Friday, May 15, 2026

05/14 Links Pt1: The Laughing Monsters; Why did the world look away when Israeli women were raped?; CENTCOM chief says 90% of Iran’s defense industry destroyed

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Laughing Monsters
As for what had made these many Palestinian perpetrators and spectators so happy—well, it’s a dark document. But the patterns are worth pointing out.

Some of the images studied by medical experts and catalogued with the investigating committee:

“The body of a young man lying on a sidewalk outside a concrete public shelter on Route 232, with severe burn injuries concentrated in the groin area.”

“A young woman with her insides protruding out of the groin area.”

“The body of a female victim with what appears to be a gunshot wound to the groin area.”

“The bottom half of a female body with bleeding in the groin area.”

The report is full of such accounts. The above are from victims who were found at the site of the Nova music festival. The scenes were similar at kibbutzim. One typical example: “On October 13th, first responders discovered two abused bodies in a destroyed home, one of them naked. The rescue efforts are documented in several videos and images that are archived with the Civil Commission. One of the first bodies found was that of a female victim. The body appears to be completely naked. Her ankle had been tied with a thick black chord. According to witnesses who provided testimony to the Civil Commission, the body had several nails driven into her lower abdomen and groin area, as well as a metal or plastic object embedded in the groin area.”

Pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Children shot in the face, victims decapitated and dismembered with hoes and shovels.

One video shows a terrorist yelling “God is great” while standing over the dead body of a woman who is naked from the waste down.

In one disturbing crime scene, a man was found “with his genitals cut off, and next to him, the body of a woman, holding his cut-off genitals, in what appeared to be a staged display to humiliate the victims.”

Again, this report is nearly 300 pages long, and it is full of such documented atrocities.

Jew-hatred strips the humanity from whatever it touches. There is nothing else like it.
Katya Sedgwick: Towards a Palestinian Autonomous Region—or Any Other Meaningful Settlement of The Arab-Israeli Conflict
It’s often said that all Left-Islamic unions inevitably end as 7th century theocracies—the Islamic Revolution in Iran is frequently cited as an example here. Yet Soviet—and Chinese, for that matter—history suggests otherwise. The USSR ruthlessly eradicated Muslim religiosity within its borders—and with it, the terrorist fervor. these days, its former Central Asian “republics” are the most moderate Muslim states—even if they are populated by tribes also found in the neighboring Afghanistan.

The Eurasian behemoth’s post-Soviet experience with Chechnya is far less rosy, of course, but even that relationship is currently stable. When religious violence does take place, the authorities squash it with gusto. Responding to the 2024 terror attack in a Moscow suburb, Russians did not hesitate to adopt every measure at their disposal, including—very publicly—torture. The world shrugged. It’s not just that the Kremlin knows about that Gaza pit bull, Russians are, stereotypically, natural dog trainers.

Russia already quietly resettled over a thousand Gazans, mostly in the Muslim regions of Chechnya and Dagestan. They don’t need to take all two million of them—just a sizable number, proudly and publicly. In doing so, they will set an example to the world. In the aftermath of the Ukraine war, Russia has a reputation to salvage—and I can’t think of a better way to approach it than by aiding Palestinians.

If necessary, Trump can sweeten the deal for Putin in Ukraine. It’s hard to see how American interest would change should the border between Russia and Ukraine move in either direction. America does have interest in Middle East peace and global commerce.

If Ukrainians are forced to shake hands on something not entirely to their liking, they can think of it as a payback for centuries of Cossack genocide. Not to mention that the turn of the century pogroms, mostly perpetrated in what is now Ukraine, prompted the creation of political Zionism. The way Zelensky, likely in coordination with Qatar, recently accused Israel of trading in stolen grain echoes the ugliest stereotypes. Perhaps Ukraine would like to resettle a few thousand Gazans?

A simple majority of Gazans want to leave and a plurality have been wanting to leave even before Israel brought the war home. They prefer comfortable Western countries where their clans have already grown roots, but Russia is almost the West and Muslim communities there are numerous. The way Russians today began thinking of themselves as Eurasionists, presupposes a multi-ethnic imperial dynamic that embraces Islam.

Some would object to the measures I am proposing, even calling it, inaccurately, “ethnic cleansing”. Most of them are the same people—and there are many who share that opinion these days, particularly on the left and among the young—that claim that Jews don’t need Israel because Joseph Stalin founded a homeland approximation for us on China’s border. That would be the so-called “Jewish Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan. It turns out, they support not just ethnic cleansing—a gulag.

