Nicholas Kristof Proves: Smart People Can Be Dumb |
And The Grey Lady is the Paper of Broken Record
Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” For the Grey Lady, the best of times are long gone. What remains is the worst — and this week proved it beyond any doubt.
Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed in The New York Times this week titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, he alleged that Israeli prison guards have trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. The Nickster relied heavily on the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor — a Geneva-based group whose founder, Ramy Abdu, has documented ties to senior Hamas leadership — and on 14 sources, many of them anonymous, several of whom have been publicly identified as Hamas affiliates or terrorism apologists.
When reports circulated that the Times was internally discussing a retraction, the paper issued a statement calling the retraction rumors “no truth at all” and stood fully behind Kristof. So, let’s be clear: the Times is defending the indefensible.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
Former US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt asked publicly whether the Times had “no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility.”
The American Jewish Committee called it a “modern-day blood libel in the paper of record.”
Scientists and doctors noted the dog rape allegation is not merely unverified — it is, as one analyst put it, medically and scientifically impossible. Kristof himself concedes in the piece that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” He then spent 4,000 words asserting it happens systematically anyway.
Making matters worse, Kristof cited former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to lend his allegations gravitas — and it backfired. Olmert issued a statement saying Kristof “misrepresented” their conversation and never validated the dog rape claims. In Olmert’s own words: “the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.” The Nickster used a former Israeli Prime Minister as a mic prop — only the thud came from the........