Tag Archive for: Nicholas Kristof

Rape Dogs Claim Lands NYT in Defamation Lawsuit

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Israel announced it will pursue a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times following the publication of an opinion piece by columnist Nicholas Kristof that alleged Israeli forces trained dogs to rape Palestinian women.

“Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X. “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers. Under my leadership, Israel will not be silent.”

“We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law, truth will prevail,” the head of state continued.

Critics have said Hamas has engaged in a propaganda war intended to “provoke outrage, shift public opinion, and pressure Israel through foreign governments and media.”

Danger of Defamation in Media Reporting

The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.

The dispute comes amid heightened tensions following Israel’s military campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah after Hamas terrorists killed, raped, and or tortured over 1,000 Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.

The American Jewish Committee has reported a 400% increase in antisemitic incidents in the United States since the attacks.

While The New York Times has not directly responded to Israel’s legal threat, the newspaper defended Kristof’s column on X after Israeli officials described the essay as “blood libel.”

In a statement, the outlet said the op-ed “draws together on-the-record accounts and cites several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers.”

The paper added that the “deeply reported piece of opinion journalism” begins with Kristof’s assertion that “whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.”

“The accounts of the 14 men and women he interviewed were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in—including family members and lawyers,” the statement said. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys, and in one case, with U.N. testimony.”

The United Nations has acknowledged that Hamas committed acts of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack and released a report describing bodies with “genital injuries” found near the Nova Music Festival, which was overrun by Hamas terrorists. The U.N. has not formally condemned Hamas for those acts.

American politicians and commentators have sharply criticized the op-ed.

“Claiming Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians is modern-day blood libel—propaganda pushed as more horrific details emerge about Hamas’ systematic torture on Oct. 7,” former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley wrote on X. “Distracting from these atrocities and smearing Israel while victims still fight for acknowledgment is sickening.”

Political commentator David Collier, who has more than 270,000 followers on X, accused major news outlets of amplifying Hamas propaganda.

“Since Oct. 7, Western media sources like @nytimes have become Hamas propaganda agents—dressing up Hamas lies as ‘investigative pieces’—and helping to fuel hatred of Israel and violent antisemitism around the world,” Collier wrote. “Seems like Israel has had enough.”

Who Is Nicholas Kristof?

Nicholas Kristof is a longtime New York Times columnist and self-described liberal or progressive commentator known for his focus on human rights, poverty, and social justice. A frequent CNN contributor, Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for commentary.

In 2022, Kristof attempted to run for governor of Oregon as a Democrat but was disqualified by the state Supreme Court, which ruled he did not meet the state’s three-year residency requirement.

Following the ruling, Kristof said he planned to remain politically engaged, writing that he would “keep fighting” on issues, including homelessness and mental health.

“I want to be clear that I’m not going anywhere,” Kristof said.

New York Times’ Rebuttal

A spokesperson for the New York Times told the Daily Signal that “the Israeli Prime Minister has threatened to file a libel lawsuit against The New York Times regarding Nicholas Kristof’s deeply reported opinion column on sexual abuse by Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers, and interrogators.”

“This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative. Any such legal claim would be without merit,” she continued.

The spokeswoman pointed out that “Nick’s column starts with a proposition to readers: ‘Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.’ Nick writes about the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel.”

“He then chronicles 14 on-the-record victim accounts and cites eight independent human rights reports documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers,” she added. “Nick has covered sexual violence for decades, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones.”

The NYT spokesperson concluded: “The accounts of the men and women he interviewed were corroborated with witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in, including family members and lawyers. Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.”

AUTHOR

Pedro Rodriguez

Pedro Boccalato Rodriguez-Aparicio is a journalism fellow at the Daily Signal. Follow on X pedrobrodrigue7.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Israel to Sue New York Times for Defamation

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The just-published New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof, accusing Israel of horrific crimes, including the sexual abuse of “Palestinians” in Israeli prisons, with victims said to include men, women, and children, and of “training dogs” to rape “Palestinians” as well, has quite properly enraged the government and the people of Israel. The Office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a Thursday, May 14 statement that Israel will take legal action against the Times over Kristof’s column.

More on this welcome news can be found here: “Israel to take legal action against ‘New York Times’ over claims of ‘dog rape’ of Palestinians,” by Shir Perets, Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2026:

Israel will take legal action against The New York Times over a column penned by Nicholas Kristof, which included allegations of serious sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a Thursday statement.

The PMO, which referred to the accusation as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar instructed officials to begin preparing a defamation lawsuit against the publication.

“They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu wrote on X/Twitter….

The planned lawsuit would focus on whether statements in the article crossed the legal threshold from opinion or criticism into actionable defamation. It was not immediately clear where the lawsuit would be filed, what damages would be sought, or whether Israeli state institutions or individual officials would be listed as plaintiffs.

On Wednesday, the New York Times issued a statement affirming its support for Kristof’s controversial op-ed, saying he “draws together on-the-record accounts and cites several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers.”

His “deeply reported piece of opinion journalism starts with a proposition to readers: ‘Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape,’” the news outlet stated.

“The accounts of the 14 men and women he interviewed were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers,” the outlet said.