Why not create a Palestinian Autonomous Region in Siberia, right next to the Jewish one? This way the two Semitic nations can live peacefully side by side, under the watchful eye of their Russian brothers. Granted, the Jewish settlement of the Far East never took hold so there is hardly a Yid left in Birobidzhan. And there is no shortage of uninhibited land in Russia regardless. And many Muslims in Russia’s capital.

This of course is a crazy idea. But “crazy” is another way of saying “extraordinary” and the Trump Administration is already thinking in these terms.

Half of Gaza is now living in tents; not even their neighbors on the Strip are willing to shelter them. Considering that most terror tunnels are still usable and Hamas is still around, at some point Israel will have to finish the job. Will anyone think of the humanitarian emergency?

Given the current regional power arrangement it’s highly unlikely that Gazans can can be deployed as proxies against Israel anyway—so why bother maintaining them as such? Russia might want to keep that conflict frozen, but it’s highly unlikely that they will be able to thaw it.

Some kind of resolution to the crisis is two years overdue. Right now, time is not on Russia’s side. They may need to settle the conflict quickly and they will accept American demands. Maybe even rejoin the civilized world.
Confronting the Iranian Regime's Holy War: Will the West Rise to the Challenge?
The U.S.-Israel strikes on the Iranian regime are definitive military responses to 47 years of religiously-fueled terror carried out by the world's foremost radical regime of the modern era. This formidable challenge to the West is compounded by the Free World's hesitation to acknowledge the jihad Iran has waged against Israel and the U.S.-led Western alliance since 1979.

Tehran and Washington are both playing for time in a war of economic and strategic attrition. The Iranian regime aims to buy time to rearm its Islamic resistance forces. The Islamic Republic's approach is underpinned by its apocalyptic and radical brand of Twelver Shi'ism.

Some 500 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had received training in Iran under direct IRGC Quds Force supervision before Hamas's invasion and massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

In the early days of the war, the IRGC's English-language social media output aimed to dismantle the pro-Israel coalition. The Tel Aviv-based firm Cyabra identified more than 40,000 inauthentic accounts originating largely from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Researchers determined that one in four accounts posting about the war were inauthentic, the largest foreign influence operation against U.S. opinion in the digital era.

The strategic effect has been to invert the moral architecture of the conflict. Hamas, its sponsors, and its supporters have framed jihadist violence as legitimate resistance. To judge their impact, at least 20 countries have recognized "Palestine" since April 2024, including the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, and Portugal.

In August 2025, senior Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad asserted that the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel paved the way for the Western recognition of a "Palestinian state," convincing the world that defeating Israel "is now possible." A Harvard-Harris poll found that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 agreed that Palestinian grievance justified the Oct. 7 killings.

American and Israeli military and counterterrorism gains of the past two years are only partial. The ultimate battle is for the hearts and minds of the Free World. Â The West requires strategic patience, resilience, and determination to overcome jihad's "forever war."


Why did the world look away when Israeli women were raped?
That Hamas terrorists raped and sexually assaulted women and girls in Israel on 7 October 2023 was plain for all to see. On the very day of the pogrom, images beamed around the world – filmed by those carrying out the abuse – showed young women being carted off as hostages, either stripped half-naked or with blood stains on the seat of their trousers. But many chose not to see.

Before 2023, feminists insisted that victims of rape and sexual assault never lie. We should #BelieveAllWomen, they told us. But the Israeli pogrom revealed a terrible truth. What many liberal campaigners and well-funded global organisations actually meant was believe all women, but not Jews. When Jewish women claimed that sex had been used as a form of torture, they were told: ‘Prove it.’ When they pointed to pictures of the lifeless bodies of bruised and bleeding women, they were told: ‘We need more evidence.’

And so, in a double insult, Israeli women were not only subjected to depraved sexual abuse, but they have subsequently had to campaign to be believed, too. When, in November 2023, the Israeli government released footage exposing the true horror of the 7 October pogrom, journalists like Owen Jones asked for ‘conclusive evidence’ that such atrocities had been committed ‘intentionally’. It wasn’t until March 2024 that the United Nations acknowledged that rape had been used as a weapon of war. Shockingly, it took more than two years for Amnesty International to reach the same conclusion. Even now, Jewish women have to fight to be taken seriously.

This week, a new report, Silenced No More, presents ‘the most comprehensive evidentiary record to date of the sexual atrocities committed on October 7 and during captivity’. It has been produced by the Civil Commission, an independent organisation established in the aftermath of the attack, to advocate for the victims of sexual and gender-based violence and atrocities, in an effort to prove to the world once and for all that women in Israel were raped and assaulted.

