The New York Times published a piece today by Nicholas Kristof claiming that Israeli soldiers coached a military dog to rape a Palestinian detainee.
A trained rape dog. In the pages of the New York Times. In 2026.
The claim rests on one unnamed source. No corroboration. No second account. No named witness. No forensic evidence. The claim simply appears, is presented as part of a pattern of documented Israeli abuse, and moves on.
Kristof does not pause on it. He does not flag it as extraordinary. He treats it the way you would treat any other reported detail, because to him, apparently, it is.
This is worth dwelling on. The New York Times has editors. It has a fact-checking process. It has, or once had, an institutional belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A claim that a military power has operationalized animals as instruments of sexual torture is, by any measure, an extraordinary claim. It ran anyway. On the basis of one man who will not give his name.
There is a reason for that. Accusations against Jews have always enjoyed a unique exemption from the standards applied everywhere else. The blood libel did not require evidence. The well-poisoning did not require evidence. The global conspiracy did not require evidence. What they required was a willingness to believe, and that willingness has never been difficult to locate. The specific accusation changes with the century. The suspension of disbelief is permanent. When the target is Jewish, the bar does not just lower. It disappears.
Now hold that against what could not clear the bar after October 7, 2023.
Doctors who treated released hostages reported that at least ten men and women had been sexually assaulted or abused in captivity. Two physicians confirmed that many of the thirty female hostages between the ages of twelve and forty-eight had suffered sexual assault. Bodies were recovered with torn clothing and blood near their genitals. The UN’s own special representative later found reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations, and clear and convincing evidence that hostages continued to be raped in captivity.
It took UN Women eight weeks to issue any condemnation of the Hamas attack. They posted it, then deleted it. Another week passed before they acknowledged “disturbing reports of gender-based and sexual violence on October 7.”
Named doctors. Released hostages. Forensic indicators. Months of silence.
One unnamed man and a dog. The New York Times opinion section.
The New York Times does not have a standards problem. It has a Jews problem
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