How can the American people know what to believe anymore? They’re supposed to be able to turn to the New York Times and other legacy newspapers for impartial facts. Although that aspirational view was never as true as many of us supposed it to be, it’s become scandalously untrue today.
The Times this week played host to one of the most astonishing examples of journalistic malpractice in recent memory. It was perpetrated by Nicholas Kristof – a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned progressive columnist and aspiring Democratic politician. Hiding under the cloak of the Times’ opinion section, Kristof ran a report alleging shocking and lurid claims of widespread, systemic sexual assault by Israeli prison guards against Palestinians.
This would be horrifying if true, except we have little reason to believe it is. To justify his claims, Kristof relies on Hamas-linked organizations, anti-Israel activists, and anonymous accounts that lack any semblance of independent verification. He also regurgitates a monstrous claim – that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners – that is widely believed to be impossible, let alone unsubstantiated.
Let’s start with Kristof’s marquee source: the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He calls it “a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel,” which is like calling the DNC “a Washington-based political group often critical of Republicans.” Euro-Med exists to oppose Israel. Many of its leaders, including its founder and chairman, are linked to Hamas. The group has a track record of promoting unverified or false anti-Israel claims, including the exact “dogs trained to rape prisoners” story Kristof repeated.
As for that preposterous claim, it is a well-documented libel against Israel.
And then there is the rampant use of anonymous sourcing, which makes up most of the first-person accounts in Kristof’s piece. Assuming these sources are real Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, they have an obvious incentive to paint Israelis in the worst possible light. Basic journalistic due diligence would have treated the claims with skepticism, especially when they offer no medical reports, photos, videos, or forensic evidence for the most extreme claims.
When Kristof does quote sources on the record, their identities are revealing.
The most prominent is Sami al-Sai, a Palestinian “freelance journalist” who says he was raped by Israeli prison guards. But al-Sai is neither an impartial nor a reliable witness. He publicly praised the October 7 Hamas attacks, eulogized West Bank terror cell leaders as “martyrs,” and has given shifting accounts of the supposed rape. He appears to have added crucial and graphic new details when talking to Kristof that don’t appear in earlier accounts.
This is also true of Issa Amro, whom Kristof glowingly refers to as “the Palestinian Gandhi.” In an earlier Washington Post interview, Amro said he was threatened with sexual assault on a particular day. In Kristof’s column, he alleges an actual assault. So, which is it?
Kristof also quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as saying he “definitely” believes that assaults have occurred. But after the story was published, Olmert said his quote was flagrantly misrepresented. It’s easy to see how it could have happened. Isolated instances of assault in Israeli prisons are entirely possible considering the scope of this conflict. Yet Kristof does not present them as occasional acts of violence, but as a systematic Israeli practice. Olmert strongly objects to that claim.
Kristof himself offers a telling hedge in his column. He writes that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” – which is an interesting disclaimer in a piece that also calls the assaults “systematic,” “widely practiced,” and “frequent.”
Adding to all of this, the timing of the piece is highly suspect: published the day before the release of a major Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attack, which, unlike Kristof’s piece, is deeply sourced with documentary evidence. It’s difficult to view Kristof’s column as anything other than an attempt to shift focus and paint a false moral equivalency.
Ultimately, this is not just another case of Hamas propaganda being laundered for the Western masses. It is a striking example of the disintegration in journalistic standards that is eroding trust in the press. I know many who have published opinion pieces in the New York Times, usually representing moderate viewpoints, and they describe a strenuous fact checking process – but it appears to be selectively enforced.
The Times should have applied particular scrutiny to Kristof given his recent ambitions. He is no longer a mere opinion columnist, but rather an aspiring progressive politician whose 2022 attempt to run for governor of Oregon was struck down in the courts over residency requirements.
Viewed that way, the op-ed begins to look much like the rest of the discourse from aspiring candidates in America – where facts take a backseat to agendas, and claims are measured more by whether they hurt the opposition than whether they capture the truth.
The difference is, this claim appeared in the New York Times, bringing us back to the question: How can the American people know what to believe?
