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Notes -
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.
It is kind of interesting how, even with real atrocities, authority figures sympathetic to the victims almost always publish fiction that is more gruesome than reality. The reign of terror was a tragedy, but many of the stories such as republican weddings were false. Similarly, many Holocaust stories told by survivors were fictitious exaggerations of things such as human skin lampposts. You also have right wingers giving demographically impossible overestimates of Stalinist crimes. Over-exaggerating crimes seems universal.
Is there some Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners? Probably. Does Israel have a military department solely dedicated to training dogs to rape prisoners? Only in my AI Generated pornographic novel.
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