Lauren, what makes your article so disturbing is not the absurdity of some of these conspiracy theories themselves, but the realization that narratives and accusations once confined mostly to the fringes of Middle Eastern propaganda are increasingly migrating into mainstream Western discourse dressed in more sophisticated language.
And I think your larger point is correct: for parts of the modern progressive movement, Israel has become psychologically and ideologically necessary as a permanent villain. The movement increasingly defines itself morally through opposition to Israel, Zionism, colonialism, “oppression,” and power structures. If the actual conflict ever ended, much of the emotional and ideological energy sustaining these movements would lose its central organizing symbol.
What is especially frightening is how quickly journalistic and intellectual standards seem to collapse once Israel becomes the subject. Claims that would normally require extreme scrutiny suddenly get amplified, repeated, emotionally framed, and circulated before proper verification because they reinforce a narrative audiences already emotionally want to believe.
And honestly, I think one of the deepest problems here is that many people no longer consume information primarily to understand reality. They consume information to reinforce identity, tribe, morality, and emotional belonging. Once that happens, conspiracy theories, distortions, exaggerations, and propaganda become much easier to absorb so long as they flatter the worldview people already want to hold.
Westerners are vulnerable in a way a lot of other people are not - when you have a baseline level of trust in journalistic standards, you’re actually more susceptible to disinformation. That’s why the NYT doing this is a big deal.
Lauren, I agree completely with you. Western societies became so accustomed to assuming mainstream institutions and legacy media were operating under at least basic journalistic standards that many people are psychologically unprepared for how sophisticated modern disinformation and narrative manipulation have become.
That’s exactly why what’s happening with institutions like the New York Times is so important and so dangerous culturally. And honestly, I hope Israel continues pursuing legal action over that outrageous op-ed instead of allowing major media institutions to hide behind the “it was only an opinion piece” defense whenever inflammatory and defamatory claims are published.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Left over the last decade or so it’s that no one cause is sacrosanct. If a particular cause proves untenable, the Left pirouettes to the next cause faster than a Bolshoi ballerina.
I can't thank Ms Shaer and Future of Jewish enough for responding so promptly to Kristof's piece. My heart sank into a familiar darkness when I saw the Opinion section of my paper on Saturday--Kristof has so much credibility among the progressives here in NY, and I knew my intuition that the contents of his piece were false and planted would have no footing among the people around me. I have grown reliant on Future Jewish to expose illusions like rape epidemics in the West Bank to give me ammunition when the topic comes up of Israel's latest atrocity, and I was frankly relieved to find this excellent response absolutely made to order for me. I was unaware of the Middle Eastern tradition of accusing Israel of antics that make both James Bond and The Simpsons writers look like amateurs. But here in NY, of course, we have a conspicuously, unashamedly anti-Israel mayoralty and another prominent and under-researched NY Times piece damning Israel can cause real damage. Maybe I will see other Future Jewish readers at the upcoming Israeli Day Parade--it will be the first time in my entire life I attended a parade holding a sign, and I do have the voices on Future Jewish to thank for the moral courage to do this. Thank you again, Ms Shaer, for such a prompt and thorough response. I'm sure Trey Parker is kicking himself for not coming up with sex gum first.
You only have to see who NYC elected as their Mayor to explain their demented mindset. It's the old test of what came first, the chicken or the egg. Jew Hate bonds them to a purpose, without Jew Hate they have no purpose.
Maintaining Jew-hatred in " backward societies?" You mean, like our own? All of the dogs should get together and file a class action libel suit against Kristoff and the Times.
Perhaps the worst, most tragic aspect of this is the complete destruction of the reputation (decades in the making) of one of America’s most revered media institutions. Congratulations NYT - you are now a laughing stock and utterly irrelevant. 📰 👋
Somewhere in the phantasmagorical dark recesses of the mind of a Islamic terrorist this “dog rape” accusation has credence and justifies murder against Jews. For the more thoughtful Jew Hater, he realizes this accusation may go too far but will believe the genocide lie. It all serves the same purpose in justification of violence against Jews and Israel.
