Every aspect of this story is so terrible that it’s hard to face. I tried to deal with it yesterday in a perfunctory manner by putting it in a roundup post.
But I find that simply won’t work. It’s too emblematic of so many things that are deeply and destructively wrong. Thus, this post.
First, some background:
In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions.
What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence.
This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses.
On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency.
What differentiates left and right is not just their emphases, but also the fact that leftist leaders join in and leaders on the right condemn the Jew-hatred. It remains a fringe thing on the right – and many of those involved in it are not even on the right anymore, if in fact they ever really were.
Also from the Posner article:
Holocaust inversion—labeling Israelis as Nazis or Gaza as Auschwitz—has appeared with increasing frequency at demonstrations and across digital platforms.
That inversion – the turning of something upside down or into its opposite – is the Hallmark of modern-day Jew-hatred masquerading at times as anti-Israel sentiment and at other times ripping off the mask. And this inversion is what we have in the Nicholas Kristof article alleging that Israelis systematically rape prisoners, including (and perhaps especially?) with dogs that are trained to rape humans.
Let’s start out by saying that the latter is not even possible (not that Kristof or the NY Times care; the goal is getting the story out there):
Kristof continues to cite medical journal articles he claims prove dogs raping humans is possible. There’s one problem. …
Those medical journal articles talk about the opposite issue … that is, humans practicing bestiality on dogs, not the other way around.
And here is an excerpt from the abstract of one of those articles:
This report delineates a case of anal injury in a 12-year-old boy who gave a detailed history of bestial behavior with a male bulldog. The child described how he had seen this behavior modeled on the internet and subsequently initiated contact with his own dog, causing the dog to penetrate him anally. This type of juvenile bestial behavior with injury has only been reported once previously in the medical literature. … Spontaneous sexual assault of a human by a canine has never been described in the human or veterinary medical literature, nor is such a thing likely.
Dogs cannot be trained to do this – and yet the charges against Israel have a lengthy history:
Grok: Dog handling and canine behavior experts (along with military K9 analysts) have explicitly stated that training dogs to perform sexual assault/rape on human command is not possible in any operational or standardized way.
… [C]laims of IDF or prison guards in facilities like Sde Teiman or Ofer using trained police/military dogs to rape or sodomize detainees—originated primarily from anonymous testimonies collected by groups such as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (often described by critics as Hamas-linked), the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and amplified by CAIR, Middle East Eye, and some UN summaries.01823 These accounts describe dogs being “let loose” or commanded to mount and penetrate restrained prisoners, sometimes with details like a handler saying a name like “Messi.”
However, these specific “dog rape on command” claims have been widely labeled as baseless propaganda or recycled antisemitic blood libels by fact-checkers and Israeli advocates. They rely on hearsay with zero corroborating evidence: no names, dates, videos, forensic records, or named witnesses—unlike documented cases of muzzled dogs being used for intimidation, biting, or general attacks on detainees (which appear in BBC reporting and human rights monitors).
Multiple sources directly addressing canine training confirm the core point you raise: there is no known training framework anywhere in the world for conditioning dogs to perform directed sexual acts (mounting and penetration) on command in a controllable, repeatable, operational setting. This is not how K9 programs work—IDF’s Oketz unit or any police/military dog units train for detection, tracking, apprehension, or attack bites, not sexual behavior. Sexual mounting in dogs is driven by instinct (arousal, dominance), not precise obedience like “attack” or “sit.” It cannot be standardized, deployed reliably, or switched on/off without massive ethical, legal, and practical barriers.
This impossibility aligns with basic canine biology and professional dog handling: you can train dogs to aggress or intimidate, but engineering them into tools for targeted rape defies how animal behavior is conditioned. Claims of this nature echo historical fabrications and lack any precedent in real military or law-enforcement dog programs.
Neither Kristof nor the Times cares to do the most basic fact-checking of the claim, which of course is “too good to fact-check.”
The Kristof article is Orwellian. The Times should be deeply deeply ashamed of publishing it. But in the current climate, it could get a Pulitzer to go with Kristof’s two previous ones.
The article is an excellent example of the Islamic terrorist’s propaganda modus operandi, and in particular the favorite Palestinian ploy of accusing your enemy of what you yourselves do – not rape with dogs, of course, but rape, humiliation, degradation, and torture of enemies. Kristof’s article is a bunch of propagandist rumor dressed up as news (but placed, interestingly enough, on the “Opinion” page, probably for legal reasons), but it came out one day before a report on Hamas’ 10/7 atrocities – which were exhaustively documented by Hamas’ selfie videos and the testimony of survivors. The evidence is night and day, although the allegations in both pieces are horrific and disgusting, because torture and rape are horrific and disgusting. But the content of the Hamas report is one of the most horrific and disgusting things ever (and I don’t say that lightly), and has the extra-horrific element of being true.
But “horrific and disgusting” really doesn’t even begin to cover it. I don’t think any words do. You can read the report here, or you can read summaries here and here – if you can stomach it.
How can people champion those who perpetrated these vile offenses and videoed themselves in the act? By denying the atrocities or by excusing them or by reveling in them. Those three responses are quite different from each other, but they have the same effect in the end.
I have read a great deal of Holocaust literature in my lifetime. Some of the descriptions of what happened back then are so awful I wish I’d never read them. The same is true of this, about which I have only read summaries but those are bad enough. The deeds are demonic, depraved, sadistic, limited only by the human imagination (which at times seems unlimited).
Many Holocaust survivors have reported that their tormentors often told them two things while they were in the camps. The first was that the victims would never get to tell their tales, because they would all be killed and the Nazis would successfully destroy the evidence. That didn’t happen, although the Nazi perpetrators tried to make it happen. But the Gazans of 10/7 weren’t interested in hiding the evidence; they broadcast it. They knew from previous experience that the some would deny despite this evidence, and some would goulishly delight in it and be inspired. This makes them arguably worse than Nazis.
This is a fascinating report based on intelligence captured from Hamas. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a relevant excerpt:
To light that internal powder keg, Sinwar needed a spark. This necessity explains one of October 7’s most gruesome aspects. Sinwar was convinced that capturing and broadcasting “explosive images” right at the start of the offensive would “trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum” among Palestinians and Arab Israelis. The goal was to spur a violent mass uprising while simultaneously paralyzing the Israeli public with terror. That is why Hamas terrorists wore body cameras and gleefully livestreamed their own atrocities.
I think they also must have believed that the West would not object – that either terror or excuses and justification (or denial) would be the West’s reaction. They almost certainly knew that the West had been primed, saturated for decades with Pallywood propaganda and taught by pro-Palestinian professors, with the cooperation of “journalists” – such as Kristof.
The other thing the Nazis told their victims was that, even if any of them did somehow manage to survive, the world would never believe them. When Eisenhower made and then released films of what the Allies found when they liberated the camps, and when he made some of the locals come and see the dead, he was aware of the risk of non-belief and he wanted to document at least some of the atrocities for future generations. And yet there are plenty of Holocaust deniers today, as well as Holocaust celebrators.