The report’s findings are stark: ‘sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.’ Unlike the #MeToo movement, the commission’s researchers do not simply rely on believing women, they have systematically assembled, verified and analysed evidence. It includes over 10,000 photographs and video segments, and more than 430 testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.

What emerges is ‘not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and the deliberate digital circulation of abuse.’ The Silenced No More report shows that sexual violence was not incidental to Hamas’s terror; ‘it was deliberate, coordinated, and embedded in the attack itself’.
The Truth about Hamas
Reading "Silenced No More," the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas's atrocities. The new report is a catalogue of Hamas depravity.

Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.

We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied. Denial serves to distort Israel's defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.


Douglas Murray: The New York Times feeds anti-Jew hatred with a horrific lie
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 comes 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 a mob 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 into the prisons where the October 7th 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 7th 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.
Silenced No More? Why Did the BBC Bury the Civil Commission Report
The vast majority of the remaining 159 mentions across the last two days were about the apparently scandalous existence of an Israeli in Eurovision, on which more is to come soon. However, there was another story which BBC editors chose to shine a light on in the same time period, that of the passing in the Knesset of the legislation required to allow the death penalty for terrorists found guilty of involvement on October 7th.

In more than double the airtime dedicated to the Civil Commission’s findings, and at prime time, Yolande Knell told audiences:
Knell: “Israel’s Parliament has approved a law which could see Palestinians accused of involvement in the Hamas-led attacks in 2023 face the death penalty. Human rights groups say the military tribunals would deny defendants the right to a fair trial, they also allege that some evidence has been obtained through torture, claims denied by the Israeli authorities.”

And
Knell: “this law passed with 93 votes to 0, an unusual level of Cross-party support in the 120 seat Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, and what it basically does is it’s empowering a panel of judges, using both civil and military law to hand down the death penalty by a majority vote, and key parts of these hearings expected to take place or begin in about a year’s time, they’re going to be shown on a live stream and a specially set up Jerusalem courtroom. So, all of that has led to comparisons with Israel’s trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which was shown on television back in 1961”

Not only did Knell give equal weight in her reporting to unevidenced allegations of confessions elicited under torture as to the monumental archive of rigorously documented evidence of Hamas atrocities in the Civil Commission report, but she failed, despite clearly being aware, to connect the two stories.

When she told her audience:
Knell: “you have, numbers are not totally clear, 300 to 400 Gazans reportedly held by Israel as criminal defendants accused of involvement in the seventh of October attacks, and there are, I should say, another 1200 or so held as what are termed unlawful combatants, without charge, mostly from Gaza as well”

She was entirely aware of the horrific crimes these prisoners are accused of and the weight of evidence against them, but she chose to separate the two stories. An audience being told that these terrorists face the same fate as a notorious Nazi deserves to be fully informed of exactly the crimes they are accused of.

Editorial decisions were made at the BBC in the last two days, to bury the civil commission’s findings in the middle of the night, and to make no link to it whatsoever when reporting on the news that the men accused of these crimes may face the same fate as Eichmann. Those decisions do not happen by accident. When the BBC chooses which stories to tell, it chooses what it wants the public to know, and how it wants the public to feel about that information.

For a national institution built on the notion of total impartiality, this is more than a simple failure.
Jonathan Tobin: ‘Rapist dogs?’ Woke journalism’s antisemitic war on Israel crosses a line
The paper needs to be given the same treatment that some of its readers think should be accorded to Israel. No one in public life—be they Jewish or not—should treat their employees as if they are credible journalists or answer their queries. Times reporters should no more be entitled to credentials to cover government or any other sector of public life than would those who work for rags produced by hate groups that also traffic in blood libels against Jews or anyone else.

The paper deserves to be shamed and shunned at least until the unlikely event of its retracting Kristof’s article. And anyone who doesn’t—whether out of concern for the freedom of the press that the newspaper mocks or because they think it appropriate to publish such absurd and unproven lies—is just as guilty as Kristof, and his editors and publishers. There should be no reticence about making it clear that it is helping to incite the growing toll of antisemitic violence against Jews in this country and around the world.

Perhaps The New York Times is too big to fail or to be isolated. Perhaps the liberal popular culture that still exalts it as a credible source is still so pervasive that its current position as a never-ending source of bile hurled at President Donald Trump and Israel makes it untouchable.

