On Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced the country intends to sue The New York Times for defamation over claims by Nicholas Kristof that Israeli security personnel sexually abused Palestinian prisoners, including that they trained dogs to rape them.
It is not impossible for a foreign country to successfully sue an American newspaper, but it is extremely difficult. Even if Israel tries to sue in its own court system, it may have a difficult time because of its own defamation laws.
However, from Kristof’s sources changing their stories to citing Hamas propagandists to multiple canine behavior experts have told various websites that training dogs to rape people is physiologically impossible; if there was ever to successfully overcome both the jurisdictional and “actual malice” barriers, this would be it.
What is telling is how the rest of the media, which was always perfectly willing to repeat Hamas’s casualty numbers during the war, have stayed away from it. Across ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and MS NOW, exactly zero televised stories have highlighted the Times’s report. Not even Chris Hayes has been willing to touch it. NewsNation’s Leland Vittert referenced the report in order to criticize Kristof’s lack of evidence. Additionally, The Times has yet to run any follow-up stories.
There was a Tuesday interview that PBS/CNN International's Amanpour and Company guest anchor Paula Newton did with Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who was on to discuss her efforts leading the effort to expose Hamas’s sexual crimes in a report called “Silenced No More” that was released that day. Part way through, Newton turned the tables on Elkayam-Levy and cited a U.N. report on alleged mistreatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, but not Krisfof’s article.
So far, the Times has remained defiant. It is perfectly willing to stand by garbage allegations of dog rape, run op-eds by Vladimir Putin and the Taliban. It runs pieces arguing how good East Germany was, highlights people arguing North Korea is better than South Korea, and why stealing is good and why actually murdering someone is basically on the same moral plane as being a health insurance executive. By contrast, when they run a column by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton on the need for law and order, staffers revolt, and people lose their jobs.
