The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: NYT Israeli Prisoner Dog Rape Claim—’Biggest Blood Libel of All’

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

“We’re anti-rape. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day after day,” says Nicholas Kristof, an opinion writer with The New York Times. This month, Kristof published a piece titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” where he alleges that the Israeli military used dogs to rape inmates. That is the biggest blood libel and slur against the Jewish people that I’ve ever heard. And yet, The New York Times, which always brags about fact-checking, didn’t fact-check it at all, Victor Davis Hanson argues on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com 👉PEPPERDINE: Daily Signal listeners save 50–75% https://go.pepperdine.edu/dailysignal      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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slash Daily Signal. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. There's been a very strange story that was printed not long ago by the liberal opinion journalist Nicholas Christoff. Now, apparently he's been retired. He's written for decades at the New York Times. He's sort of a social activist. He does some good things sometimes,

but he tries to draw attention of the New York Times readership to supposed crisis of morality all over the globe, such as the so-called genocide. It depends on who you talk to and defer. He visited it very many times. But he's had a checkered career. During the anthrax scare near the millennium, he wrote a series of articles suggesting that a government scientist was responsible for sending that deadly anthrax basilis in the mail to particular people. There was no real evidence of that.

The person was never formally charged, and there was litigation back and forth. He also ran for governor of Oregon, where he moved as a young man, and his family has a farm, but he hadn't lived there. Of course, he'd living in the East Coast because he was working in the New York Times. The Democratic Secretary of State disqualified him. from trying to run for governor in 2022, arguing that his main residence was elsewhere, out of state. She was a liberal Democrat like he is, and yet he got very angry and accused of being politically biased and corrupt. Oregon Supreme Court, very liberal, upheld that decision, so although he'd raised $1.6 million, he could not run for governor.

But here's what he's done recently. He's written an article that alleges that prisoners following the October 7th massacre of Jews in Israel by the Hamas terrorist organization and people of Gaza who tagged along, many of them were caught in jail, and some directly involved in the assault, some just in the subsequent operations in Gaza itself. And he's interviewed them. Many of them are anonymous. And he says that they have been systematically, systematically raped, molested, tortured. But what got the sensational coverage for these allegations were that he said that in some cases,

and one in particular, a Hamas, a former Hamas person, or said that he had been raped inside an Israeli jail by a canine, by a dog, and that this was a part of an Israeli policy to train canines to rape inmates and to abuse them. There's a lot of things wrong with that. First of all, most of the sourcing for the article either came from the Euromed website, which is hard left, anti-Israeli, and founded by someone who's closely connected with Hamas.

Second, most of the sources were anonymous. Third, the ones that were not are affiliated in many cases with the Hamas terrorist group. But most strangely at all, there is no scientific proof that a trainer or an owner can prepare a dog to commit sexual intercourse against a human's will or against a human at all. Dogs don't rape people to the degree that there has been any recorded incidents of dog human

sexual content. It's in the context of bestiality. That is a owner coaxing a dog in some fashion to have intercourse. But there's no dog's sexuality is so different. than humans, you can't just say to a dog, achieve sexual preparedness, and go have intercourse in a forcible manner against that victim. It doesn't happen. And yet, Nicholas Christoph doubled down and said there were scientific evidence that had happened. And it didn't. It was completely, that was a complete fabrication. And when he said that it wasn't necessarily the rule of in Israeli jails. He said it was systematic. So the article is self-contradictory. It's based on either left-wing, anti-Israeli sources, or pro-Hamas informants, most of them anonymous. He has a history of not being reliable, even though his reputation is one, as being a global humanitarian who tries

to draw our attention to abuses. There's one final thing. It wasn't just a sin of commission, there was a sin of omission. I mean, let me find what I mean by that. He knew, as did the New York Times, that Israel had been conducting an exhaustive investigation, exhaustive over almost two and a half years to find out what actually happened on October 7. And they had all sorts of evidence. They had prisoners who confessed to what they did. And remember, these didn't need to be coerced.

In the Hamas mindset, they want to brag on what they did. They're proud of it. They had instruction booklets telling them how to say, spread your legs and other commands in Hebrew. They were greeted as heroes by gods and civilians when they came back and heard the story. When they brought back over 240 hostages, the hostages were in danger of losing their lives from an angry mob. So there was no reticence on the part.

of cooperating with Israelis. Then they had people who survived the attack that had testimonies. Then they had extensive photographs of the bodies of the slain. They had camera footage from the Hamas terrorists who were so exuberant and happy to kill Jews that they actually filmed it on their military helmets. And they collated all of that evidence together. And the result was medieval. It was a story of people losing their limbs, of women being raped repeatedly, gang rape, being shot, being mutilated, being sexually in a sexually perverted manner, tortured, children beheaded.

It's horrific beyond words. That systematic report was coming out and has now appeared. And so the supposition is that Nicholas Christoph, who is very anti-Israel, cooked up an idea that he would, preempt this story by an even cruder, weird, or surreal story that, well, whatever Hamas did to the Israelis that you're going to read this week, that's the implication, not implicit, not explicit, but implicit. It's not going to be as bad as what I'm going to tell you, because the Israelis train dogs to rape people.

That is the biggest blood libel and slur against the Jewish people that I've ever heard. And yet the New York Times, who always brags about fact-checking, didn't fact check it at all. And the result is he is now being sued by the Israeli government and the Netanyahu administration. I don't think that's going to go anywhere. It's very hard for a foreign country to sue an individual, especially when the prime minister is in the public realm.

But it's going to draw attention to the New York Times in general and Nicholas Christoph in particular. He has skated on thin ice for a long time. and he's not a reliable opinion journalist. And this confirms that he should not be writing for the New York Times. It's a free country. If they want to peddle these lies and these libeles, they're welcome to it. But it's going to destroy their reputation if he comes back again

and pursues what he's been doing for a long time. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.