The pro-Israel community has been complaining about The New York Times since the 1970s. Indeed, anger about the attitude of the so-called “newspaper of record” toward Jews can be traced back to long before that. Above all, the way it silenced coverage of the Holocaust because its assimilated Jewish owners didn’t wish to shine a spotlight on the specifically anti-Jewish crimes committed by the German Nazis and their collaborators, remains among the darkest chapters in the publication’s history.
The problems with the Times’ reporting about the State of Israel and the war being waged against it—or even its efforts to whitewash the Jew-hatred of some of its foes, like Iran—in past decades are well-documented. But now these issues fade almost into insignificance when compared to its current endeavors. Simply put, the newspaper, which remains among the most important in the world due to its reputation, vast readership and enormous journalistic resources that dwarf those of most of its significant competitors, has now crossed the line between biased coverage and outright antisemitic incitement.
Debunked and discredited
The publication of columnist Nicholas Kristof’s article“The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” wasn’t merely a disgraceful example of bad reporting. Almost as soon as it was published on May 11, it was debunked by numerous media monitoring organizations and commentators as relying almost completely on sources associated with Hamas terrorists and containing little or no evidence that stands up to scrutiny.
Israelis have been subjected to false accusations before and, no doubt, will continue to be singled out for biased coverage. And that includes the work of some left-wing Jewish and Israeli publications that will put out just about any unfounded claim to bolster the anti-Zionist cause or merely because they hope it will discredit the current government, which they oppose.
But by lending credence to the ridiculous and undocumented accusation that Israelis trained dogs to rape Palestinian Arab prisoners, they published something that is not merely unproven even by the “evidence” which Kristof subsequently claimed exists, but which most experts about dogs believe to be impossible. By running that along with other horrible stories about sexual violence for which he provided no credible proof, Kristof left the realm of merely disputed or dubious claims and crossed over into the realm of open Jew-hatred.
This isn’t merely a controversial accusation that can be debated. It is a blood libel, pure and simple. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that the Times’ decision to publish, promote and defend the piece warrants comparison to the same sort of vicious Nazi propaganda published in Der Stürmer by the regime led by Adolf Hitler.
That the article was published on the eve of the release of a well-documented and detailed report about the atrocious sexual violence committed by Palestinian Arabs, led by Hamas, on Oct. 7 makes the paper’s decision even more outrageous. The Times knew about the report. It was approached by its authors and offered its findings months in advance. But they were rebuffed. Instead, the paper went ahead and ran Kristof’s dubious compendium of Hamas accusations first, so as to try to overshadow the truthful story about actual crimes committed by Palestinians against their Israeli victims.
That makes it clear that the Kristof piece is a classic case of “mirroring” in which criminal regimes and movements attempt to falsely claim that their opponents are committing the very crimes of which they themselves are guilty.
The rape accusations lodged against Israel are similar to the ones about “genocide” that are ubiquitous in the Times and uttered throughout the liberal media, as well as left-wing academics and politicians, as if they are documented truth. Hamas is a genocidal movement whose purpose is the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of its population. The attacks that occurred on Oct. 7, 2023, were not merely an actual attempt at genocide. They were a trailer for what the Palestinian Arabs—and by that, I mean Hamas and other Islamist groups, as well as its supposedly more “moderate” rivals—wish to do to the rest of Israel if given the opportunity.
Yet Kristof is standing by his story. And his publishers are brandishing his reputation and Pulitzer Prizes as an all-purpose answer to their critics.
A discredited reputation
That Kristof has been guilty of journalistic malpractice in the past and used his important perch to defend con men is a matter of record.
That the Pulitzers are something of a joke has long been known to journalists, reaffirmed this year with the awarding of one to a Times photographer for a picture that accompanied an article about the alleged starvation of Palestinians. But the picture that won the award turned out to be of a child suffering from cerebral palsy, not a starvation victim, thus making it yet another example of journalistic fraud. Sadly, the Pulitzers and the Times are no more willing to rescind or return this prize than they are of another one rooted in fraud that the paper won in 1932 by Times’ writer Walter Duranty for lying articles that denied the truth of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s mass murder of Ukrainians in the terror famine.
Still, the paper’s self-serving claims of accuracy will probably be more than enough for the now overwhelming liberal audience that reads the Times these days. That the publishers and editors of the newspaper would go along with Kristof’s decision to head down this particularly vile rabbit hole of hate says something important about the sea change in the liberal corporate media. The same applies to the credentialed elites to whom the paper largely appeals. If the comments posted to the article on the Times’ website mean anything, they are more than ready to believe a story as fantastic as the one about rape and dogs, as long as the accusations were lodged against Israel, and to cheer Kristof for his “courage” in spreading such obvious Hamas propaganda.
Readers are by this point accustomed not merely to the newspaper’s regurgitation of obviously exaggerated and/or false civilian casualty statistics provided by Hamas. Those who only get their news from this newspaper or the many other liberal mainstream media outlets that have similar attitudes toward Israel may think themselves among the best-informed people in the world. But, in fact, such persons are painfully ignorant about the war that Hamas and other Iranian proxies are waging against the Jewish state since they have been given little or no information about how Israel’s enemies operate in Gaza or Lebanon.