Brilliant. Funny. She's a great writer and right on the money when it comes to Jew haters needing any narrative that vilifies Israel no matter how ridiculous the stories are!
—"Why is the NY Times anti Israel. Its readers are usually a more intelligent audience. What is the motivation"?
The NYT (at least in America) is the home office of our globalist progressive aristocracy and ever since the shock of the 2016 Peasants' Rebellion (Brexit and Trump), they have been on a war footing, or maybe more accurately, have shifted from a regime of soft control (subtle nudges in their direction) to one of hard control (weaponized narratives meant to lay down electrified taboos and let everyone know the heavy price they will pay for violating them).
And for reasons of both power and because of the many uses of ideology, this is also when they switched to becoming essentially the Vatican of the Social Justice faith, an organization where every syllable of every article must comply with (and reinforce) their sacred dogma. This aligns them both with their own children and their younger staffers, who've been indoctrinated in the SJ faith since grade school and who can be very useful attack dogs as long as you flatter their self-images and create an ideological safe space, but who can get VERY angry if they have to experience the "harm" of unapproved ideas. (This helps explain why zero progressive adults stood up against the Ivy League Hamasnik encampments.)
When it comes to Israel: Israel has always been one of the Satans in the SJ cosmology, as the campus Left inherited the Soviet jihad against Zionism and want nothing more than to watch what in their worldview is a country of settler-colonial imperialist white capitalists be bloodied by the poor brown oppressed indigenous Palestinians (this brings them to ideological orgasm); also, the globalists feel most aligned with the angry children of SJ when it comes to the issue of nation-states, borders, immigration etc—they need the nation-state to reek of ancient bigotry, which is why among Israel's many crimes they've added the charge of "ethnostate". They want to dissolve all borders, but Israel's first.
Then of course there's the familiar role of the Jewish scapegoat, which gets loaded with all the supposed crimes and anxieties of each age—one generation Jews are too foreign, then they're too ubiquitous; then they're too capitalist, then they're too communist; then they're too weak and bookish, then they're too martial and aggressive etc—which is now meant to be sacrificed to appease the Western progressive neurosis around colonialism, imperialism and bigotry. (Jews are always assigned the role of dying for our sins, just like the most famous Jew of them all.)
Throw in the fact that the Palestinians are perfectly designed to occupy the top spot in the global progressive hierarchy of sacred victims and also that there are so many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals that lead the campaign against Israel (which provides permission to many others), and there you have it—all roads lead to Anti-Zionism, which provides more bang for the buck when it comes to scoring cheap virtue and creating ideological cohesion and weaponization.
The big picture is that we are seeing a surge in the Progressive Movement here in the U.S. and their hate for Jews, due to the funding behind them. When you have the Ford Foundation, George Soros, PACs, Labor Unions that promote Progressives running for office, and many more, it's difficult to fight the paid for protests, the funding of publications by nefarious donors to the NYT and the MSM. These are all part of the engine that drives the antiemitism on a runaway train. As for Kristof, who wrote mainly on Economics for the NYT, he 'suddenly' produced a poorly written and the worst blood libel article on Israel. And what a coincidence, a day before the extensive report by Israel on Hamas atrocities was to be released, Kristof's article appeared. The word is that Hamas' people made sure there was something to counter it, and there it was for the world to read. Maybe Kristof should write an article about the abuses of goats and sheep that Hamas and others like them participate in, or the recent voting on child brides in Afghanistan? How about the women without husbands that Hamas violates in exchange for giving them food? But I digress because I won't hold my breath for any of that to happen. I will be patient until the world gets turned right side up again, and it's coming; this I truly believe.
