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We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
The New York Times ran an opinion article by Nicholas Kristof wherein a number of Palestinians report being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. There’s not much in the way of physical evidence, but that is hardly unusual in rape crimes. Israel has strenuously denied the allegations, characterizing them as blood libel. It seems to be a he-said/she-said that comes down to whether you believe the Palestinian prisoners (who often have ties to Hamas or other extremist groups, hence why they ended up in Israeli prisons) or the IDF.
Certain enterprising young pro-Israel influencers think they can to better than appeal to untrustworthiness. They puport to have found a smoking gun that proves the NYT published a complete fabrication in order to libel the State of Israel, and by extension all Jews. One of the more salacious anecdotes regards a man from Gaza who alleges that he was raped by a dog.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Despite calls and rumors to the contrary, The Times so far has declined to retract the article.
Unless you’re just having fun with it this post reads to me as if it’s way, way, way too credulous of the dog-sleights-man.
The question isn’t if a dog could mechanically rape a human being. (Although it would be a moderately disordered dog that would rape a man: what breed are we talking anyways?) The question is if Israeli jailors would sic a dog on their captive with the intent for the dog to rape him. (Actually, how does that work mechanically: did they tie him head down ass up?)
It’s a fairly unusual accusation. It requires e.g. that the Israelis have rape dogs. Which the jailors are willing to use. Without this being exposed in any provable way. Is it possible? Well, sure, technically, but why haven’t I heard of this sort of thing before? Do the Iranians have rapehunds? Did the Nazis sic specially trained dogs on their victims? I don’t recall anything like this in Leviticus. It’s not in Bernal Diaz.
The alternative, much more plausible event: “It didn’t happen. We made it up. It’s not real.” The story was fabricated because it sounded good. The victim hallucinated. Something was lost in translation. A rumor got out of hand. Those are all explanations consistent with everything I’ve ever observed in human nature.
Extradordinary claims require exorbiditrary evidence? It seems much much likelier that people will believe anything bad about Israel than than the dog didn’t even need any peanut butter.
The previous 'dogs trained to rape people' claims were 1) a canard repeated against Pinochet by actual literal communists who made up quite a lot of other things, although they probably were tortured in conventional ways and 2) the confessions of an insane serial killer who also definitely tortured and raped people but also claimed lots of other improbable falsehoods. So my priors from this are 'Israel is torturing prisoners but not with trained rape dogs'.
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The human Israeli soldiers are rapey - recall the protests and rioting when the Israeli govt briefly tried to arrest some of its soldiers for raping prisoners. Apparently the rapist is now a celebrity in Israel, appearing on TV shows.
It's absolutely believable that the same govt who tolerates raping of prisoners also tolerates the use of dogs for rape. It is a very ordinary claim, not an extraordinary claim.
An Israeli parliamentarian on live camera vigorously protested for doing anything to prisoners:
Abusing prisoners also fits into the general Israeli policy of rule by terror and force, their Dahiya doctrine of maximum destruction to civilian targets.
See what the comment you're replying to said: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. See also the rules: "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
None of this is inflammatory or surprising or extraordinary. The same country that goes around massacring, raping, launching various bombing attacks, assassinations and false flag attacks its entire existence continues to do so... stop the presses! They've been torturing prisoners for many years, why would we expect them to stop now?
They did this kind of thing long before 2023, shooting people because they can: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition?LangID=E&NewsID=24226
There are videos here of a goofy attempt to cover up rape: https://x.com/ApartheidReview/status/2054208876048679271
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/report-israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/
They dropped the charges, it's not politically possible to punish these guys. How would it be possible, when people riot to free them and politicians leap to their defence? What do they have to fear? It's not like America or a Western country where war crimes are taken painfully seriously.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/12/israeli-military-top-lawyer-drops-charges-soldiers-palestinian-detainee-abuse-gaza
Would we be surprised if the Syrian government that went around torturing and massacring and suppressing almost the whole time it existed (Hama for instance) continued to do so? Or if the Chinese government which has been constantly being incredibly authoritarian and repressive for its entire existence continues to be authoritarian and repressive? That doesn't need sourcing, it's ordinary and normal.
