Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist who has called Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists a “moral and practical failure,” was ridiculed widely for a social media post on Friday in which he wrote about a copy of his book found in the Gaza Strip.
“In some quarters in the United States, there’s a hateful stereotype that everyone in Gaza is a terrorist supporter, and perhaps that makes it easier to excuse the bombing of entire neighborhoods,” Kristof wrote.
The columnist shared a photograph that a Gazan posted of “a destroyed house with my book about empowering women worldwide, ‘Half the Sky,’” Kristof wrote. “It’s an English-language book that must have belonged to a sensitive and tolerant soul, for it is a passionate call for gender equality and blunt about gender challenges in some of the Muslim world.”
The Times columnist wrote that he doesn’t know “what happened to the people living in the house or if they survived, but I’m sick at the thought that my tax dollars supported the destruction and perhaps killing of this reader of mine.”
“I think we have a winner here for the single most embarrassing Potemkin Village tweet in the history of the world,” wrote John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine.
“I’m against a war that will protect the Jewish state from the rapists and murderers and kidnappers, because someone had a copy of my book, is the worst and possibly most Boomer reason for being against a war ever,” wrote Peter Savodnik, senior editor at The Free Press.
“Odds are the person who was reading the book was an IDF soldier,” he added.
Omri Ceren, legislative director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), wrote that “unless I’m misreading this, and I don’t think I am, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times finds it significant that a genocidal antisemite found himself aligned with Kristof’s own thinking.”
“Now that’s not automatically a knock on Kristof himself. Just because a genocidal antisemite agrees with you on something, that doesn’t make you yourself a genocidal antisemite,” he wrote. “But it’s weird, right?”
