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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.
Atrocity propaganda happens in every conflict, but this is so over-the-top it's like something someone would make up for an edgy Internet story.
Can I believe Israelis torture Palestinian prisoners? Yes. Can I believe they might even rape Palestinian prisoners? I'm very skeptical that it's SOP or approved, but I believe it happens. But raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs?
If you spend any time thinking about the mechanics (gods know nobody wants to, but here we are), you'd realize that even a large dog would have trouble mounting an unwilling person, who would have to be pretty thoroughly tied up, and then you'd have to think about how you'd train a dog to do that (yes, a dog will hump anything but you can't generally get them to hump in a particular way on command), and it just gets extremely unlikely. At most, I can imagine them getting a dog to jump on a bound Palestinian prisoner and laughing about it. A whole squad of trained rape-dogs? Come the fuck on.
Dogs are considered particularly unclean by Muslims, so this sounds like either something the Israelis made up as a story to scare Palestinians, or something Palestinians made up as a story about how depraved and evil Israelis are, or both.
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