Nicholas Kristof’s selective skepticism

Nicholas Kristof has a skepticism problem — he is least skeptical of the stories he most wants to be true.

His recent New York Times column on alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees reads less like reporting than advocacy dressed in journalistic clothing. He leaned on circular sourcing: nongovernmental organizations citing each other, testimony filtered through the activist ecosystem of Hamas-governed Gaza, overlapping organizations presented as if their mutual referencing constituted independent corroboration. The piece appeared, pointedly, just before the release of an Israeli report documenting sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct 7, 2023. The timing was not incidental. The goal was to manufacture moral equivalence between documented atrocities and allegations resting on contested sourcing.

One might have expected, at minimum, that a reporter making such incendiary claims would have placed a call to an animal behaviorist. Experts broadly agree that dogs cannot be trained to sexually assault humans — a