Canine Hurrah! The Secret Annals of the Israeli Dog Rape Program

To: Nicholas Kristof
From: Gary Epstein
Re: Vindication

I am sure that you are feeling besieged by all the attacks on your ground-breaking article about sexual abuse in Israeli prisons. You must be particularly sensitive to charges that you are a shoddy journalist with a long history of fabricating lurid sexually oriented fantasies. Your creative – if a bit dishonest – reporting on child brothels in Cambodia must be front of mind as you contemplate yet another enormous embarrassment.

Remember? You wrote multiple New York Times columns and articles about those child brothels, visiting them yourself and quite performatively purchasing the freedom of two young girls whom you were told were child prostitutes. It wasn’t your fault that your primary source, Somaly Mam, was later exposed for fabricating most of the narrative about trafficking. I mean, did anyone actually expect you to check facts before you went to press? After all, you work for The New York Times, which publishes pictures of children with congenital diseases and falsely claims they are victims of starvation (cropping out pictures of well-fed siblings).

Anyway, you later apologized for having been so credulous and, let’s admit it, stupid. You said that you regretted amplifying false stories. That was it: one apology, in which you acknowledged that you had been misled and failed to verify most of the key claims you made. Over a decade of false stories, and you get away with one mea culpa. Nice work, if you can get it.

Well, you are in the soup again for, so to speak, barking up the wrong tree. I don’t want to psychoanalyze you, but the downward spiral from fascination with imaginary child prostitutes to an unhealthy preoccupation with fantasized bestiality suggests that you may be in need of professional help. Your article on “widespread Israeli sexual violence,” including the programmatic use of trained rapist dogs to violate Palestinian prisoners, has been attacked as fraudulent, undocumented, unverified, poorly sourced, sensational, lurid, and libelous. It also suggests a highly degenerate fixation on canine sexuality that is implausible and inconsistent with animal biology.

You are probably getting your apology ready, especially since the whole mess appears to have been contrived in cooperation with Hamas apologists to blunt the factually accurate report of the crimes committed on October 7 that was scheduled for issuance the day after your column appeared.

Not a good look, Nick.

Well, you are in luck. While the following official contrived transcript of the Israel Defense Forces Dog Rape Training Brigade (“Canine Hurrah!”) may not withstand journalistic scrutiny, we both know that journalistic scrutiny is not one of your strong points, or one of your weak points. The sources in your article don’t really even survive the giggle test. These are folks who claimed that their feet exploded because of electric shock torture, who accused Israelis of organ harvesting, executing hospital patients, and other nonsense, and whose stories about which foreign objects were inserted in them changed each time they were repeated (could an alleged victim really confuse a carrot with a dog’s penis in separate narratives?).

Anyway, since the following transcript provides partial support for your story and the New York Times agenda, I am sure that you will find it useful.

PLEASE DO NOT TELL ANYONE HOW YOU GOT IT.

Final Report of the IDF Dog Rape Training Brigade (“Canine Hurrah!”)

After we were assigned our task, we set out to find a bunch of male dogs that were confused about their sexuality. We rejected any that showed interest in pictures of female cocker spaniels or labs and focused instead on those whose owners had majored in Near Eastern Studies or Gender Studies. Research disclosed that we should concentrate on dogs that spent a significant part of their free time sniffing and licking their own private parts and those of other animals, and made themselves nuisances in ways familiar to female pedestrians, i.e., those without impulse control. Finally, we addressed a group of canine participants by a number of different pronouns and ruled out those who did not show the requisite flexibility by failing to respond to more than one pronoun.

When we had accumulated a corps of likely candidates, we kept them separated from female companions and bombarded them 24/7 with pictures of Yasser Arafat while playing patriotic Israeli music and spraying female pheromones.  We then eliminated those who turned away in disgust.  We knew that discerning dogs would not cooperate with the program; we were looking for the type of dog that, had it been human, would have shown up on command at a Columbia campus demonstration.  We wanted dogs that would follow orders without thinking.

We were left with a small group of 8-12 dogs.  The number is imprecise because Ehud, who was in charge of the program, had taken to drinking heavily and sometimes double-counted.

We probably spent too much time trying to make the dogs remaining in the program invisible, since we knew that there was no way in hell that a program such as this would go unreported in the Israeli press if it was observed by inmates or prison personnel.  We were unsuccessful in our invisibility program, but we think that our efforts in implementing the fallback position of dressing the dogs in penguin costumes until they were actually introduced to the prisoners was effective in preventing leaks.  We sure hope that Nick Kristof doesn’t hear about it.  A penguin rape story will cause incalculable damage to Israel’s image.

We had been advised that canine biology militated against a successful human rape training program.  The three reported cases apparently involved humans who actively encouraged their own penetration. We know that these cases have been avidly followed and cited by Nick Kristof (with a “sigh” that reveals more than was probably intended), which makes it even more imperative that we keep reports of our activities away from him and The New York Times.  We were confident that having been able to commit genocide while growing the target population, apartheid while the affected minority enjoys full and equal rights, and mass starvation upon residents who remained remarkably well-fed, we would be able to persuade some highly motivated dogs to disregard their own biology and follow orders.

We failed.

Even more regrettably, news of our program leaked into the prison population, with the result that we started receiving applications from prisoners who were excited by the idea and eager to participate (it appears that Kristof’s fetish may be held by others).  As you can imagine, this sent us back to the drawing board, since the program was designed as punishment.

To our regret, we are unable to report any real progress.  We now have a bunch of seriously messed-up dogs and demoralized trainers.

We await further orders.

Nick, I hope this provides you with the necessary ammunition to save your miserable career.  You haven’t written anything worthwhile since your reporting from Darfur 20 years ago, and you have become a sadly diminished example of a formerly promising journalist who has become a shill for terrorists, but I really don’t want to read yet another groveling apology from you.

No one will believe a word of it, anyway.