But that should not discourage those who understand that Kristof’s article is a crossing of the Rubicon when it comes to the paper’s credibility. No decent person should accept the newspaper as a legitimate source so long as it is willing to traffic in blood libels against Jews. And we should be confident that—as with its past crimes against journalism, such as those committed in the 1930s and 1940s—the verdict of history will judge all those associated with the newspaper and those who support it as knowingly guilty of spreading falsehoods, misinformation and antisemitism.
Times Columnist Kristof’s Father Fought on Nazi Side in World War II
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose article accusing Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners is being denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as "Hamas propaganda," "fabricated," and a "baseless blood libel," had a father who served on the Nazi side during World War II. In Kristof’s 2024 memoir, Chasing Hope, he writes, "When I was growing up and other kids talked about their dads heroically battling the Nazis, I kept quiet. I didn't want to admit that my father had actually fought for a year on the same side as the Nazis."

Kristof’s father also wrote a letter to the editor of the Times in 1989 defending Paul Touvier, the intelligence chief of a pro-Nazi militia in Vichy France who was convicted of killing seven Jewish hostages. Kristof’s father wrote that in World War II, "in so many cases it was sometimes difficult indeed to draw a sharp line between friend and enemy, patriot and traitor, moral and immoral acts. To do good, you often had to do evil too. Time and again, people had to quantify their ethics: I am permitted to be this much immoral to achieve that much good; kill so many to save that many. And once the war ended, it was a question to what extent personal commitments or obligations taken under one set of circumstances were still binding under totally different circumstances, moral and political."

The disclosure that Kristof’s father served in the Romanian military on the Nazi side may help to explain why Kristof would be so eager to demonize Israel in particular when prison abuse cases are plentiful worldwide, and especially in New York. The Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, who had served Britain in World War II from 1940 to 1945 in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps and at MI6, wrote a 2005 article in The American Scholar, "The New Anti-Semitism," in which he observed that "Jew-baiting, Jew-hating, or generally being unpleasant to Jews" serves a purpose by bringing to non-Jews a "kind of relief." Wrote Lewis, "For more than half a century, any discussion of Jews and their problems has been overshadowed by the grim memories of the crimes of the Nazis and of the complicity, acquiescence, or indifference of so many others. But inevitably, the memory of those days is fading, and now Israel and its problems afford an opportunity to relinquish the unfamiliar and uncomfortable posture of guilt and contrition and to resume the more familiar and more comfortable position of stern reproof from an attitude of moral superiority."

Kristof himself acknowledges in his memoir that a "tortuous family history helped turn me into the kind of reporter I became," that "identity can be complicated," and that "all this shaped me." The same memoir says Kristof "would regularly wake in the dark" as a child to hear his dad screaming during the dad’s nightmares.

Immigration documents for Kristof’s father obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show conflicting information about his age and nationality. The documents also indicate that Kristof gave inaccurate information to Times readers about his father’s story.
Fake News, Real Jews By Abe Greenwald
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It's not a secret that America is in the throes of a major trust crisis. But that’s really half the story. Americans are at once militantly untrusting and hopelessly credulous. It all depends on whether the story they’re told supports or undermines their position.

More often than not, given the dominant ideological trends of our day, this means rejecting the simple truth and believing the fantastical lie. It means denying the assassination attempts we’ve all seen, to one degree or another, with our own eyes and buying a vague cloak-and-dagger fantasy about a coordinated false-flag diversion.

But that’s not all it means.

The paradoxical combination of popular distrust and widespread gullibility has always been a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. Suspicion and superstition are mutually reinforcing, and both are elemental to Jew-hatred. So it also means dismissing the self-recorded savagery of Hamas and believing the impossible and unverified tale of dogs trained by the IDF to rape Palestinians. It means hearing calls to globalize the intifada and deeming them peaceful cries for liberation. It means seeing a man’s Nazi tattoo and refuting that the man has Nazi sympathies. It means witnessing synagogues come under attack on a weekly basis and declaring that Islamophobia is a national scourge. It means interpreting population growth in Gaza as a genocide.

For anti-Semites and those they’ve recruited, this is the alternate reality that suits their tastes. It justifies the hatred in their heart. And in the minds of an ever less discerning American public, it’s becoming the “truth”—which incentivizes suppliers. This is why it’s where the AI slop, foreign ops, anonymous rumor, conspiracy theory, and dishonest journalism are most likely to harmonize. When it comes to Israel, they’re indistinguishable.

