It’s now clear that we are living through a civilizational emergency. Just as the Palestinian Arabs tried to bring about the destruction of Israel in the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, so the Islamic world has deployed the cultural apparatus of the West to destroy the Jews.
The spurious distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is no longer even being deployed as a fig-leaf. Attacks on Jews are out of control in both Britain and America.
In London, such attacks are now taking place almost daily. In New York last week, a mob of Islamists and leftists besieged Park East synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; this week, another such mob set upon Jews outside a synagogue in Brooklyn.
Anti-Zionism, with its incendiary lies about Israel’s behavior designed to paint it as a unique menace and turn it into the pariah of the world, has been further weaponized to unleash something even darker.
We are witnessing a reversion to primitive, pre-modern forms of Jew-hatred.
The New York Times this week published a 4,000-word article by Nicholas Kristof headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” in which Kristof accused Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian Arab prisoners.
This grotesque assertion was held to exemplify Kristof’s claim of systematic sexual violence “against men, women and even children by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”
The allegation that dogs were used to rape prisoners, said by experts to be anatomically impossible, is as ridiculous as it is obscene.
Tellingly, it combines certain hallmarks of the Palestinian Arab mindset—the belief that dogs are filthy, that Jews are also filthy, and the habitual and false projection onto the Israelis of crimes that the Palestinian Arabs themselves commit against them.
Indeed, Kristof has drawn upon precisely this poisonous Palestinian thinking.
The “dog rape” claim has been pushed since 2024 by the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Kristof treats this source as credible. It’s anything but.
It’s previously claimed that the Israel Defense Forces harvested the organs of Palestinian corpses, another disgusting fantasy drawn from the depths of the deranged Palestinian mind.
The Israelis have listed the group’s founder, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative. The day after the Oct. 7 slaughter and kidnapping of 1,200 Israeli innocents, Abdu posted on X that the perpetrators were “knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud.”
Kristof produced not one shred of evidence for his claims. His sources were either anonymous or belonged to the echo chamber advocating the mass murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
He quoted terrorism supporters whose own claims of abuse had changed over time. Honest Reporting noted that Sami al‑Sai, introduced by Kristof as a “freelance journalist,” has a long record of celebrating terrorists on social media and was jailed twice for incitement. The claims he made to Kristof about his alleged abuse differed in key details from the story he fed the Israeli “human rights” group B’Tselem last year.
More seriously still, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused Kristof of misrepresenting his words so that he was made to appear falsely as validating these allegations.
In short, the article was a nauseating travesty. But this wasn’t merely recycled Hamas propaganda demonizing Israel. The “dog rape” allegation was a psychotic fever dream straight out of medieval, Nazi and Soviet anti-Jewish demonology.
Kristof wrote that when it was suggested to him that Palestinian witnesses might fabricate accusations to smear Israel, this struck him as “far-fetched.”
Just think about that. To Kristof, it wasn’t “far-fetched” that a dog could be trained to rape a man. What was instead “far-fetched” to him was the suggestion that the Palestinians might be lying to harm Israel.
But that’s exactly what they do all the time. Kristof, his editors and other Israel-haters believe Palestinian lies—however absurd and impossible—because they want to believe them.
They regard the Palestinians as the wretched and oppressed victims of the Israelis. That’s why it’s considered as “far-fetched” to believe that the Palestinians could do anything monstrous to the Israelis, as to believe that the Israelis could be the Palestinians’ victims.
That’s also why so many of the Israel-haters have denied the sexual violence done to the Israelis on Oct. 7.
The day after Kristof’s travesty, the results were published of a two-year Israeli commission of inquiry into the gender-based atrocities committed during the Oct. 7 massacre and subsequent captivity of some 251 people, even young children, dragged that day into the Gaza Strip.
The commission, founded by legal scholar Cochav Elkayam-Levy, drew upon more than 10,000 photographs and video segments; more than 1,800 hours of visual material; and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.
Its findings are very hard to read. The victims were tortured, mutilated and decapitated; a breast was cut off and tossed around; women were shot in the course of being raped and raped after they were murdered.
They were shot in the face to annihilate their beauty and their humanity; nails and other objects were found in their intimate areas; relatives were forced to perform sexual acts on each other. And it was all filmed by Palestinian savages who proudly carried out these depraved acts with delirious glee.
This report constitutes meticulously sourced, authoritative research that throws an even more shocking light on Kristof’s warped and malevolently sourced message.
The New York Times has been accused of running the Kristof article the day before in order to diminish the Israeli report. Whether or not this was so, Kristof himself suggested that his aim was to diminish what happened on Oct. 7.
His article, he said, showed that “the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.”
No other country is treated like this. Only Israelis are to be denied the unique reality of their suffering. Abuse happens in all prisons, and Israel is surely no different. But only Israel is subjected to psychotic lies about it.
That’s because Israel is the world’s only Jewish country, and the way Israel is being abused is the way Jews have always been abused.
The claim that dogs are trained to rape Palestinian Arab men is merely a modern version of ancient blood libels that the Jews were poisoning the wells or murdering Christian children to bake their blood into Passover matzah.
Today’s starvation libel, the genocide libel, the baby-killers libel, the harvested organs libel—and now, the “rape dogs” libel—all transmit the same message as the murderous blood libels of old: that the Jews are evil, demonic, inhuman. They are therefore to be excluded from the field of human empathy. They are to be branded as monsters and their suffering is to be denied.
The combined effect of Kristof, The New York Times and all the other media outlets and red-carpet celebrities and university professors and social media influencers who present the Jews as devils incarnate is that they set the mob on them.
“You rape men, you rape children,” screamed the mob outside Park East synagogue. “You f**king sociopath, I see it in your eyes.”
Jews are being hunted down on the streets of Western cities just as they were once hunted down in medieval Christian towns. Rampaging mobs were driven by bloodlust, inflamed by the Catholic Church, which told them that the Jews were the devil.
Astoundingly, Jews are now facing the same kind of religious mania—this time driven by Islam and left-wing ideology.
What we’re looking at is a throwback to a primitive set of murderous beliefs from before the Enlightenment, before modernity and before the age of reason.
We are realizing to our horror that the skin of civilization is extremely thin, and that it’s now been torn off altogether. We’re living through a spiritual plague. Barbarism is in the ascendant, and its super-spreader is The New York Times.
