The four reasons why we can’t move on from a blood libel

“The New York Times” and its enablers are counting on the public’s short attention span and the “suicidal empathy” of liberal Jews to bury Nicholas Kristof’s lie about rapist dogs in Israel.

On May 11, “The New York Times” published Nicholas Kristof’s astonishing compendium of charges that the State of Israel is deliberately raping Palestinian Arab prisoners, not just by the usual means of such crimes but by training dogs to sexually assault them. In the week since, the question hanging over both the newspaper and its critics has been what, if any, consequences there will be for publishing a 21st-century blood libel.

As far as the Times is concerned, the answer is none. And given the applause this piece of journalistic malpractice generated from its core readership, the unlikelihood of a threatened libel suit succeeding, coupled with the dismal turnout for a demonstration outside its offices in Midtown Manhattan, they have some reason to believe they are right.

Unrepentant and unembarrassed

The article sparked outrage from those who pointed out the lack of credible evidence to back up this astonishing charge, which the newspaper, as well as its liberal and leftist readers, largely ignored. It also prompted cheers from Israel-bashers and antisemites everywhere, who view it as something they could place alongside the false accusations about the Jewish state committing “genocide” and creating mass starvation in the Gaza Strip, as well as practising “apartheid” at home.

During the days that followed the article’s publication, hopes that the paper’s management would issue some sort of clarification or correction proved vain, as they stood by Kristof without giving readers any more reason to trust them than he did. So, as far as the nation’s largest newspaper is concerned, those who are angry about its shoddy reporting and normalisation of classic tropes of antisemitism should just move on.

And with the publication of all of three letters to the editor on May 18, none of which even mentioned the dogs, which was the most shocking and offensive element, senior Times management is trying to tell us that the matter is closed.

Are they right?

Those in charge at the Times likely assume that journalism is now a business where stories rarely last more than a single news cycle. They also know that readers, even many in their audience, who are largely made up of credentialed elites steeped in leftist doctrines, have become so immersed in nonstop social media feeds that their attention spans are short.

Under the circumstances, they have likely concluded that even if they are aware of how wrong their actions have been, they won’t have to answer for Kristof.

While those responsible for one of the worst moments in the Times’ long reportorial history may think that is so, that won’t happen. And it won’t happen for four reasons.

Legal jeopardy

The first is that Israel’s government is likely to follow up on its threat to sue the newspaper, even if most legal experts think such an effort would be a waste of time. There is a genuine danger of embarrassing and damaging revelations for the newspaper in any legal proceeding, regardless of whether it is successful.

On the face of it, the chances of Israel being able to sue and win a libel lawsuit are slim to none. Under the “actual malice” standard that governs US law and stems from the Supreme Court precedent in “The New York Times v. Sullivan”, it is very difficult to win such cases. The three-part test that any public figure suing for libel must satisfy is proving knowledge of falsity, reckless disregard for the truth and intent to cause harm. That has proved nearly impossible to satisfy in most cases. And it is unlikely that a foreign leader like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or an individual country, could even get a US court to consider such a lawsuit.

Nevertheless, some legal experts have pointed to reasons why the Times may still be in trouble.

Jonathan Turley points out that while the Jewish state is unlikely to be able to sue the Times and Kristof for libel, soldiers who were implicated in the story may be able to do so.

Mark Goldfeder, writing in “National Review”, agrees. But he argues that Israelis need not sue in American courts. He believes they can sue the Times in an Israeli court, though not for libel.

By holding the newspaper accountable under civil claims of “injurious falsehood” and “negligent publication”, they may be able to create a viable case. Doing so could open a path for Israelis to apply to the federal district court in New York and then “compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation”. As he notes, “A properly framed application does not ask the court to adjudicate the case; it simply asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.” It stands a chance of forcing compliance.

In either instance, the result would mean that the Times and Kristof would have to produce the evidence they claim to possess, explain how they obtained it, and disclose other information and communications that might undermine their credibility. Even if that does not lead to a victory in court, the resulting revelations could prove extremely damaging to the news outlet and may be more significant to its reputation than the ludicrous accusation of dog rape would be to Israel.

Even left-wing journalists remain unconvinced

The second reason this story is not going away has to do with the questions journalists are asking about what happened at the Times.

What we are learning is that some liberal journalists who share the negative view of Israel demonstrated by Kristof and the editors who enabled him are asking how this story was produced. To put it mildly, the way the paper handled it was fishy. Doubts about its decisions are being voiced not only by conservative critics but also, reportedly, by members of the paper’s notoriously woke newsroom staff.

As veteran media reporter Dylan Byers writes in “Puck”, some Times reporters do not understand why a charge of such magnitude and dubious provenance appeared only in the opinion section rather than on the news pages.

Many readers of the Times have pointed out, with justice, that there is no longer any real difference between opinion and news there, let alone the church-state divide that once existed between the two before the publication took a hard-left turn in the past generation. Many who work at the newspaper think there should be such a division, at least in principle. And if there is, the failure of management to allow its news staff to conduct its own investigation into Kristof’s tall tales of dog rape makes the whole thing even more suspicious.

Regardless of what you think of Israel, and few at the Times are not hostile to it, the paper’s failure either to break the claims as news or to advance the story with further reporting that does not fall under the label of ‘opinion’ calls its credibility into question. And that, as Byers reports, has not gone unnoticed in its offices on 42nd Street.

Even if lawsuits do not create discovery that unravels the allegations, the ferment within the media organisation could bode ill for the editor who must be deemed primarily responsible for this atrocity.