For Jews, this is the virtual reality overlaying our real one. It’s the false narrative we wake up to each morning. It floats overhead, growing larger and fouler, casting a darker shadow on our lives every day. For us, reality has never felt more undeniably real.
Ashley Rindsberg: The ‘Israeli rape dogs’ blood libel fits a long, troubling tradition at The New York Times
In December 1924, the New York Times assured its readers that Adolf Hitler – just released from prison after the failed Munich Putsch – was “no longer to be feared” and would retire to private life in Austria. Two years earlier, the paper had run an uglier prediction, vouching that Hitler’s antisemitism “was not so violent or genuine as it sounded” but a tactical pose to attract followers. In fact, the Times informed readers, Hitler was “credibly credited” with acting on a “lofty, unselfish patriotism.”

Far from an exception, this was part of a pattern at the Times of its correspondents smoothing the jagged edges of the Nazi project. In August 1936, the Times reported from the Berlin Olympics that visitors had concluded “Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leader in the world today” – printed the same year Jewish German athletes were thrown off the national team and the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship. The Times correspondent who wrote those words would also opine (in a news story) that the newly reinstituted German draft would mean that “Military discipline and army tradition will prevail in the land, and neither of these countenance rioting, whether racial or of another variety.” That correspondent, Frederick Birchall, won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, for his “dispatches on the rise of Hitler”— only two years after another Times correspondent won a Pulitzer for denying the Ukraine Famine, a campaign by Stalin to wipe out the region’s kulaks (landowning peasants) that starved five million people to death.

If this had been the end of the story, it might be excused as the moral errors of wayward reporters. But the real damage done by the Times’ Nazi-sympathizing reporting was still to come. On September 1, 1939, the morning German tanks rolled into Poland, the paper’s lead story – citing a “semi-official news agency” – reported that Polish guerrillas had stormed a German radio station at Gleiwitz.

By 1939, there was no semi-official news agency in Germany: every German outlet was a property of Joseph Goebbels’ ministry. The actual source for the Times’ “Polish attack” story was the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper Hitler kept on his nightstand. And the Polish “attack” itself was Operation Himmler, a staged provocation in which concentration camp prisoners were murdered by Nazi officials, dressed up as German radio station operators, and laid out as "evidence” of Polish aggression. On account of the corpses used for the plot, the Nazis nicknamed the effort Operation Canned Goods.

On its own this would have meant nothing – more Nazi propaganda from a regime already notorious for this kind of distortion. But the moment the New York Times turned it into “news,” it became a triumph, giving Hitler that pretext he needed to launch his invasion of Poland, triggering the Second World War. And just in case there had been any doubt about the Times’ integrity in the matter, the Pulitzer committee stepped in to play its part, awarding the Times correspondent who wrote the story, Otto Tolischus, the 1940 Pulitzer for his “dispatches from Berlin”.
Netanyahu Says Israel Will Sue New York Times, Nick Kristof for 'Blood Libel' Rape Article: Times Takes More Heat for Relying on Widely Discredited Source
The pressure on the New York Times intensified Thursday after Israel announced it will sue the newspaper over opinion writer Nicholas Kristof's article alleging garish "sexual violence" by Israeli troops against Palestinian detainees. While a Times spokesman defended Kristof a second time, the Times newsroom, which is separate from the opinion section, has been silent as the integrity of Kristof's reporting comes under heavy fire.

"Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof," Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on X. "They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel's valiant soldiers." Netanyahu made clear that "under my leadership, Israel will not be silent. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law."

The Times's front office, meanwhile, is performing damage control on social media, where Kristof's sensational claims—especially his most lurid accusation that Israel uses specially trained dogs to rape male prisoners—are being dismantled in real time. A Times spokesman has already defended the piece in two separate statements—saying that "independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking." Media reporters, however, are questioning what type of internal review was conducted prior to Monday's publication and why the newsroom hasn't followed up with a news story on the sensational allegations, which have ballooned into a major story distracting from coverage of President Donald Trump's trip to Beijing.

Dylan Byers, a closely read media reporter with Puck, wondered in his latest newsletter "whether the paper even considered putting additional reporters on this Opinion piece and reframing it as a straight news story—and whether they've tasked reporters with fact-checking those claims now."

Status, another media newsletter, pointed out that the Times's "newsroom has yet to advance or incorporate any of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner's reporting or touch on any of the allegations made in the piece, maintaining radio silence despite the continuing scrutiny. Kristof's bombshell report has also not appeared on any of The Times' podcasts, where the paper's biggest stories are typically showcased."

Kristof's reporting has, however, come under increasing assault from outside the Times's moat.


