Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.

As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.

In a piece that has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.

Kristof’s most grotesque claim is based on an anonymous source who is described as a “journalist” from Gaza. According to this source, while being held in an Israeli prison in 2024, the Gazan man was stripped naked, blindfolded and handcuffed. Then “a dog was summoned.” The dog’s handler — who we are helpfully told was speaking Hebrew — then encouraged the dog to “mount him.”

The “source” goes on to claim that he “tried to dislodge the dog, but it penetrated him.” During this time, the Israeli guards were allegedly taking photos and filming the assault while laughing and “giggling.”

Like a number of other journalists, I have spent far too much time this week reading up on the relevant literature about this claim. My computer’s search engine history is probably now as suspect as Kristof’s.

Normal people would note that the story does not pass (sorry to use the phrase) the most basic smell test. It is the sort of claim that someone would only make if they wanted to portray their enemies as absolute monsters, enemies of humanity: Untermensch.

As it happens, if you scan the relevant literature, you will find there is absolutely no evidence that dogs can be trained to rape and penetrate human beings. There is not a case — not one — of a dog trainer turning a canine into a rape machine.

So here we get to the true question: Why would anyone make such a claim? And why would a purportedly serious newspaper publish it?

The reasons are several-fold. The first is that the New York Times story landed just a day before an anticipated report on Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023.

Many of us did not need further evidence of the crimes of that day. But the release of the commission of inquiry sets out in remorseless detail the “systematic, widespread” use of rape by Hamas on that day and the way in which sexual violence was “integral” to their attack.

It lays out the calculated way in which Hamas terrorists raped men and women on the day of the attack and raped Israeli hostages — men and women — while they were held in captivity in Gaza.

The findings include descriptions from footage, firsthand eyewitness accounts, and from mortuary photographs of the way in which Hamas members gang-raped women while killing them, and even raped their victims after killing them. It is impossible to think of crimes worse than those that Hamas committed that day.

Unless you are Nicholas Kristof.

Because if you know that a report is coming out into Hamas’ use of sexual violence, then it is clearly very important to invent a claim even more appalling than the real-life crimes of Hamas.

For the New York Times, it seems to have been crucial to throw a lie into the system in order to overwhelm or block any sympathy or understanding that might go in the direction of the Israelis.

The New York Times has leveled claims of antisemitism against a number of people in the past year, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. But none of the worst things that Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes have ever said even come close to the lie the New York Times has printed in its own pages. A paper that claims to be opposed to conspiracy theories has just mainstreamed the most disgusting conspiracy theory imaginable.

And just consider the effects of this.

The effect is to portray the soldiers and prison guards of the Jewish state as uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting and uniquely inhuman.

What wouldn´t someone do to express their disgust at such people? If Jews are the sort of people who can even turn dogs into rapists, why shouldn’t mobs assemble outside the synagogues of New York? Why wouldn’t masked “activists” demonstrate their outrage by hounding Jewish children on the streets of this city? After all, the people they are going up against are uniquely evil. Right?

As it happens, I have been in the prisons where the October 7 terrorists who were captured alive are being held. Over the years, I have been in many prisons where jihadists like them are detained. I have been in American- and Iraqi-run prisons where members of al Qaeda have been held. And the circumstances in which Israel holds the October 7 terrorists are exactly like those.

The conditions are sparse and unpleasant. But that is because the Israelis are holding prisoners who literally wanted to die as well as kill when they invaded southern Israel. In prison, they will use whatever they can find to kill their guards.

But these conditions are still a world away from the lies that Kristof and the New York Times decided to print without evidence.

Some people will expect the Times to retract its story. But I doubt they will. A friend in the US Air Force described to me yesterday the process he went through when the Times ran a piece claiming that he and colleagues blew up funerals in Afghanistan.

There was no evidence for it.

But when my friend tried to point this out to the Times, he found that the people meant to be in charge of correcting errors were the very same people who had written them.

Meantime, I am sure we can all look forward to the Gray Lady’s next piece pondering the inexplicable rise of Jew-hatred in the United States.

They might find the causes are closer to home than they know.