The Jewish State Belies the Laws of Nature, Teaches Dogs to Rape Prisoners, Says NYT. Happy Jewish Heritage Month!
How did we get here, where the onetime paper of record is engaging in a blatant blood libel? My new book, The Jews and the Left, explains.
You might not know this, but May is Jewish Heritage Month in the United States. So it was especially galling when the New York Times ran a front page opinion piece by columnist Nicholas Kristoff which claimed that among other abuses, Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.
Yup. You heard that right: The New York Times, the onetime paper of record, the definitive legacy newspaper of this country, published an outright fabrication—that Israelis had somehow overcome the laws of nature and taught dogs to rape Palestinians.
It’s astonishing that this needs to be said, but “Jews trained dogs to rape prisoners” is an IQ test, and if you believe that, you just failed.
What’s worse is the piece preempted by a day the publication of the most comprehensive report of the sexual crimes that Hamas committed against Israeli men, women, and children on October 7 and after. They gang raped men and women before dismembering them. They sexually tortured the hostages they took, including the little girls. They committed crimes too horrific to repeat here.
Yet the day before this report came out—a report of actual crimes by Palestinians against Israeli Jews—the Times went with a fabricated report of Jewish crimes against Palestinians.
It’s atrocity inversion. It’s victimhood envy. And it’s the purest form of antisemitism.
How did we get here? How did we arrive at a situation where the New York Times is publishing outright libels against the Jewish State?
That’s what my new book, The Jews and the Left, is all about. It tells the story of why Jews became Democrats in the first place, what made being a liberal so central to the identity of American Jews, and why the Left turned on the Jews.
Of course, it’s not just the Left. This week, Senator Rand Paul’s adult son accosted Congressman Mike Lawler in a bar and hurled a series of antisemitic invective at him. But there is widespread condemnation of antisemitism on the right. Not so on the Left, where it’s seeped into the very bones. Being anti-Israel has become the price of entry to the Left.
And yet, amazingly, most American Jews remain staunch Democrats.
I think it’s because they see themselves as an oppressed minority and identify with other immigrant groups.
But this is a fundamental misreading of Jewish American history. We were never guests here. And we were never oppressed. We were founding partners in the creation of this great nation, and on the 250th anniversary of its birth, we owe it to ourselves to remember that history.
That’s the story I tell in The Jews and the Left, a tale of love and betrayal that begins in 1654 and ends in the here and now.
It’s out in two weeks, and if this sounds intriguing, I hope you’ll pick up a copy.
And in the meantime: Jews, stop reading the New York Times!
Your show gets better every week.
What I find remarkable, is how eager the NYT is to betray its own blind hatred of Israel by printing absurd lies, when there might actually be reason to unveil bad prison practices - like everywhere else in the world. In a democracy, one relies on the work of journalists and non-governmental groups to examine and uncover unjust practices - Israeli reporters, commissions and organizations conduct their own internal reviews. Of course no government is perfect, and of course there are reasons to criticize and hold accountable Israeli government and prison officials, as is vital in any democracy. If one is to be charitable to Kristof, we can hope he's betraying his bleeding heart gullibility. But I'm going to be less charitable and condemn him for outing himself as wanting desperately to believe that Israelis are singularly evil and beyond repair. Otherwise, why would he jeopardize a plausible expose?? I'm an Israeli American and, like you Batya, I am critical of Israel's ongoing West Bank campaign. There is nothing antisemitic about condemning Jewish settler violence, or wanting to reform Israeli prison practices to make certain that guards preserve their own humanity. And being critical of Bibi should not be the litmus test of one's antisemitic tendencies - after all, are we to accuse the coalition between Bennett, Eisenkot, and Lapid of being antisemitic? If Kristof and the NYT editorial board were honest brokers, there probably is a need for reform in these prisons and detention centers without glaringly lying to the point of Jew-hating absurdity. But they clearly are not honest or truly interested in hunting down the truth.