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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.
I think the reason why what is obviously a piece of reported journalism appears in the "Opinion" section is that the NYT isn't willing to stake its integrity on the existence of trained rape dogs, and the rules of traditional journalism say that blame for factual inaccuracies in opinion pieces lies with the named author and not the newspaper.
Technically, it didn't. Kristof is careful to distinguish between cases where he has corroborating evidence, and cases where he is recounting uncorroborated allegations from former detainees. If the detainee did accuse the Israelis of using rape dogs (which I assume he did) then the NYT has printed the true statement "He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him." The world would be a better place if journalists didn't act as stenographers for lying sources, but the current rules of journalistic ethics unfortunately say that it is okay as long as you are clear that you are attributing the lies to the source.
So we have another example of where the logic of bounded distrust applies - the NYT has (almost certainly) reprinted a false claim while staying clearly on the right side of the rules of traditional journalism. This is not going to embarrass them with anyone who hasn't already bozo-binned them.
That said, Why?. The NYT and Kristof don't need the dogs to make their point. "Abu Ghraib-style atrocities against Palestinian detainees are ubiquitous in Israeli prisons and even in the rare cases where there is hard evidence the Netanyahu government proudly refuses to prosecute" is a story they do stand up. The only people who think there is an important moral distinction between raping someone with a carrot or a truncheon and raping them with a dog are PETA, and it might be possible to convince them that the dog enthusiastically consented. A high-reporting-effort piece of long-form journalism about serious atrocities, with corroborating evidence that most of the allegations, was relegated to the Opinion section, and then subject to deserved ridicule, because of a throwaway allegation below the fold that was added for meme value despite the implausibility. An editor should have pointed this out, and Kristof should have made the change and thanked them for saving him from embarrassment.
Also, why did Kristof's editor not click the links? There are five links which are inserted with a claim that they corroborate the trained rape dog allegation, but the two that work in the UK don't - they are links to other articles which say that dogs were used (as happened at Abu Ghraib - it is the most obvious thing an evilmaxxing jailer would do to humiliate a Muslim detainee) as part of the sexual humiliation of naked prisoners, but not that the dogs penetrated anyone.
My opinion of the NYT is not revised downwards because they went to the dogs a long time ago and everyone knows it. Kristof and the IDF both had a reputation to lose - one is shamed by the true allegations, the other by the false ones.
I don’t think this is true. Being raped with a carrot is different to being raped by a dog. The latter is infinitely more degrading - it’s being sexually dominated by a far lesser species.
I agree that dogs are worse, which is presumably why Kristof wanted to keep the dogs in the story, but I don't think fine details matter once you cross the moral event horizon.
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