The Patriot Post® · NYT Dilutes the October 7 Atrocity

Here’s a question: What do New York Times contributing photographer Saher Alghorra and longtime New York Times columnist Nick Kristof have in common?

Answer: They’ve both won Pulitzer Prizes. (If you answered, “They both hate the Jews,” you get partial credit.)

Alghorra’s name is likely unfamiliar to you, but he’s the guy who photographed an emaciated 18-month-old Gazan boy who was ostensibly starving due to Israel’s heavy-handed war against Hamas. The ghastly and heartrending photo immediately went viral, and it became a powerful symbol of supposed Israeli excess in prosecuting the war in Gaza. As it turned out, though, the little boy wasn’t being starved by those heartless Jews; instead, he was suffering from preexisting genetic and other medical disorders that the international media had conveniently failed to mention. Alas, the Times’s quiet correction a few days later didn’t have quite the global impact that the initial photo did. Still, Alghorra won himself a Pulitzer this year for his work in documenting the war in Gaza — a war made far more awful due to Hamas’s habit of building its military infrastructure beneath hospitals and of bravely hiding behind human shields.

As for Kristof, his high-water mark as a reporter came in 2006, when he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Muslim-perpetrated genocide against Christians in Sudan’s Darfur region. Sixteen years earlier, he’d won a Pulitzer for his work in covering the pro-democracy student movement in Communist China, including the brutal and bloody 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

Lately, though, Kristof has become a useful idiot of not only Hamas but of the Jew-hating Left. Exhibit A is a Times column published on Monday, modestly titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” in which he reports, “Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

Kristof goes on to credulously quote a 46-year-old freelance journalist, Sami al-Sai, who said of his Israeli captors, “They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck. Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.”

Kristof seems to revel in the gruesome details of al-Sai’s supposed sexual assault with a rubber baton and some carrots before he scolds the rest of us: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

Columnist David Harsanyi isn’t buying it, and neither should you. Kristoff “excavates conspiracies so unhinged that no marginally reputable media outlet has ever touched them,” Harsanyi notes. “Even the New York Times relegates it to its op-ed section, since the piece breaks every rule of objective journalism. But even columnists have an obligation to abide by the basic standards of evidence. Kristof does not.”

Remember: These people, these Palestinians, are propagandists of the first order. And their religion, Islam, via its precept of taqiyya, allows them to lie in order to gain advantage against the enemies of Islam. And what better and more inflammatory lie to tell than that the Israelis are sexually assaulting innocent Palestinians?

Kristof doesn’t seem interested in corroboration or fact-checking. That’s for suckers, right? In yet another account — this one the sexual assault of a Palestinian woman — Kristof laps up her tale like a thirsty dog. As Harsanyi writes:

In any event, Kristof not only fails to provide the woman’s name, but he offers no other witness, no complaint, no medical evidence from an Arab doctor, no photos of bruises, nothing but the accusation. Did the columnist ever verify that the woman had been detained? Because Kristof doesn’t tell us in which prison this woman was purportedly held, or why she was arrested, or even when. Any competent journalist would have heard blaring sirens when a story leaves out any detail that could be used to launch a genuine investigation. It’s difficult to believe that’s an accident. Yet, Kristof treats all the allegations as fact.

One of Kristof’s “victims” claims — I kid you not — that the Israelis ordered one of their dogs to rape him.

Kristof must think he showed balance by adding that there’s “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I’m sure, appreciates this magnanimous exoneration.

As for the timing of Kristof’s piece, it seems suspiciously timed to blunt the impact of a new report, titled “Silence No More,” which finds that “sexual violence [by Hamas] was systematic, widespread and integral” to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.

As the AP reports, “The report details a two-year investigation that drew on more than 400 testimonies and nearly 2,000 hours of visual analysis documenting 13 patterns of violence, including gang rape, sexual torture and forced nudity.” The New York Post adds, “Over 430 witnesses were also interviewed, who told terrifying tales of terrorists raping and mutilating women both alive and dead, humiliating them sexually, and executing women while violating them and then parading their bodies as trophies.”

I’ll spare any further details, but this is awful, sickening stuff throughout, and it’s far better corroborated than anything Nick Kristof uncovered or elicited. But what are we to expect from The New York Times, the Left in general, and their pathologically anti-Israel agenda?