Psychoanalyzing NYT editorial policy is a depressing business. They have consistently chosen a narrative that makes Jews look bad. Any Jews but especially Israelis, Hasidim, Litvaks, Sephardim.. and the intention is to differentiate their media offerings from *those people* in order to advance their status in the eyes of their target demographic. So the NYT is forever doubling down on their stochastic violence with their large grab bag of vilification. defamation and incitement. NYT editorial policy's habitual disregard for law, logic and civility is voluntary blindness trumpeted loud.
That such wildly bizarre accusations against Jews are moving from the seventh century minded Middle East and entering the western press may be a sign that western civilization itself is regressing into backwardness. Many are rejecting the enlightenment and the Judeo-Christian values we were founded upon. Scapegoating Jews is what all failing, dysfunctional and declining civilizations have always done. This is the point that Europe is at right now. I still however believe America can be saved.
"Nicholas Kristof, whose opinion piece in the New York Times last week accused Israeli dogs of being trained to rape Palestinian inmates, is copying a Middle Eastern tactic that has worked well in that region — to maintain durable, deeply embedded Jew-hatred in backward societies".
The Mossad sharks and rape dogs are what is keeping the propaganda machine @nytimes in business. From cheering for Hitler, New York Times' coverage in 1924, following Hitler's release from prison, the Times wrote that he was "a much sadder and wiser man, no longer to be feared."
To the cover-up regarding Stalin's famine in Ukraine, where grain was confiscated at gunpoint to be sold abroad. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent together with the New York Times, obscured the reality of mass starvation. Nicholas Kristof mirrors the legacy of Duranty and the paper’s history to deceive its readers.
Lauren, what makes your article so disturbing is not the absurdity of some of these conspiracy theories themselves, but the realization that narratives and accusations once confined mostly to the fringes of Middle Eastern propaganda are increasingly migrating into mainstream Western discourse dressed in more sophisticated language.
And I think your larger point is correct: for parts of the modern progressive movement, Israel has become psychologically and ideologically necessary as a permanent villain. The movement increasingly defines itself morally through opposition to Israel, Zionism, colonialism, “oppression,” and power structures. If the actual conflict ever ended, much of the emotional and ideological energy sustaining these movements would lose its central organizing symbol.
What is especially frightening is how quickly journalistic and intellectual standards seem to collapse once Israel becomes the subject. Claims that would normally require extreme scrutiny suddenly get amplified, repeated, emotionally framed, and circulated before proper verification because they reinforce a narrative audiences already emotionally want to believe.
And honestly, I think one of the deepest problems here is that many people no longer consume information primarily to understand reality. They consume information to reinforce identity, tribe, morality, and emotional belonging. Once that happens, conspiracy theories, distortions, exaggerations, and propaganda become much easier to absorb so long as they flatter the worldview people already want to hold.
Thank you so much!
Westerners are vulnerable in a way a lot of other people are not - when you have a baseline level of trust in journalistic standards, you’re actually more susceptible to disinformation. That’s why the NYT doing this is a big deal.
Lauren, I agree completely with you. Western societies became so accustomed to assuming mainstream institutions and legacy media were operating under at least basic journalistic standards that many people are psychologically unprepared for how sophisticated modern disinformation and narrative manipulation have become.
That’s exactly why what’s happening with institutions like the New York Times is so important and so dangerous culturally. And honestly, I hope Israel continues pursuing legal action over that outrageous op-ed instead of allowing major media institutions to hide behind the “it was only an opinion piece” defense whenever inflammatory and defamatory claims are published.
And speaking of support, please support me as well and subscribe to my free Substack: https://fredericktatala.substack.com/
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Left over the last decade or so it’s that no one cause is sacrosanct. If a particular cause proves untenable, the Left pirouettes to the next cause faster than a Bolshoi ballerina.
LOL, Well said.
Lauren, you just gave the NYT lazy editors (opinion writers) ideas for their next article. We will be looking for their Pulitzer.
