Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons at Spiked – Israeli rape dogs? The New York Times is barking mad:

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.

It’s certainly drawn out the antisemites, this nonsense. Owen Jones we expect, but yes, it gets kind of worrying when it also includes UN representatives. and the mainstream media.

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.