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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.
In historical analysis, there’s a useful concept called the criterion of embarrassment. If a claim is highly embarrassing to the claimant, then it’s more likely to be true, as normally people are unwilling to lie when they stand to gain only shame, humiliation, and loss of status. For instance, while every holocaust writer talks about the Jews who acted as informers and helpers to the camp guards, no author ever claims that they themselves informed or collaborated, because to be an informant (or moser) against another Jew is the most shameful sin in Judaism. Hence, such a narrative does not exist, as the author would be delivering himself only social approbation. “Raped by a dog” is like this. It is a claim that is maximally shameful to a Palestinian claimant given their unique cultural values. It’s a claim that would arguably harm the Hamas cause by decreasing morale and the enrollment of new recruits. And it’s an unnecessary claim, given that the IDF’s top lawyer already resigned in order to publish a video of the Israeli soldiers raping a prisoner.
Lying about this would not serve an essential function, and according to the criterion of embarrassment, I think it’s likely these prisoners are telling the truth about what they think happened. (Phrasing it this way because they may have been made to think the rape involved a dog, as part of a psychological terror campaign).
That is not the case here and you are misapplying a very niche concept and trying to sell it as some sort of bayesian reasoning tool.
The Criterion of Embarrassment is mostly used for Biblical apologetics to justify believing in the Crucifixion. It has very limited usefulness elsewhere; it's not some kind of general rule that historians use to evaluate the plausibility of historical narratives.
"This is more likely to be true because it makes the narrator look bad" has a certain amount of general truthiness to it, but it still needs to be balanced against other factors, like plausibility and how the teller stands to gain from it even if it does cast them in a negative light.
There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs. It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them? Come now. Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters. Lying about it also serves the very valuable function of generating more propaganda to be repeated by people who hate Jews.
For this to be the case, there would need to be a lot of cases in history where someone lied about something which would lead to overwhelming personal and familial shame. Do you think that’s true?
That’s exactly how it is. “What, as a teenager you fantasized about dying a heroic death to save your family or nation, but not being sodomized by a dog?” You can easily socially reinforce males to die in war through patriotism. That comes out of instinct. You cannot make them eager to be sodomized by dogs. There is nothing in Palestinian culture which would allow such a thing. (Imagine you’re the USM commander of the battalion ready to begin the Battle of Fallujah. More than 100 Americans are expected to die. You’re preparing your troops. But wait! Due to unforeseen circumstances, we can actually win the battle if just one soldier is sodomized by a dog and talks about it publicly. Who is the heroic soldier willing to save 100 lives by being raped by a dog? I think every few would raise their hand, maybe your intuition says differently. But now imagine they were all Muslim fundamentalists from a culture where women will not find husbands if their brother was raped and who find dogs ritually contaminated. And this explains the Israeli motive, given that destroying all of their dwellings and starving their children did not significantly curtail their morale. It makes sense why Israel would use dogs for rape because nothing else has reduced Palestinian morale.)
How much more important is the “dog” element compared to the previous, evidenced cases of rape in Israeli prisons? Does the “dog” element move the needle?
This is 100% true, but you will not find a case of atrocity propaganda in history where a man writes publicly “yes, it was I who was raped by the German Hun when they took Belgium! It was my backside which suffered!”
You are intentionally avoiding the point. It's clearly true that people are more likely to lie in ways that benefit them and less likely to lie in ways that do not benefit them, but even for Crucifixion, the "Criterion of Embarrassment" is based on a lot of assumptions and convenient omissions. It's a rhetorical tactic, not a historical reasoning tool. Would someone admitting to being raped by dogs experience shame? No doubt, but you are quite capable of reasoning for yourself why they'd lie about it. I also note that I am unable to find any actual named witnesses, just anonymous ones. It's a lot easier to claim multiple accounts by a bunch of names we can't actually put a name or face to.)
Really? Do you have some deep insight into the Palestinian mindset? Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale? As someone who's been studying Palestinians longer and more deeply than you have (you only care about them because of who they are fighting, not because you have an actual interest or understanding of their culture, history, and language), I am very, very doubtful that these atrocity stories would do anything but inflame them more.
Your hypothetical "What if you could save your comrades by being raped by a dog?" is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest. No one asked a Palestinian to get raped by a dog for Hamas.
If you really want to pose analogies, the equivalent would not be "Volunteer to be raped by a dog" but "Volunteer to claim you were raped by a dog," or if you believe the dog-rape really happened, "Volunteer to fight an evil enemy who might rape you with dogs if you are captured."
