Israel’s response to rape allegations: threaten the newspaper
Threatening the messenger instead of addressing the message is one of history’s less convincing tells.
Nicholas Kristof publishes a deeply reported piece in the New York Times collecting horrific allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees, and Israel’s response appears to be skipping past the whole “investigate the accusations” phase and going directly to threatening the newspaper. Very normal, very confidence-in-the-facts behavior.
“Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday.
“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 added in a statement to Reuters. “We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”
The Times has not responded to Israel’s legal threat but the paper has repeatedly defended Kristof’s reporting over the last few days.
Kristof’s interviews with 14 men and women “were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers”, said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement posted on Wednesday. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.”
Israel’s crisis communications strategy maps neatly onto the DARVO flowchart.