I can't thank Ms Shaer and Future of Jewish enough for responding so promptly to Kristof's piece. My heart sank into a familiar darkness when I saw the Opinion section of my paper on Saturday--Kristof has so much credibility among the progressives here in NY, and I knew my intuition that the contents of his piece were false and planted would have no footing among the people around me. I have grown reliant on Future Jewish to expose illusions like rape epidemics in the West Bank to give me ammunition when the topic comes up of Israel's latest atrocity, and I was frankly relieved to find this excellent response absolutely made to order for me. I was unaware of the Middle Eastern tradition of accusing Israel of antics that make both James Bond and The Simpsons writers look like amateurs. But here in NY, of course, we have a conspicuously, unashamedly anti-Israel mayoralty and another prominent and under-researched NY Times piece damning Israel can cause real damage. Maybe I will see other Future Jewish readers at the upcoming Israeli Day Parade--it will be the first time in my entire life I attended a parade holding a sign, and I do have the voices on Future Jewish to thank for the moral courage to do this. Thank you again, Ms Shaer, for such a prompt and thorough response. I'm sure Trey Parker is kicking himself for not coming up with sex gum first.
You only have to see who NYC elected as their Mayor to explain their demented mindset. It's the old test of what came first, the chicken or the egg. Jew Hate bonds them to a purpose, without Jew Hate they have no purpose.
Maintaining Jew-hatred in " backward societies?" You mean, like our own? All of the dogs should get together and file a class action libel suit against Kristoff and the Times.
Perhaps the worst, most tragic aspect of this is the complete destruction of the reputation (decades in the making) of one of America’s most revered media institutions. Congratulations NYT - you are now a laughing stock and utterly irrelevant. 📰 👋
Somewhere in the phantasmagorical dark recesses of the mind of a Islamic terrorist this “dog rape” accusation has credence and justifies murder against Jews. For the more thoughtful Jew Hater, he realizes this accusation may go too far but will believe the genocide lie. It all serves the same purpose in justification of violence against Jews and Israel.
Brilliant. Funny. She's a great writer and right on the money when it comes to Jew haters needing any narrative that vilifies Israel no matter how ridiculous the stories are!
Absolutely true! 👍🏼
If you know of Antonio Gramsci.
If you understand his ideology.
If you know who Herbert Marcuse was.
If you have a reasonable understanding of the whole oppressor/oppressed Cultural Marxist thing.
Then you might understand why the Left is siding with Terrorists in Gaza.
I wouldn't believe a word a New Yorker said unless they prove to me they don't believe in Jewish rape dogs. 🤔
Why is the NY Times anti Israel. Its readers are usually a more intelligent audience. What is the motivation.
The problem in the West is that bad behavior is not punished and therefore you get more and more of it.
—"Why is the NY Times anti Israel. Its readers are usually a more intelligent audience. What is the motivation"?
The NYT (at least in America) is the home office of our globalist progressive aristocracy and ever since the shock of the 2016 Peasants' Rebellion (Brexit and Trump), they have been on a war footing, or maybe more accurately, have shifted from a regime of soft control (subtle nudges in their direction) to one of hard control (weaponized narratives meant to lay down electrified taboos and let everyone know the heavy price they will pay for violating them).
And for reasons of both power and because of the many uses of ideology, this is also when they switched to becoming essentially the Vatican of the Social Justice faith, an organization where every syllable of every article must comply with (and reinforce) their sacred dogma. This aligns them both with their own children and their younger staffers, who've been indoctrinated in the SJ faith since grade school and who can be very useful attack dogs as long as you flatter their self-images and create an ideological safe space, but who can get VERY angry if they have to experience the "harm" of unapproved ideas. (This helps explain why zero progressive adults stood up against the Ivy League Hamasnik encampments.)
