Nicholas Kristof Proves: Smart People Can Be Dumb

And The Grey Lady is the Paper of Broken Record

Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” For the Grey Lady, the best of times are long gone. What remains is the worst — and this week proved it beyond any doubt.

Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed in The New York Times this week titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, he alleged that Israeli prison guards have trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. The Nickster relied heavily on the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor — a Geneva-based group whose founder, Ramy Abdu, has documented ties to senior Hamas leadership — and on 14 sources, many of them anonymous, several of whom have been publicly identified as Hamas affiliates or terrorism apologists.

When reports circulated that the Times was internally discussing a retraction, the paper issued a statement calling the retraction rumors “no truth at all” and stood fully behind Kristof. So, let’s be clear: the Times is defending the indefensible.

• Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
• Former US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt asked publicly whether the Times had “no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility.”
• The American Jewish Committee called it a “modern-day blood libel in the paper of record.”
• Scientists and doctors noted the dog rape allegation is not merely unverified — it is, as one analyst put it, medically and scientifically impossible. Kristof himself concedes in the piece that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” He then spent 4,000 words asserting it happens systematically anyway.

Making matters worse, Kristof cited former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to lend his allegations gravitas — and it backfired. Olmert issued a statement saying Kristof  “misrepresented” their conversation and never validated the dog rape claims. In Olmert’s own words: “the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.” The Nickster used a former Israeli Prime Minister as a mic prop — only the thud came from the Times.

The timing is pathetically suspect. Kristof’s column went live — prominently featured on the homepage, with video — the night before Israel’s Civil Commission on Hamas’s systematic sexual atrocities on October 7. A 300-page trove of evidence, medical examinations, testimonies — would be released the very next morning. The Times knew about it. Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed it had approached the paper “months ago” about reporting on Hamas’s use of rape as a weapon of war. The Times said it was “not interested.”

I cancelled my subscription. But that’s not enough. What we need is a reckoning. The safety of our peoplehood hangs in the balance.

Nothing New To See Here

My attorney, Professor Orly Ravid of Southwestern Law School, wrote a law review article being published in August called Truth on Trial: Media Malpractice in Israel/Gaza Coverage, which documents — with scholarly precision — exactly what we are watching unfold in real time. She charts the Times’ pattern of misleading headlines, misquotations of Israeli leaders, uncritical amplification of Hamas casualty figures, reliance on Hamas-affiliated sources, and the suppression of stories — like the documentary evidence of October 7 sexual violence — that didn’t fit the paper’s narrative architecture. Ravid notes that between October 7, 2023, and June 2024, the Times admitted to 72 errors in war coverage — 48 of them, or nearly 67 percent, casting Israel in a false negative light. Corrections were, as she documents, “late, vague and sometimes evasive.”

Kristof’s column is not an anomaly. It is the institutional expression of what Ravid describes as a “newsroom intifada” — a cadre of activist journalists who feel no obligation to professional ethics and who apply internal pressure to shape coverage in ways that distort reality on the ground.

But Ravid’s meticulous documentation, as damning as it is, documents only the latest iteration of a pattern that stretches back decades. This is not a paper that lost its way after October 7. This is a paper returning to form. In her 2004 book Buried by the Times, historian Laurel Leff documented how the New York Times — then, as now, owned and operated by a Jewish family, the Sulzbergers — systematically underreported and buried news of the Holocaust during World War II.

The paper published fewer than two dozen front-page stories about the extermination of European Jews between 1939 and 1945, and even those were typically stripped of their specifically Jewish context. When the gas chambers were operating at full capacity, the Times was worried about the appearance of advocating for its own people.

This level of pathological self-erasure has metastasized. The Sulzbergers who were too frightened to be Jewish when Jews were being slaughtered are now too feckless to be honest when Jews are being lied about and hunted by ruthless radical Islamists and their mindless henchmen. I guess being spineless is inherent in the DNA of the family.

The Paper of Broken Record: It’s Official

There is a cruder explanation for some of what we are seeing: desperation. Legacy news media is in freefall. Subscriptions are hemorrhaging, advertising revenue has largely migrated to platforms, and the Times — like every legacy outlet — has discovered that outrage drives clicks.

Former editorial page editor James Bennet accused the paper of catering to “its readers and social media reactions instead of being an arbiter of truth.” Bari Weiss, in her resignation letter from the Times, wrote that “history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.” Yale Professor Edieal Pinker, who analyzed over 1,500 Times war articles, concluded that the paper’s relentless anti-Israel framing was driven by a choice to “get clicks and generate more advertising revenue.” Blood libels, it turns out, are good for business. The Times knew exactly what it was doing by featuring the Kristof op-ed front and center. And shame on them.

The October 7 Blood Libel

A perfect example of the Times’ disingenuous coverage was the Al-Ahli hospital headline in October 2023 — “Israeli Airstrike Killed 500 at a Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say” — which was false. The explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. The death toll was between 50 and 100, not 500. The source was Hamas’s own health ministry. The Times kept the headline live for five days. It sparked riots across the Middle East. Jordan’s King Abdullah cancelled a summit with President Biden. A Jewish holy site in Tunisia was attacked.

What Must Happen

Cancelling subscriptions matters, but it is not the end of our obligation. We must say, plainly, that the Gray Lady has disqualified herself from the title of paper of record. She has become something else: a weakened platform laundering Hamas propaganda through Pulitzer Prize credentials and calling it journalism.

[SIDEBAR] The Society of Professional Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, and every major journalism ethics body in the world have codes requiring reporters to verify facts, avoid conflicted sources, correct errors promptly, and ensure their reporting does not “contribute to hatred or prejudice.” These standards still exist — ridiculous as that sounds — and are simply no longer enforced, self or otherwise.

Kristof’s column violated every one of them. His primary source has documented ties to Hamas. His central factual claim is medically impossible. His corrections, if they ever come, will appear in a footnote while the original reached millions. As Ravid argues, reinstating these standards as a genuine professional norm — not just words on a website — is exactly where the fight has to go next.

As Ravid concludes in Truth on Trial, the answer to biased speech cannot be suppression — the First Amendment is clear, and she is right. We don’t want the government deciding what is true. But the answer also cannot be silence on our end.

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1927 that the remedy for false speech is “more speech, not enforced silence.” He would not have considered platforming Hamas propaganda as the more speech he had in mind.

This is not journalism worthy of being hailed “the paper of record.” From the Holocaust to October 7 to trained dogs that never existed — the Grey Lady is now the broken record.

So, the old grey mare ain’t what she used to be — and after this embarrassment — never will be again.

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