It's ironic that there are all these people who cry about leftists holding Israel 'to a different standard' than Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Syria - when they are the ones who do so, demanding all this evidence that Israel has done something wrong, as if there aren't mountains of killings and atrocities they dish out... If any other country said 'oh the UNHCR is biased against us, Amnesty is biased against us, all the journalists we keep shooting are biased against us, they're all just anti-Our_Country' they wouldn't get even the most credulous to believe such a nakedly self-serving assertion.
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He kinda did by quoting the parliamentarian in question. You think the rapist being invited to a TV show is so extraordinary and inflammatory? Or that some people might have the same opinions as an elected representative?
The claim that a specific IDF soldier is known to be a rapist AND a celebrity in Israel who appears on TV shows does strike me as an inflammatory one, yes.
"Known to" does a lot of heavy lifting, because you can always deny the accusation, and hide behind "it's just an allegation", but sources for claim are not hard to find.
That's all I was looking for, thank you.
@RandomRanger's gloss was highly misleading: he made it sound as if it had been established beyond reasonable doubt that this soldier had raped a Palestinian prisoner, but that this revelation hadn't gotten in the way of his becoming an Israeli celebrity. Whereas according to this article, the investigation is still ongoing, and far from being widely admired, the soldier claims he decided to break his anonymity after being publicly shamed and criticised by an Israeli woman for what he allegedly did.
Given that the accusation is based on video evidence I think his portrayal of it is fairly accurate.
Again, anyone can deny an accusation. The people inviting him to their shows can claim he's innocent indefinitely.
I'm not following. He is widely admired. He is being invited to TV shows and is being treated as a celebrity. The specific actions he is accused of (rather than his general conduct under the assumption of his innocence) are being explicitly defended by Israeli representatives. There are also other people who are criticizing him, but that does not detract from the large swathes of people circling the wagons around him.
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Forget it Shakes it's Chinatown.
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I wouldn't have believed most of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib if there hadn't been pictures of it. Some people will do weird shit if they have the oppurtunity.
Abu Ghraib seemed more like "assholes taking an opportunity to do sadistic shit". Rape dogs seems like the kind of thing you'd need training programs for, with like, budgets and performance evaluations.
"true, this dog won't hunt -- but he's very rapey..."
"We kept him in a room with 24/7 streams of Andrew Tate content, he doesn't even understand the concept of consent anymore"
Okay, I laughed.
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I don't know, I doubt we will be getting solid scientific evidence on how easy it is to get a big dog without special training to mount an unwilling human who has been tied up in "receptive" position anytime soon, but per the Abu Ghraib example + other better-evidenced Israeli misconduct I certainly would not dismiss this on "these soldiers would not do such a thing" grounds.
Of course, there's no reason it couldn't be made up, either; but then if you think the NYT would make this up or eat it up from a source without properly verifying it by whatever means they have available, I would like you to apply the same degree of skepticism to press-reported atrocities even when you agree with the direction (for many here, I guess that would be Russians in Ukraine e.g. the Bucha story?).
They have a history of being extremely credulous when making these sorts of attacks, like with the Russian Bounty story.
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The Israeli military uses dogs pretty extensively, this is well documented by non-controversial sources. In the context of a large detention center run by the Israeli military, I'd imagine they are particularly useful to search for contraband like drugs, or to incapacitate combative detainees in a non-lethal manner.
This seems like it could easily be a case of "assholes taking the opportunity to do sadistic shit" especially because they know the Muslim perception of dogs, and therefore it would be even more humiliating and degrading than other forms of sexual assault.
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Yeah, that’s sort of my point. If you want to sexually brutalize male prisoners there’s a wealth of options easily available with a ton of precedent.
The dog thing is obviously designed to be maximally inflammatory to the intended audience; the red / green alliance of islamists and hardcore leftists and their
useful idiots“fellow travelers”.Plus of course anyone already maximally inclined to believe negative things about da joos.
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