Earlier today, Israeli researchers published a meticulously documented report detailing the use of sexual violence as a key component of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent captivity of hostages. The authors informed the New York Times of the report, and reportedly of its publication date, but the newspaper declined to pursue the story.
Instead, in an apparent (and successful) attempt to distract from the findings, the New York Times and its columnist Nicholas Kristof chose the evening before the report’s publication to publish an Opinion piece equating Israel to Hamas and charging “Israeli sexual violence” by prison guards.
Any credible allegations of abuse should be investigated. At the same time, Kristof’s column clearly fails to meet the standards of ethical journalism. The piece, for example, relies heavily on Euro-Med, an extremist NGO whose founder and chairman Ramy Abdu has repeatedly peddled disinformation about Israel — including falsehoods slurring the Jewish state as sexually deviant. In a 2023 social media post, Abdu shared a map of incoming rocket alert locations, falsely insisting it was “a map of registered sex offenders living in Israel.” The post remains up today, long after the lie was debunked.
Abdu has also misrepresented images from the Syrian civil war as being from the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere falsely claimed that civilian hostages held by Hamas were soldiers. Euro-Med’s chairman of the board Richard Falk, meanwhile, has warmly endorsed an anti-Jewish book by a notorious antisemite and Holocaust denier, and has been criticized by the United Nations Secretary General for promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories. Despite its disqualification as a credible source, Kristof cites Euro-Med three times in his column.
Kristof doesn’t share with readers that another of his sources, Sami al-Sai, had previously charged Palestinian officials with torturing him in a Palestinian prison, but had flatly contradicted his own account when speaking to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. Whichever of his versions was true, an ethical journalist would at least inform readers of his inconsistent history on the topic.
Another source heavily relied on by Kristof is a report by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry composed of three disgraced partisans, each of whom resigned after widespread criticism of their antisemitic remarks, such as claiming that Jews control social media.
One person quoted in the column has even charged Kristof with misrepresenting his views. “I did not validate these claims,” former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement to the New York Times seen by the Free Press. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”
Kristof has previously reported stories on humanitarian issues that proved to be false. In 2014, he wrote an article entitled “When Sources May Have Lied,” in which he admitted to being “hoodwinked” by a source in a story about sex trafficking. He has written several pieces praising another humanitarian with a false pedigree.
New York Times readers deserved a more thoroughly vetted and more fully reported article. They now deserve to be informed of the problems plaguing Kristof’s piece. The paper should retract Kristof’s outrageous claim that trivializes the rape, murder, and dismemberment of countless Israeli women — he purports that “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” It should investigate the timing of the article, which seems designed to distract from a report incriminating Hamas, which is to say designed to protect Hamas. It should address the serious charge that Olmert’s views were misrepresented. And it should acknowledge and apologize for the article’s irredeemably flawed sourcing.
For the Hebrew version of this statement, please see CAMERA Hebrew.