Mick Hartley

Cory Franklin at Spiked returns to the astonishing New York Times Nicholas Kristof article on Palestinian prisoners being raped by trained dogs in Israeli prisons- a clear antisemitic libel of the most outrageous kind. Why on earth have they not issued a correction and an apology?

For a claim to merit publication, extraordinary evidence has to meet two thresholds. First, is the claim plausible? Second, is the claim provable? If the claim is not plausible, it is not automatically untrue, but it should only be published if accompanied by absolute proof. No one would believe the moon is made of green cheese, and that should end the question – unless someone brings back an indisputable sample of green cheese from the moon’s surface. That’s proof of the implausible. But the case of the ‘rape dogs’ goes beyond even the ‘green cheese’ standard.

There is no evidence that dogs can be trained to rape men and no credible, documentable accounts exist of dogs being trained this way. Alan Howe of the Australian asked a dog expert of 34 years, who explained that it failed the plausibility test. ‘Canine erection is a reflexive neuroendocrine response to female reproductive pheromones – it is not a voluntary behaviour and cannot be trained or reliably triggered on command’, the expert said. ‘The specific act alleged is not biologically plausible.’

Did no one at the New York Times wonder about this? This should be the first question any editor would ask – and who knows how many editors Kristof’s column passed through. We do know that, in a separate statement, the editors, still offering no evidence, doubled down on their support for the column – essentially stating that including the alleged rape dogs in the piece was neither an oversight nor a mistake on their part. Was this incurious behaviour deliberate? We have to ask, because for now neither Kristof nor his editors have tried to establish that dogs can be taught this unnatural behaviour.

After flunking the plausibility test, the opinion piece failed the probability test as well. Badly, in fact: no names, dates, locations, photographs or any tangible evidence that dog-rape ever happened. The only accounts are hearsay from anonymous prisoners – who have an obvious agenda – and no response from Israeli prison authorities, former guards or others who might offer conflicting views….

The silence that has met Kristof’s claims is also telling. Given such an explosive claim, where is the follow-up by other news outlets that have no compunction about publishing stories critical of the Israeli government? Where are the Guardian, the BBC, the Washington Post and others? Are they content to leave the New York Times marooned on a journalistic island?

Well, Owen Jones – one of the original propagators of this particular libel – did say that Kristof’s article confirmed the story (see here). Does that count?

For that matter, why has the NYT settled for issuing an anodyne statement of support for the story instead of sending reporters out to verify the allegations? Rather than perform journalism, the editors appear to be content to rest on their reputation as ‘the newspaper of record’.

And what a record that has been of late. It includes the frontpage allegation that the IDF was responsible for the deadly explosion at the Al-Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza in October 2023, later discovered to be the result of a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad. Add to that the Pulitzer prize-winning front-page picture in July last year of an emaciated Palestinian child – evidence, supposedly, of Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza – who actually turned out to be suffering from a chronic disease, not malnourishment. The child’s perfectly healthy brother was cropped out of the photograph. Both these sensational frontpage stories in the newspaper of record were demonstrably false and all it took was some competent reporting to prove it – the kind of reporting the New York Times purports to do.

Yes, I think we get the message about the NYT: lost down the fashionable antisemitic drain.

Also – it would, of course, be enormously embarrassing for the NYT to admit at this point that the whole story was a toxic fabrication that they should never have printed. Best let it lie…