that is now running riot through all our most venerable institutions, the worst thing about all this is the fact that the mainstream media are throwing away their own credibility. Speaking on my podcast, The Brink, last year, the American journalist Bari Weiss put it perfectly. ‘There is a crisis of trustworthiness’, she said. ‘You should not trust something that’s not worthy of your trust.’ The effect is to drive audiences into the unregulated Wild West of amateur commentators online, to clickbait merchants like Piers Morgan and, finally, to conspiracy theorists.

It’s a kind of horseshoe theory, I suppose. The New York Times – and other outlets like the BBC, which has had its share of similar scandals – has now proven itself to be up there with the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. The only difference is pedigree. We’ll miss the truth when it’s gone.

Jake Wallis Simons is co-host of The Brink, with former parachute-regiment officer Andrew Fox. It is available on all platforms now.