Eurovision ‘conspiracy’
More to the point, they have already been conditioned to think of everything Israel does as a nefarious conspiracy. To take but one of many examples of this pattern of coverage, you need only look at the feature published by the Times the same day as it ran Kristof’s blood libel about efforts to build support for Israel’s entry in the Eurovision song contest and to prevent the country from being expelled from the competition. The article depicted Israeli efforts to avoid being thrown out of the popular international television program as if it were a secretive intelligence operation that subverted the contest.
It may be hard to take something as silly and cheesy as Eurovision seriously. But the same global movement that has as its mission the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet is angry about the success Israelis have enjoyed in the contest. Countries where antisemitism is endemic, like Ireland, have tried to throw the Israelis out. They don’t think those who watch it should be exposed to the spectacle of Israelis singing and dancing, and performing songs the same as other contestants.
And the Times hinted at dark forces somehow manipulating the public voting that plays a part in determining the victors. But like any such competition in which people can vote 10 times (the voting to determine who gets to play in Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game allows fans to vote five times a day for weeks), to even raise the question of voter fraud is absurd. But when Jews and Israelis are involved, anything is possible.
How is it conceivable that the Times and similar media outlets have gotten to the point where they are ready to suspend normal standards of journalistic credibility if it allows them to besmirch Israel, even with crazy charges like the one about training animals to commit rape?
The answer is both obvious and familiar.
Woke ideology and the end of journalism
A generation of journalists who were indoctrinated in the toxic leftist myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism takes it as a given that the world is divided into two immutable classes of persons. On the one side are “people of color,” who are always victims, no matter what they do. On the other hand are “white” oppressors, who are always in the wrong, regardless of the evidence about their actions or those who seek their destruction.
The neo-Marxist intersectional mindset labels Israelis and Jews as the latter. That’s despite the fact that they form the most persecuted minority group in history and that the majority of Israelis are not “white.” But a press that doesn’t think evidence or facts matter as much as their assumptions rooted in their racialist politics doesn’t care about that.
That’s the only reason why anti-Zionist screeds are regularly published in the Times in recent years, even though such stands deny rights to Jews and apply double standards and smears to Israel that are the working definition of antisemitism.
Kristof began his career in an era where this was not the case. But to maintain his relevance and popularity in a newsroom where woke doctrine is the new orthodoxy, he has adapted his already loose standards to accommodate the current intellectual fashion. The result is the demonization of Israelis, even if it means resorting to the sort of lunacy that would assert that Israeli dogs rape human beings on the word of propaganda outfits like the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
To deem Kristof and the Times guilty of blood libels doesn’t mean that Israelis commit no crimes or that the Jewish state is perfect. It is no more perfect than any other nation, though compared to the rest of the region, its imperfect democracy stands out as an exception to the authoritarian and lawless standards of the Middle East. Still, it needs to be reiterated that there is no evidence that there is anything like the systematic criminal abuse of Palestinian prisoners (some of whom are guilty of taking part in the crimes of Oct. 7). And Kristof gives us none that any editor or publisher with a shred of integrity would accept as enough to justify running his story.
What then is the proper response to the Times?
Suffice it to say that we are past the point where polite, factual letters-to-the-editor or even the most scathing report by media monitoring organizations can serve as a sufficient response.
There needs to be a concerted effort to hold the paper accountable, but we already know what won’t work. Boycotts by pro-Israel and Jewish readers will be of little use because few who care if the Jewish state survives still pay for subscriptions to it. Demonstrations outside its offices on Manhattan’s 42nd Street are a good idea. But one-off events aren’t enough.
Isolate hate-mongers
The paper needs to be given the same treatment that some of its readers think should be accorded to Israel. No one in public life—be they Jewish or not—should treat their employees as if they are credible journalists or answer their queries. Times reporters should no more be entitled to credentials to cover government or any other sector of public life than would those who work for rags produced by hate groups that also traffic in blood libels against Jews or anyone else.
The paper deserves to be shamed and shunned at least until the unlikely event of its retracting Kristof’s article. And anyone who doesn’t—whether out of concern for the freedom of the press that the newspaper mocks or because they think it appropriate to publish such absurd and unproven lies—is just as guilty as Kristof, and his editors and publishers. There should be no reticence about making it clear that it is helping to incite the growing toll of antisemitic violence against Jews in this country and around the world.
Perhaps The New York Times is too big to fail or to be isolated. Perhaps the liberal popular culture that still exalts it as a credible source is still so pervasive that its current position as a never-ending source of bile hurled at President Donald Trump and Israel makes it untouchable.
But that should not discourage those who understand that Kristof’s article is a crossing of the Rubicon when it comes to the paper’s credibility. No decent person should accept the newspaper as a legitimate source so long as it is willing to traffic in blood libels against Jews. And we should be confident that—as with its past crimes against journalism, such as those committed in the 1930s and 1940s—the verdict of history will judge all those associated with the newspaper and those who support it as knowingly guilty of spreading falsehoods, misinformation and antisemitism.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