Kathleen Kingsbury became editor of the Times’ opinion section in 2020 in the wake of its scandalous retraction of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. That retraction was forced by a newsroom mob that revolted against the publication of a view they did not favour. The result was the firing of veteran editor James Bennet for allowing a conservative opinion on its pages. He was replaced by Kingsbury, a woke writer who clearly sees no distinction between journalism and leftist activism.

By exposing the newspaper to the sort of unflattering scrutiny brought on by Kristof’s smears, Kingsbury may end up paying the price for the paper’s abandonment of traditional journalistic ethics and commonly accepted rules about publishing far-fetched claims. Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, a member of the fifth generation of his family to serve in that capacity and two generations removed from anyone in it who was nominally Jewish, may believe that appealing to the hard left is good business. But once readers start learning more about how Kristof’s claims were published, Sulzberger might start looking for a scapegoat for this mess. And Kingsbury is first in line to walk the plank.

They’ve gone too far this time

There is a third reason this controversy is far from dead. Despite the ineffectual nature of the public protests, the blood libel has finally disillusioned many in the Jewish community who were still ready to continue viewing the Times as “the paper of record”, despite its troubling record of bias against Jews and Israel.

The newspaper crossed a line with its absurd story about dogs being trained to rape human beings. That cannot be ignored or undone, and from now on it will colour the debate not only about this newspaper’s credibility but also about that of the mainstream liberal media that it exemplifies.

Until now, liberals who had not gone completely over to the antizionism and open antisemitism that has become normalised by the Times could still claim that its coverage was fair, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

But the dog-rape charge is so ridiculous and so utterly lacking in substantiation that only someone already drenched in both Jew-hatred and woke ideas about journalists not having to prove their allegations could believe it. Animal trainer after animal trainer has attested to the improbability, if not the impossibility, of such an act occurring.

The fact that the only two mildly critical letters published about the story failed to mention the rape canard makes it obvious that any vestigial belief in minimal journalistic standards at the Times is gone. Many on the left may cling to the newspaper because it validates all of their pre-existing prejudices and opinions. The fact that every news story reads more like opinion than what would have been considered news at the newspaper a generation ago may also appeal to them. But what Kristof and his editors have done is make it harder than ever to maintain the fiction that the Times is anything other than a left-wing rag, undeserving of the respect it once earned.

As much as, if not more than, its sins of the past, such as Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning denials of the Holodomor, Kristof’s rapist dogs will be thrown in the faces of Times employees long after the columnist himself is forgotten.

‘Suicidal empathy’ exposed

The fourth reason the discussion of this story will not go away is that it has exposed a critical failing within the Jewish community in the way some respond to attacks on Israel and the Jewish people.

The instinctive identification by many Jews with those in conflict with the State of Israel is nothing new. Yet some are still willing to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire, even when confronted with a dog-rape libel. All this does is assist those who seek Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide. At the very least, the anger generated by this episode should fuel a broader discussion about how Jews respond to the information war being waged against them.

The newspaper was counting not only on applause from those ready to believe any lie about Israel, no matter how grotesque. It was also relying on the response of self-described “liberal Zionists”, along with other Jews whose ties to Israel are more tenuous, who would shift attention away from the paper’s misconduct and Palestinian crimes towards investigations of the Israeli prison system. And that is precisely what some writers at left-wing publications such as “The Forward”, JTA and “Haaretz” effectively did.

By treating the story as sufficiently credible to justify discussing its allegations as plausible, such people are practising what Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”.

In doing so, they help flip the script from the documented atrocities committed by Palestinian Arabs, including the widespread sexual violence and murderous brutality of October 7, 2023, to a narrative built on dubious allegations. In the process, they reinforce a false sense of moral equivalence between the two sides.

Though some may be well intentioned, those who prioritise sympathy for the side that started the current war, and the wars that preceded it between Jews and Arabs, and then lost it, bringing immense suffering upon their own people, are not being fair-minded or compassionate. Rather, they bolster terrorists, undermine efforts to defeat them and defend Israelis, and at the same time engage in self-righteous virtue signalling.

Some are also using the Times story as a cudgel with which to attack Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom they oppose for other reasons, accusing them of indifference to alleged prison abuses.

It is true that Israeli military prisons may be no better than those in other countries. They may even be worse. But it is also important to understand that many of the Palestinian prisoners captured after October 7, 2023, were involved in unspeakable atrocities. In addition to terrorists seized in Gaza, they are not only deserving of contempt from civilised people but also present a serious danger to one another and to the Israeli reservists assigned the unpleasant task of guarding them. Kristof ignored this context, along with many other relevant facts, in his effort to demonise Israelis.

As for Ben-Gvir, he is popular on the far right and despised by centrists and the left. But when he vowed that those responsible for the October 7 atrocities would receive no privileges and nothing more than the bare minimum required by law, he spoke to a far broader constituency than his own supporters. To scapegoat him, or to use his policies as a reason to diminish outrage over Kristof’s allegations, is misguided. Nor should it distract from the documented use of rape by Palestinian terrorists, which the Times story effectively sought to obscure.

By crossing the line from debatable accusations to blood libel, Kristof has also exposed the futility and intellectual bankruptcy of those Jews who have internalised so much of the post-October 7 surge in antisemitism around the world. Rather than validating their positions, the fallout from Kristof’s article is likely to further discredit them.

For all of these reasons, even if the Times never acknowledges its betrayal of the obligation to report the truth, the controversy surrounding Kristof and his mythical rapist dogs will linger in the public imagination in ways the columnist never intended, and for many years to come.