When it comes to Israel: Israel has always been one of the Satans in the SJ cosmology, as the campus Left inherited the Soviet jihad against Zionism and want nothing more than to watch what in their worldview is a country of settler-colonial imperialist white capitalists be bloodied by the poor brown oppressed indigenous Palestinians (this brings them to ideological orgasm); also, the globalists feel most aligned with the angry children of SJ when it comes to the issue of nation-states, borders, immigration etc—they need the nation-state to reek of ancient bigotry, which is why among Israel's many crimes they've added the charge of "ethnostate". They want to dissolve all borders, but Israel's first.
Then of course there's the familiar role of the Jewish scapegoat, which gets loaded with all the supposed crimes and anxieties of each age—one generation Jews are too foreign, then they're too ubiquitous; then they're too capitalist, then they're too communist; then they're too weak and bookish, then they're too martial and aggressive etc—which is now meant to be sacrificed to appease the Western progressive neurosis around colonialism, imperialism and bigotry. (Jews are always assigned the role of dying for our sins, just like the most famous Jew of them all.)
Throw in the fact that the Palestinians are perfectly designed to occupy the top spot in the global progressive hierarchy of sacred victims and also that there are so many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals that lead the campaign against Israel (which provides permission to many others), and there you have it—all roads lead to Anti-Zionism, which provides more bang for the buck when it comes to scoring cheap virtue and creating ideological cohesion and weaponization.
Hope that makes sense! Thanks
The big picture is that we are seeing a surge in the Progressive Movement here in the U.S. and their hate for Jews, due to the funding behind them. When you have the Ford Foundation, George Soros, PACs, Labor Unions that promote Progressives running for office, and many more, it's difficult to fight the paid for protests, the funding of publications by nefarious donors to the NYT and the MSM. These are all part of the engine that drives the antiemitism on a runaway train. As for Kristof, who wrote mainly on Economics for the NYT, he 'suddenly' produced a poorly written and the worst blood libel article on Israel. And what a coincidence, a day before the extensive report by Israel on Hamas atrocities was to be released, Kristof's article appeared. The word is that Hamas' people made sure there was something to counter it, and there it was for the world to read. Maybe Kristof should write an article about the abuses of goats and sheep that Hamas and others like them participate in, or the recent voting on child brides in Afghanistan? How about the women without husbands that Hamas violates in exchange for giving them food? But I digress because I won't hold my breath for any of that to happen. I will be patient until the world gets turned right side up again, and it's coming; this I truly believe.
Psychoanalyzing NYT editorial policy is a depressing business. They have consistently chosen a narrative that makes Jews look bad. Any Jews but especially Israelis, Hasidim, Litvaks, Sephardim.. and the intention is to differentiate their media offerings from *those people* in order to advance their status in the eyes of their target demographic. So the NYT is forever doubling down on their stochastic violence with their large grab bag of vilification. defamation and incitement. NYT editorial policy's habitual disregard for law, logic and civility is voluntary blindness trumpeted loud.
That such wildly bizarre accusations against Jews are moving from the seventh century minded Middle East and entering the western press may be a sign that western civilization itself is regressing into backwardness. Many are rejecting the enlightenment and the Judeo-Christian values we were founded upon. Scapegoating Jews is what all failing, dysfunctional and declining civilizations have always done. This is the point that Europe is at right now. I still however believe America can be saved.
...................................................................................................................................................................................................
"Nicholas Kristof, whose opinion piece in the New York Times last week accused Israeli dogs of being trained to rape Palestinian inmates, is copying a Middle Eastern tactic that has worked well in that region — to maintain durable, deeply embedded Jew-hatred in backward societies".
The Mossad sharks and rape dogs are what is keeping the propaganda machine @nytimes in business. From cheering for Hitler, New York Times' coverage in 1924, following Hitler's release from prison, the Times wrote that he was "a much sadder and wiser man, no longer to be feared."
To the cover-up regarding Stalin's famine in Ukraine, where grain was confiscated at gunpoint to be sold abroad. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent together with the New York Times, obscured the reality of mass starvation. Nicholas Kristof mirrors the legacy of Duranty and the paper’s history to deceive its readers.