Call me Back Podcast: The Making of the Kristof Column — with Matti Friedman
Content warning: This episode includes discussion of sexual violence

How do unverified claims become a New York Times column?

On Monday, the New York Times published an opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled "The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians" — an explicit attempt to draw a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel by alleging that both equally engage in systematic sexual violence. The piece, based on interviews with 14 unnamed Palestinians, cited a Geneva-based NGO calling Israeli sexual abuse a "standard operating procedure" and described, among other things, trained dogs used to sexually assault prisoners. Kristof quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appearing to validate the charges - but Olmert subsequently issued a statement clarifying that he did not, in fact, confirm the column's most serious claims, including that Israeli authorities directed the rape of children or that systematic sexual torture is state policy.

The morning after Kristof's column appeared, an Israeli civil commission released a 300-page report - built on more than 10,000 photographs, thousands of hours of video, and over 400 testimonies - concluding that Hamas's sexual violence on October 7th was systematic, widespread, and deliberate. The New York Times, which had been told the report was coming months in advance, published it nearly 24 hours after running Kristof's op-ed.

Reporters who spent the day going through Kristof's column claim by claim found it largely unverifiable - no dates, no locations, no names - recycled from dubious sources and in many cases almost certainly false. The deeper question this episode asks is not simply whether the column is fair, but how something like it gets published in the paper of record at all: what is the pipeline, from NGO to press release to Pulitzer Prize winner's byline, that turns unverified claims into fact? And why does that pipeline flow so reliably in one direction?

To answer that, Dan is joined by Matti Friedman, a former AP reporter and editor in Jerusalem, and author of the 2014 Atlantic essay "What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel" - who has spent years documenting the specific mechanisms by which NGOs hostile to Israel have shaped, and in some cases dictated, Western coverage of this conflict.

In this episode:
02:12 - What Kristof’s column alleged
09:39 - Which claims are documented, unverifiable, or implausible
14:21 - How NGO claims become mainstream coverage
17:21 - Euro-Med, activist sourcing, and the New York Times
23:47 - Matti Friedman’s warning about Western media
27:21 - The October 7th sexual violence report and the timing problem


Hugh Hewitt: The rise of the radical left in America on the back of Jew hatred Haviv Rettig Gur returns to Hugh’s show to review how the seeds of today’s crazed lurch into anti-Semitism by the Democratic Party has been a long time developing and spreading.

Hugh Hewitt: Dr. Michael Oren joined Hugh to discuss the collapse of Kristof into rank anti-Semitism



Seth Frantzman: Why should the US-China meetings matter for the Middle East? Here are five reasons
China-Gulf influence
As the Iran conflict continues, China will benefit from its ties with the Gulf states. This is particularly true of its ties with Saudi Arabia.

China is seen as a rising power and one that can bring stability and investment. There is concern in the region that the US war with Iran has spread chaos and instability.

Countries like Saudi Arabia want to hedge their bets on what comes next in the world. Saudi Arabia has been a close friend of the US since the 1930s. Nevertheless, it now understands that this century will bring new challenges.

Gulf media outlets are watching what happens with the Trump visit to China. One report said the conflict was “fast-tracking” China’s influence in the Gulf and the region.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported: “Kuwait said on Tuesday that Iran launched a failed attack earlier this month on an island where China is helping build a port in the Gulf Arab country. The accusation came just hours before Trump was to depart for Beijing on a high-stakes visit over the Iran war and other issues.”

This is important. Countries want to make it clear to China that Iran’s actions are also a threat to stability. Iran will want to try to smooth things out and emerge as the responsible power.

China may benefit from trade deals and munitions
“US missile shortages could strengthen China’s hand during Trump visit,” the South China Morning Post reported on the eve of the Trump visit.

This messaging is clear. It means the US has wasted a lot of munitions in the war on Iran.

China has watched closely. If the US had landed a knockout blow, then China might feel worried. But if the US is tied down in Iran, that could benefit China.

On the other hand, China wants to secure trade and oil deliveries. As such, it may be concerned that the continued US blockade of Iran and the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might affect China’s dominance and its need for oil and other trade that passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran also feels that if it can’t secure trade routes, its future might be in jeopardy.

China historically was not a major naval power. It is a land power, primarily. Over recent decades, however, it has invested heavily in shipbuilding and naval power.

Iran does not have good infrastructure for land links with its neighbors. This is partly due to geography. Building land links to Central Asia is difficult. Also, its neighbors in that area are mostly poorer and less developed.

