It’s the dogs that dog the credibility

For many readers, the one anti-Israel allegation that deserved closer scrutiny in Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times column blew the entire piece. It’s a shame. But he can still fix it

Sweet fella…. Down, boy, DOWN! (Hans Kemperman)

For years, we in Israel have been hearing from others about our Q Units. You know, the espionage departments whose geniuses dream up all those wild weapons and phantasmagorical gadgets to catch our enemies by surprise and leave everyone else wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

For example, exploding pagers.

James Bond had his own Q Unit and a somewhat fumbling and socially bumbling genius referred to only as Q. Some of his gadgets? Well, they certainly were more elegant than belt-borne beepers.

There were sleek Aston Martins tricked out with machine guns, missiles, tire cutters and even ejection seats for those recalcitrant front-seat passengers. There were so many Mont Blanc poison pens and Omega Seamaster satellite transmitters that Q must have had to appear before M on more than one occasion to explain the cost overruns.

Our own Q? Aside from explosive pagers, he or she is at least said to have a thing for live animals.

A FEW YEARS BACK, there were reports out of Egypt that its Sinai beaches were being terrorized by great white Mossad sharks that threatened a good part of Cairo’s tourism revenue. I’m sure there were those claiming that the clever Jews most likely taught these Carcharodon carcharias to swim a hundred miles or so, turn right at the third beach and then make a reasonable number of fin-depth runs toward swimmers, especially children and the elderly.

Poor sharks. The training must have been brutal.

There were claims that Israel trained dolphins to spy. As with the sharks, nothing was ever proved, but you have to wonder whether those cute, playful Delphinidae are even capable of such nefarious activity.

Over the years, the gamut of animals Israel was said to use for its security needs ran from cows and wild boars to migratory birds and even lizards. So the day comes when the creature of choice for Israeli prisoner control turns out to be the widely available, easily trainable and eminently controllable Canis lupus familiaris.

The modus operandi of this dog’s alleged deployment, however, is far more complicated than just siccing it on some poorly behaved Palestinian prisoner. A recent claim in The New York Times seems to make a side-trip through Science Land and what must certainly include genetic engineering. Then it seems to take a mind-numbing leap of faith into a wildly futuristic realm in which Israel’s Q, perhaps with help from Jewish space lasers, actually concocts a male canine creature that can summon an erection on command and sexually violate said poorly behaved Palestinian prisoner.

Fido, sit! Fido, roll over! Fido, rape!

YES, THINGS HAVE GOTTEN pretty bizarre out there. And Nicholas Kristof, an award-winning NYT columnist known for his commitment to human rights, must know that bizarre automatically means there will be doubts.

I’ll go out on a limb to say that most of his critics probably understood “rape” by canine to mean with the dog’s penis. That’s how I read it. If true, this would necessitate some sort of complicated bio engineering and/or super-duper training – something the professional dog trainers I contacted told me was impossible.

So I looked into a few of the accepted definitions of rape. The World Health Organization (WHO) definition is the “physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration of the vulva or anus with a penis, other body part or an object” [my italics].

So perhaps it was penetration with a paw or a snout? I’ve watched trained dogs use these appendages on demand to perform tricks. A dog erection on demand sounds pretty wild. Also, not all of us are up on the WHO’s complete definition of rape – and I’m willing to bet that this is also true among Kristof’s regular readers and even fans, of which I’m one.

FOLLOWING A LENGTHY STINT covering the region for a US news network, I wrote the following in an American op-ed piece. It addressed the matter of news source believability and the believability of the resulting reporting:

“A few days after Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave his famous order to break rioters’ bones [at the beginning of the First Intifada], I spent the morning in a Ramallah orthopedic ward overflowing with teenage boys. Each said he had been beaten by soldiers. ‘What were you doing?’ I asked. The answer – invariably – was that they were on their way to buy bread when, unprovoked, the soldiers pounced.

I began wondering how much bread these boys could eat when I came across a teenager I recognized from the day before. I had seen him throw a firebomb at troops – who quickly caught him and, of course, broke a few bones. ‘Why were you beaten?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I was on my way to buy bread.’

“Worse was an incident involving doctors. Two days after my lesson about bread and beatings, journalists were summoned to a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem to view a boy about to be taken off life support. He was brain dead, said the physicians, due to a massive cerebral hemorrhage brought on by an Israeli beating.

“Rabin’s controversial policy had claimed its first life. A big story.

“I was elsewhere at the moment, but viewed the footage when I returned – and noticed there was no head wound, not even swelling. The boy, a resident of Gaza, had been transferred from a local hospital. I called the hospital and spoke with the deputy director – who, apparently unaware of what was being set in motion in Jerusalem, told me there had been no complaint or physical sign of violence when the boy was admitted. What’s more, he had a history of spontaneous brain hemorrhaging.

“I called the hospital in Jerusalem. The director put his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke at length with someone else. He came back on the line and insisted the boy had been beaten, because that’s what the father had said. And the lack of head wounds or swelling? ‘Israeli soldiers are sophisticated,’ the doctor said. By the time I got back to the deputy hospital director in Gaza, he sounded very uncomfortable – and clearly had been told to change his story.

“(A journalistic footnote: My editors were savvy enough to stay away, yet other outlets, despite the warnings, were unable to resist a Great Media Moment.)”

NICHOLAS KRISTOF’S CRITICS – and I’m among them this time around – wonder about his attempts at verification. Euro-Med? Its founder, Ramy Abdu, is a Palestinian with previous ties to the Gaza flotillas. Its chairman, Richard A. Falk, is a former UN official whose deeply negative views of Israel are long known. Couldn’t Kristof have turned to a more ecumenical source to verify?

At the very least, he could simply have asked a dog trainer or two, for it’s the dogs that dog the credibility of his piece. Nothing else. That’s because in recent years – especially with the appointment of the racist man-child Itamar Ben Gvir as the cabinet minister in charge of Israel’s police and prisons – human rights for Palestinians in Israeli custody have been seriously eroded.

So Mr. Kristof, a few more of your thoughts on that particular assertion by former Palestinian prisoners could have gone a long way toward ameliorating the sense of general disbelief regarding the entire column. They still can.