Kristof’s sensationalist charges, including the charge that the IDF deliberately has trained dogs to “rape” “Palestinian” prisoners, has spread around the world, causing untold harm to Israel’s image. Kristof relied on “Palestinians” for this malignant misinformation, apparently unaware that “Palestinians” have a long history of lying, and he never bothered, prior to publication, to obtain a comment, and rebuttal, from Israel that he might at least have included in his piece; he might even have checked with canine trainers who, to a man, have now publicly spoken about the impossibility of training dogs to rape humans.

This isn’t the only part of Kristof’s hit piece that is blatantly false, but it is the most outrageous and unbelievable of his many outrageous and unbelievable claims. When Israel did respond to the piece, and denounced its wild fabrications, the NYT doubled down, claiming that it stood by Kristof’s piece, and by the “Palestinians” upon whose testimony he relied.

This was too much for the government of Israel to let pass with just a denunciation of the New York Times and Kristof. It knew his piece damages Israel’s reputation around the world, and not just among those who are always prepared to believe the worst of the Jewish state. That preposterous charge about that canine corps of doggy rapists, and other bizarre charges, too, which Kristof made, will now become the stuff of approving comments from Hamas, CAIR, the Iranian government, and of course wsuch people as Francesca Albanese, Roger Waters, Susan Sarandon, Rashida Tlaib, Wally Shawn, Zohran Mamdani, and others of that silly-sinister ilk, whose name, alas, is legion, will pick them up and repeat them.

Now the New York Times will be sued for defamation by the State of Israel. How much will it ask for? Let it be Trumpian in size — a billion dollars, or two, or more. How do you measure the cost of such lies being made and disseminated across the globe, to the reputation of the Jewish state? How many more attacks on Israelis or Jews will be the result of those baseless kristovian charges?

Israel thinks that the New York Times will rue the day it published Kristof’s hit piece, not because it will have come to its senses, morally — the New York Times long ago lost that sense when it comes to its reporting on Israel — but because having to pay a billion or two for having published Kristof’s calumny, which is a kind of updated version, applied to the Jewish state, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, will be painful. Does anyone doubt that the State of Israel will be able to call on the best defamation lawyers in the world, no matter where the suit is brought?

But here is another question. Why should Israel limit itself to suing the Grey Lady? Shouldn’t the onlie begetter of this defamation, the egregious Nicholas Kristof, with his long history of anti-Israel animus, also be sued? Let his days be full of exhausting testimony, both his own and that of others, and of withering cross-examinations, as lawyers for the plaintiff make mincemeat of him, and when the verdict comes down, he who is morally bankrupt will now be personally bankrupt as well.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Texas AG Sues Pornhub for Failing to Verify Age of Users

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Texas’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against pornographic website Pornhub for failing to obey state law requiring pornography websites to confirm the age of users before granting access to their sites. Experts welcomed the news as a step toward protecting minors from sexual exploitation.

Last year, Texas enacted House Bill 1181 into law, which requires pornography sites to verify that a user is 18 or older before allowing access to the site. The lawsuit against Pornhub, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), alleges that Aylo Global Entertainment, the parent company of Pornhub, is liable for up to $1.6 million “plus $10,000 a day from September of last year to the date of the lawsuit.”

“Instead of abiding by Texas law requiring purveyors of obscene sexual material to institute age verification systems, the company immediately presents minors who access their websites with pornographic content,” Paxton stated in a press release. “I look forward to holding any company accountable that violates our age verification laws intended to prevent minors from being exposed to harmful, obscene material on the internet.”

Texas is one of eight states to enact laws requiring porn sites to verify the age of their users in recent years. The other states with age verification laws include Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

Pornhub, one of the most visited porn sites in the world, has been embroiled in a series of lawsuits in recent years. Two class action lawsuits have been certified against the company for profiting from child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking. Pornhub is also the target of a lawsuit on behalf of nine women who were secretly filmed while changing in a locker room in which the footage ended up on the site. As of 2023, Pornhub is the defendant in at least 10 lawsuits involving 256 alleged victims.

In a 2020 New York Times exposé, columnist Nicholas Kristof described how Pornhub is “infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Benjamin Bull, general counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, confirmed Pornhub’s penchant for allowing illegal material to fester on the site for monetary gain.

“From our own litigation and investigation, Pornhub is a criminal sex trafficking enterprise pretending to be a legitimate business,” he remarked. “It’s about time state law enforcement required them to comply with a common-sense law that protects children from sexual abuse and harm.”

Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, expressed hope that Texas’s lawsuit will cause the pornographic site to reconsider its exploitive practices.

“Pornhub doesn’t take the exploitation of anyone seriously,” she told TWS. “They don’t care about the women and men whose lives are ruined when they are trafficked and forced to create pornography. They don’t care about the men and women whose brains are literally deteriorating because of pornography addiction. They don’t care about the relationships and marriages ruined because of pornography. And they don’t care about children who will be caught up in pornography addiction and never able to live freely because of it. All Pornhub cares about is increasing profits and spreading their evil filth everywhere. So maybe, Pornhub will care about the over $3.5 million they will owe the people of Texas.”

Szoch continued, “AG Paxton and the people of Texas should be commended for holding Pornhub accountable, and they should continue going after Pornhub until it is completely shut down. There is nothing good about pornography. Nine out of 10 boys and six out of 10 girls are exposed to pornography before the age of 18. This evil drug robs people of their ability to love. It must be stopped.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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