As such, Iran has to search for maritime trade to secure its future. The Gulf is important for this. The disruption in recent years, in the Red Sea and now the Strait of Hormuz, has led China to rethink its role in the world.
Seth Frantzman: Role of Gulf states in Iran conflict said to change over one week
The Gulf states were victims of Iranian attacks during the war that began with US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran on February 28. Iran lashed out, attacking a dozen countries in the region.

Iran’s major target was the United Arab Emirates, but it also attacked Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, Oman, Qatar, the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, and other countries.

In addition, Iran targeted US bases and made it clear that it can strike wherever it wants.

During the conflict, the Gulf states created the impression that they were taking blows without responding. They were able to increase the effectiveness of their air-defense systems. The feeling was that they wanted to stay out of the war, even though they had a right to respond.

Iran’s narrative was that some of the Gulf states hosted US forces, or in the case of the UAE and Bahrain, had signed the Abraham Accords with Israel. Therefore, Iran could target them at will.

Some perceptions of the Gulf’s role have now changed. Some Gulf states have taken a more proactive role to both defend themselves and also to build up their strength, according to media reports this week.
Amit Segal: Inside the Mind of Hamas
Hamas believed it could wipe out its arch-enemy in one grand operation. In pursuit of this goal, it dragged its allies into a war they did not believe in, and one they would ultimately lose. According to an analysis of captured Hamas documents by Hebrew University's Dr. Daniel Sobelman, Hamas's thinking was the precise opposite of Israeli intelligence assumptions. By 2019, Hamas had come to believe that it was Israel that was deterred from action.

In May 2021, Hamas initiated a 12-day conflict over tensions on the Temple Mount. The head of IDF Military Intelligence came out of the operation with the overconfident assessment that "five years of complete calm with Gaza" was achieved.

In Gaza, however, Hamas was celebrating a strategic victory. The fighting had sparked unprecedented Israeli Arab uprisings - an internal vulnerability Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar realized could be weaponized as a "nuclear bomb" to destroy Israel. The war had also seen Hamas's first active wartime coordination with Iran and Hizbullah via a joint situation room. Far from a deterrent, the 2021 conflict was a highly successful "dress rehearsal" for the full liberation of Palestine.

In June 2022, Sinwar outlined to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh scenarios for joint action. The first was a full-force, surprise confrontation involving Hamas, Hizbullah, and other regional forces (with Iran supporting from the sidelines) to immediately bring down and end the State of Israel, relying on simultaneous, massive uprisings in Judea and Samaria and among Israeli Arabs. Days later, Haniyeh sat down in Beirut with Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC Quds Force's Palestine Branch.

Haniyeh reported that Nasrallah had expressed "clear and resolute" support for the first scenario, believing the immediate end of Israel's existence was "realistic and achievable." Izadi supported the plan, but insisted they needed to investigate hurdles before moving forward.

During Sinwar's June 2023 visit to Tehran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei bluntly rejected Hamas's push for an immediate, decisive battle, advising Hamas to focus instead on Judea and Samaria while Israel was "gradually" encircled. Still, Sinwar gambled that once the first shots were fired, the sheer scale of the attack would drag his allies into the battle.

Violent uprisings in Judea and Samaria and among Israeli Arabs were an absolute requirement in every single scenario. To light that internal powder keg, Sinwar was convinced that capturing and broadcasting "explosive images" right at the start would "trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum" among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. That is why Hamas terrorists wore body cameras and gleefully livestreamed their atrocities.
CENTCOM chief says 90% of Iran’s defense industry destroyed after US-Israeli campaign
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers on Thursday that the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran has destroyed 90% of the Islamic Republic’s defensive capabilities, severely limiting Tehran’s ability to threaten the region.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the posture of CENTCOM and U.S. Africa Command, Cooper said the operation achieved its military objectives in less than 40 days.

“Most notably, we degraded Iran’s ability to project power outside its borders and threaten the region and threaten our interests,” Cooper said.

Referring to Iran’s missile and drone barrages against Israel in April and October 2024, Cooper said Tehran no longer has the capacity to launch attacks “with that mass and scale.”

Cooper also said Iran has been cut off from supplying weapons and support to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

“Those transfer paths and methods have been cut off,” he said, describing the outcome as the result of the culmination of careful planning.


IDF Operation in Lebanon Caught Hizbullah Off Guard
After a 48-hour covert advance, IDF troops crossed the Litani River, fought Hizbullah at close range, and uncovered underground compounds stocked for a planned invasion of Israel. Lt.-Col. B., commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Unit, said, "We wanted to surprise them, and the only way was to advance at night, through the brush and in total darkness. During the day, we blended into the terrain, in 'holding areas.'"

