It’s hard not to compare Kristof’s claims of dog rape to the blood libel of Christian blood used for matzah.
Remember the term paper assignment that was completed but couldn’t be turned in “because the dog ate it?”
Now we have Palestinian prisoners who were violated because Israelis trained dogs to do it.
Remember the “blood libel,” according to which Jews killed Christian children in order to use their blood to bake matzah?
Now we have a candidate for the US House writing that, if elected, she will turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists . . . that will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
The dog rape libel is brought to you by Nicholas Kristof, in an opinion piece in The New York Times.
The castration libel is brought to you by Maureen Galindo, running for the US House in San Antonio. This is among the company that Nicholas Kristof keeps.
Remember the journalistic ethic about naming your sources? Kristof doesn’t. Remember the journalistic ethic about providing dates? Kristof doesn’t. Of journalism’s basic requirement of who, where, what, when, and why, Kristof deletes three of the five.
Barton Swalm of Wall Street Journal summarizes:
Kristof “reports as credible several obvious lies, among them the allegation that Israeli prison guards train dogs to rape Palestinian inmates — a claim suggesting Mr. Kristof knows as much about dogs as he does about international affairs.”
If only we knew the detailed etiology of the blood libel that we have of the Kristof libel — the string of online, unverified, lurid, preposterous claims that culminate in Kristof’s New York Times-credited libel. We regret having to report on Kristof’s claims at all, so obscene they are and so disturbing the credibility attributed to them by virtue of his NYT platform. However, if early in the unfolding of the absurd blood libel its origin had been laid bare, perhaps Jewish lives would have been saved. So elsewhere in the IJN this week we publish the JTA report on Kristof, although we understand if readers prefer to stop reading in the middle, or prefer not to begin.
Question:
If Kristof were actually reporting heretofore unknown facts of such a dramatic and damning nature, why didn’t The New York Times assign a reporter to the story and publish it in the news pages rather than in an opinion column? The astigmatic misalignment of the Times’ presentation of the “scoop” is itself telling.
Defense calls no witnesses:
In subsequently defending his opinion piece, Kristof wrote that articles in three medical journals supported his newfound veterinary expertise about the sexual capacities of dogs. The IJN has been unable to identify whether Kristof ever named the articles or named the medical journals to defend his claim.
Meanwhile, experts quoted in the JTA report say that Kristof’s claims for dogs border on the impossible, or are impossible.
Witness for the prosecution:
Among critics of Kristof’s methodology are a handful of Palestinian voices who have condemned Hamas, and who point to Kristof’s reliance on a report issued by an NGO that, says Israel — and not only Israel — has been a Hamas propaganda operation for more than a decade.
JTA reports that Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian writer and advocate in the US, wrote that a primary source for Kristof — the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO (and others) — have “troubling records on accuracy, conduct, and associations. They are not credible sources, even if the article relied on others as well,” Alkhatib wrote.
For the record, Alkhatib also believes that incidents of sexual abuse have occurred in Israeli prisons.
If Israeli prisons are like other prisons, Alkhatib may be right. Israel, however, should strive for a higher standard, and any institution under the authority of Israel Security Minister Ben Gvir should not be exempt from scrutiny.
Alkhatib also believes that Palestinian testimonies are anonymous due to shame and fear of retaliation. But there is no moral or legal justification for damning Israeli individuals, let alone an entire country, on the basis of anonymous accusations. The “me-too” movement showed that only when alleged victims put their name behind their claims could their claims acquire credibility. Not to mention, victims of sexual abuse who come forward committed no crime — very much unlike the case with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
If there are in fact Palestinian prisoners who were sexually abused, and if they come forward, their abusers must be punished and the system must be radically reformed — but the criminals too must face the legal consequences of their actions. These typically include aiding and abetting, or actually committing, attempted murder, murder, or mass murder.
Israel has the right to protect itself against the atrocities of bus bombings, pizzeria bombings, seder bombings, and the Oct. 7 atrocities.
© IJN 2026
