The New York Times Goes Wild with "Israeli Rape Dogs"
Plus: California's "porn for prisoners" scandal, and an interview with the most infuriating man on the Right.
This week there was an explosive story in the New York Times by longtime columnist Nick Kristof, who traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories and assembled a very long piece accusing the Israeli government of systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
As part of his allegations, Kristof writes that Israeli prison officials have been training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. These are very serious claims—both because of their horrific nature and because they are being made in the most important newspaper in the world. Kristof recounts the testimony of one of the Palestinian prisoners:
On one occasion, [the prisoner] said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
Is this true? First, it’s worth noting that every sentence is hedged with “he said,” meaning that Kristof and his editors are very careful, knowing that this is going to be a highly explosive story and they are writing defensively. Kristof carefully distances himself from the allegations he’s making—he always characterizes them as claims made by this Palestinian journalist or prisoner, rather than stating them as proven facts.
Second, if you follow the hyperlinks in the story, which, when you click through them, all redirect to human-rights organizations and activist groups that are mostly anti-Israel. Kristof later claimed that he read medical literature indicating that rape dogs were possible, but the cases he cited were, in fact, instances of human-initiated zoophilia. So, the sourcing on this—when you really boil it down and you take the activists out—is firsthand testimony from a single person who we have to believe is telling the truth, and not incidentally, might have a strong motivation to lie.