It explains their motive if you think "reducing their morale" is an Israeli objective, if you think rape-dogs would actually do this, and if you think they have failed to achieve their objective. You are, as usual, just imagining an fantastical "Evil Israelis who do Evil Things because Evil (Jews)." Sitting in their Headquarters of Evil, they say to themselves, "Well, we've reduced Gaza to rubble but those brave Palestinians still haven't surrendered" (what would this even look like, at this point?). "Let's start raping them with dogs- surely this will break their spirit!" (And... what? They will stop fighting? Stop resisting? Throw out Hamas? What is the endgame you imagine the Israelis imagining in this scenario?)
It's pure made-up atrocity porn. Even if rape-by-dog has ever happened in an Israeli prison, it's like claiming Abu Ghraib was part of a systematic plan by US forces to demoralize Iraqis and make them stop resisting. Maybe you believe this was the case, but then you have to believe that from the top on down, the entire US chain of command was not just sadistically evil but extraordinarily stupid.
For the Palestinians? Not much. For Westerners? Certainly adds more outrage. Everyone kind of understands/accepts that prisoner rape will happen, whether or not you think it's pervasive and institutionally approved. But rape by dogs? Only evil Jews would do something like that!
Where is the Palestinian who has done this? From what I can tell, the accounts are all anonymous.
I note this is similar to the situation regarding the gang rapes that supposedly happened on October 7. There are numerous accounts of it happening, claims of footage existing, but because you can't find an individual, named Israeli woman who will go on camera and describe what was done to her, people who hate Jews will claim it's atrocity porn, while simultaneously finding anonymized Palestinian accounts of rape by dogs credible.
For what it's worth, while I agree with you entirely in your dispute with coffee_enjoyer, I would like to nitpick that this isn't true about the criterion of embarrassment.
It's true that the CoE is not treated as absolute. This is why people who deploy it as a gotcha in apologetical contexts are being dishonest. The CoE is probabilistic. In principle, if there's no clear reason to falsify something, it seems more likely to be true, but this is an educated guess based on how well we can model the beliefs and motives of an author. That's a very fallible process, so the CoE is very rarely, in biblical studies, treated as conclusive by itself. It is used alongside half a dozen other criteria to try to build up a picture of what is likely to be true.
I would note that the CoE is not always used in ways friendly to orthodox Christianity. The CoE has sometimes been used to argue in favour of the historicity of the Crucifixion, but it is always used to defend the likely historicity of, for instance, what seemed to be false or mistaken prophecies on Jesus' part. For example, the Olivet discourse infamously contains the claim that this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened (Mark 13:30). It would be highly embarrassing for Jesus to make an incorrect prophecy, and some scholars would argue that there are places in the Bible where the authors seem to be backing off or making excuses for (e.g. the Lukan Jesus chides others for seeking to know the times, or 2 Peter 3:8). The CoE would be used to argue in favour of the mistakes being real, even though this shows a fallible Jesus and is problematic for believers.
It does get used outside of biblical studies as well. My favourite example is the satanic verses - there seems to be very little reason for early Muslims to make up a story about Muhammad being misled, so is it more plausible that the event is historical? It doesn't seem totally unthinkable to suggest that Muhammad, during his lifetime, experimented a bit with optimising his message, and tested out how different ideas went down. There could be argued to be elements of early Islam that are syncretic with re-contextualised Arabian paganism (most famously the Kaaba), and there are undisputed incidents where Muhammad seems to show sympathy toward a pagan custom - the Nakhla incident, for instance, shows Muhammad apparently wanting to observe a pagan custom not to fight in the holy months, until (supposedly) God corrected him. So it seems plausible that maybe Muhammad might have once briefly experimented with incorporating pagan divinities into Islam as something like angels, then changed his mind, and the story of a Satanic suggestion was invented to cover the gap.
However, that theory is still highly speculative - wiki describes a history of debates on its historicity, some of which challenge the idea that there could be no motive other than truth for Muslims to invent the incident. The CoE is very rarely dispositive by itself!
At any rate. I would defend the CoE as having a place in historical and textual study.
I don't really disagree with any of that, but I think calling something "The criterion of embarrassment" is really just giving a lofty name to a reasoning tool that, as you say, is not dispositive by itself. An admission against self interest is a piece of evidence, but it's just one factor. It relies on assuming that our account of who claimed what is entirely accurate, that our understanding of their motives and interests is entirely accurate, and it's rarely the case that you have a single person or entity making a claim that would be unambiguously against their self interest to be believed.
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