After the unit's lead forces identified the entrance to an underground infrastructure site, "an encounter developed. We understood the situation and deployed forces on both sides of the river. In effect, we trapped the terrorists inside....They came out each time from a different opening, fired and threw grenades" in a battle that lasted two hours. "It was face-to-face fighting, just meters from a fortified enemy."

The troops encountered Hizbullah's explosive drones during the fighting, but the Lebanese brush actually worked in the soldiers' favor. "Their drones are less effective in the brush. They operate with fiber optics, and that fiber simply tears between the bushes and trees. That gave us an advantage."

During the five days of clearing operations after the battle, inside underground compounds 10-15 meters deep, "we found everything there: food, water, ammunition, motorcycles and ATVs. It was a full preparation for a raid. Their intention was clear: to go up into our communities. Seeing that with your own eyes gives you an enormous sense of responsibility."
Israeli military, defense firms race to find solution to FPV drone threats
As Israeli troops are increasingly targeted by small, first-person-view (FPV) drones in Lebanon, the Israeli government has called on the nation’s defense industry to quickly provide troops with effective defenses.

The problem of FPV drones, often controlled through fiber-optic cables and therefore virtually jam-proof, has grown so large that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly called an urgent meeting Wednesday to discuss solutions.

“The drone threat has become one of the most urgent operational challenges faced by maneuvering and defensive forces today,” Michal Mor, CEO of Israeli defense firm Smart Shooter, told Breaking Defense. “These drones are accessible, inexpensive, highly maneuverable, and increasingly difficult to defeat, especially as fiber-optic-guided drones enter the battlefield and prove immune to electronic jamming.”

FPV drones, and often grisly videos showcasing their lethality, have become ubiquitous in the battlefields of Ukraine, but former senior Israeli defense official Menahem Landau said they’re relatively new to the Middle East, where he says Hezbollah has made use of them against the Israel Defense Force.

This “new capability,” he told Breaking Defense, “is cheap, and they train the right people to use this quite easily.” Landau previously headed the Israel Ministry of Defense’s UAV and Drones Branch and is now with the firm Caveret Group.

The Alma Research and Education Center, which covers security threats to northern Israel, published a report on May 11 noting that since the beginning of Israel’s recent ground offensive in Lebanon, “over 80 [FPV] explosive drones have been launched at IDF forces in recent weeks, of which about 15 hit and killed 4 soldiers and a civilian, and caused injuries to dozens of soldiers.”

The attacks by FPV drones on IDF positions have been published by Hezbollah and circulated on social media, including a video of an alleged attack on an Iron Dome battery. In the first two weeks of May, there have been daily drone incidents, although the IDF does not provide data on which are FPV drones.
Three civilians wounded as Hezbollah drone hits near Rosh Hanikra in the Galilee
An explosive drone launched by Hezbollah terrorists hit in the Rosh Hanikra area, near the Lebanon border in the Western Galilee on Thursday, wounding three civilians, one critically.

Dr. Tzvi Sheleg, deputy director of Galilee Medical Center, confirmed that three casualties were evacuated to the Nahariya hospital.

“One is in critical condition, suffering from shrapnel injuries and very severe internal trauma,” Sheleg said in a video statement, adding that the victim was rushed to the operating room.

A second casualty was moderately wounded by shrapnel and was undergoing scans, he said. A third person sustained light injuries.

Sheleg said the injuries appeared to have been caused by an explosion and included blast and shrapnel wounds.

Separately in the Eastern Galilee, the Israeli military said in an initial statement that it fired an interceptor at a suspected aerial target from Lebanon near Kibbutz Misgav Am in the Galilee Panhandle, with the outcome under review, while another alert in the nearby Mevo’ot Hermon region ended without injuries.

Overnight, the IDF said it intercepted another aerial target in Southern Lebanon without activating air-raid sirens and reported additional Hezbollah fire, including an anti-tank missile and mortar shells, that struck near Israeli troops operating there without causing casualties.

The attacks by the Iranian-backed terrorist group violate “ceasefire understandings,” the IDF stressed.

The statements followed Israeli strikes Wednesday on Hezbollah weapons depots, launchers and infrastructure in Southern Lebanon, which the IDF said were used to plan attacks on Israeli forces and territory.

The army added that troops from its 91st “Galilee” Division continue ground operations in Southern Lebanon aimed at dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure, reporting that since the start of the operation, more than 400 terrorists have been eliminated and over 1,000 weapons seized.





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