A Miscarriage of Journalism at 'The New York Times' [View all]
personally, i take most everything published about gaza w a big grain of salt. imho, oct 7 was part of a plan to defeat joe biden. the protests that broke out looked orchestrated to me from the jump. it is a fact that qatar has poured million into u.s. universities, leading to hiring of many profs sympathetic, to say the least, to the palestinian cause. oct 7 was the start of their ‘sleeper cell’ activation.
i think the kristoff opinion piece was sloppy journalism that even the now quite corrupt nyt wd not have published in it’s news section.
they have had to walk back quite a few things, esp their use of kids w degenerative diseases as ‘famine victims’. if the ‘famine’ was so bad, shouldnt they have had their pick of hundreds of emaciated kids to choose from?
i cd go on, but…
anyway, here is a point by point refutation of what i believe is flat out libel.
Let’s start with fairness. One of the fundamental rules of our justice system is that a man should be permitted to confront his accuser. Whether in civil or criminal cases, we have for hundreds of years rejected the English Star Chamber’s technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in secret. This principle is so essential to any basic system of fairness that it appears repeatedly throughout our laws—from the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause and its guarantee of public trials to our hearsay rules, which preclude out-of-court statements the accused never had an opportunity to cross-examine. But Kristof’s article relies mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility—much less their political or ideological affiliations—cannot be tested and thus cannot be known.
Two, any cursory review of Israeli legal databases would reveal that Israeli prisons allow Palestinian prisoners to file complaints about the conditions of their confinement—and that these complaints do get filed. Indeed, since 2023, Israel has received 182 such complaints filed by Israel Prison Service detainees from the Gaza Strip. Of those, 83 were filed by the prisoners’ attorneys, 85 were reported by Israeli officials themselves, and four involved allegations of sex offenses—a tiny fraction among a prison population that includes some 10,000 Palestinians. But the point is that Kristof offers not a single shred of evidence that any of the Palestinian prisoners who filed complaints has ever been subjected to retribution—much less that this speculation about retribution has ever been a feature of the Israeli prison system.
Three, Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses. No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims. There’s an old adage that says it’s impossible to prove a negative—all the more so when there are no facts to investigate.
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-new-york-times-miscarriage-of-journalism?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawR4J-tleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFCSFoyOVdrZTk1bjZ5UGZ2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHo0mNGgWkFRW0nIgndZaG5Zinshxkj44ftbsMFmaxLS70knggg-rOinpQ3V7_aem_14QHlOjYnwHuUVpce9y-kw
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