It is an unlikely coincidence that The New York Times published a Nicholas Kristof column accusing Israel of abusing Palestinian prisoners on the day before the release of a civil commission report documenting Hamas’s sexual violence on Oct. 7, according to Michal Cotler-Wunsh, CEO of the International Legal Forum.
The former Israeli envoy for combating antisemitism told JNS that the paper was enabling a “blood libel” that could lead to violence against Jews.
“What happened was actually complete burial of the commission report,” she said. “Hundreds of pages, a report with evidence.”
“The publication of this article took up all the airspace in dog rape allegations, anatomically possible or not,” she told JNS.
The Times denied any coordination or intent to overshadow the report. “The Times never passed on the Civil Commission report and wasn’t told about its completion or the timing of its release,” stated Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for the paper.
“Once the report was made public, we covered its findings,” Stadtlander said. “The commission’s work also had no bearing on Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column or its publication timing.”
Cotler-Wunsh told JNS that the Times has a “lack of journalistic responsibility and ethics and fact-checking and anything that we would expect from the media as a watchdog of democracy.”
She called Kristof’s column “blood libelous” and said that she has not seen consequences or accountability for the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation.
“Blood libel, once released into the air, has this way of spreading and becoming accepted ‘truth,’ regardless of the failure to provide evidence,” she told JNS. “What it then normalizes is the ever-mutating lethal hate that’s literally targeting, enabling, fueling the vandalism, violence and even the murder of Jews.”
Cotler-Wunsh advises readers to stop reading the Times, which she said “publishes fiction.”
“You can read all kinds of fiction, but if you’re reading the New York Times as news, then I would actually recommend to stop reading it,” she told JNS.
Cotler-Wunsh wouldn’t be surprised if the paper published the column as an opinion piece to protect itself from legal recourse. “The likelihood of accountability is very slim,” she said.
