The Daily Mail published this week the most comprehensive account yet of the sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023, drawn from the testimony of 430 witnesses, survivors, experts, and medical staff who gave evidence to an independent Israeli women’s rights commission established in the wake of the attack. The report documents the systematic and deliberate defiling of victims, women who were stripped, bound, raped, shot, stabbed, and burned, with sexual assault continuing even after death. The commission’s findings make clear the violence was designed not merely to kill but to humiliate, to destroy the victims’ bodies so thoroughly that their families could not have a final goodbye.
Concurrent with the publication of that report, the New York Times ran a 3,500-word opinion essay by columnist Nick Kristoff alleging that what happened to Israeli women on October 7th is now being mirrored in Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including the claim, sourced to an anonymous Gaza journalist, that Israeli guards deployed a dog to sexually assault a detainee. Israel has rejected and condemned the allegations.
Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review and author of the forthcoming book Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the Kristoff piece and its implications.
Rothman said the purpose of the column is transparent even if the intent cannot be definitively proven: to allow readers to conclude that everyone is raping everyone in that conflict and that assigning moral responsibility is therefore too complicated to attempt. He said the New York Times is capable of rigorous fact-checking when it wants to be, describing his own experience writing a single opinion piece for the paper as the most brutal fact-checking process he had ever encountered. The decision not to apply that standard to Kristoff’s column was not an oversight, he said. The allegations were simply too useful to the paper’s audience’s desire to believe that Israel is capable of the same unspeakable barbarity its attackers demonstrated. Media critic David Harsanyi has noted that the column provides zero verifiable details for the central allegations, no names, no places, no times, no reasons for detention that would allow any independent follow-up investigation, and that the named sources in the piece include at least one figure described as an accused sex pest with no credible connections to the events in question.
The Israeli government announced it is filing a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, a case Rothman acknowledged will face enormous legal hurdles given the high bar American defamation law sets for public figures and institutions, but which he said is nonetheless necessary to formally confront the degree to which the paper subordinated or abandoned its own standards in order to publish allegations that serve a particular ideological narrative about the Jewish state.
Rothman placed the Kristoff column in a much longer historical context that forms the backbone of his new book. He said the specific accusations Kristoff retails, that Israel commits rape as a weapon of humiliation, engineers famines, pursues genocidal policies, represents white colonial imperialist power in the Middle East, are not recent inventions. They are Soviet propaganda narratives developed systematically after the 1973 war, when the USSR determined that its direct military investment in Arab armies was not yielding strategic returns and shifted to a comprehensive campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state through narrative warfare. Those narratives were absorbed by the Marxist revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which over subsequent decades evolved into pan-Arabist and eventually Islamist movements, converging with the Iranian revolutionary sphere, which combined Islamist religious framing with Marxian anti-colonial frameworks. The result is an ideological infrastructure that has been producing the same accusations against Israel for half a century, and which explains why what sounds new to casual observers is actually a well-worn playbook.
On Sebastian Gorka’s statement that Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and other anti-Trump right-wingers could be labeled domestic terrorists under a new national counterterrorism directive due to links with anti-Semitic behavior, Rothman said the characterization concerns him somewhat. He said people who traffic in dangerous ideas and narratives deserve criticism and accountability for contributing to a threatening environment, but that attributing the violent acts of deluded individuals to the people whose rhetoric may have influenced them collapses important distinctions about moral and legal responsibility. That said, he said responsible communicators ought to be acutely aware of the threat environment they are operating in, which he described as genuinely dangerous.
He said the broader pattern of leftwing political violence, including shootings at ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities, assassination attempts against right-wing figures and multiple attempts on the president’s life, and the sustained burning and looting of American cities during 2020, receives systematically less attention and less serious categorization than right-wing threats, a disparity he said is predicated on dubious research produced in an environment where scholars who study left-wing extremism have themselves been successfully intimidated into self-censorship. His book attempts to give that century-long history of left-wing political violence a plain-eyed examination and to identify the recognizable patterns in left-wing terrorist waves that could help policy practitioners anticipate and counter what is coming.The Daily Mail published this week the most comprehensive account yet of the sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023, drawn from the testimony of 430 witnesses, survivors, experts, and medical staff who gave evidence to an independent Israeli women’s rights commission established in the wake of the attack. The report documents the systematic and deliberate defiling of victims, women who were stripped, bound, raped, shot, stabbed, and burned, with sexual assault continuing even after death. The commission’s findings make clear the violence was designed not merely to kill but to humiliate, to destroy the victims’ bodies so thoroughly that their families could not have a final goodbye.
Concurrent with the publication of that report, the New York Times ran a 3,500-word opinion essay by columnist Nick Kristoff alleging that what happened to Israeli women on October 7th is now being mirrored in Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including the claim, sourced to an anonymous Gaza journalist, that Israeli guards deployed a dog to sexually assault a detainee. Israel has rejected and condemned the allegations. Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review and author of the forthcoming book Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the Kristoff piece and its implications.
Rothman said the purpose of the column is transparent even if the intent cannot be definitively proven: to allow readers to conclude that everyone is raping everyone in that conflict and that assigning moral responsibility is therefore too complicated to attempt. He said the New York Times is capable of rigorous fact-checking when it wants to be, describing his own experience writing a single opinion piece for the paper as the most brutal fact-checking process he had ever encountered. The decision not to apply that standard to Kristoff’s column was not an oversight, he said. The allegations were simply too useful to the paper’s audience’s desire to believe that Israel is capable of the same unspeakable barbarity its attackers demonstrated. Media critic David Harsanyi has noted that the column provides zero verifiable details for the central allegations, no names, no places, no times, no reasons for detention that would allow any independent follow-up investigation, and that the named sources in the piece include at least one figure described as an accused sex pest with no credible connections to the events in question.
The Israeli government announced it is filing a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, a case Rothman acknowledged will face enormous legal hurdles given the high bar American defamation law sets for public figures and institutions, but which he said is nonetheless necessary to formally confront the degree to which the paper subordinated or abandoned its own standards in order to publish allegations that serve a particular ideological narrative about the Jewish state.
Rothman placed the Kristoff column in a much longer historical context that forms the backbone of his new book. He said the specific accusations Kristoff retails, that Israel commits rape as a weapon of humiliation, engineers famines, pursues genocidal policies, represents white colonial imperialist power in the Middle East, are not recent inventions. They are Soviet propaganda narratives developed systematically after the 1973 war, when the USSR determined that its direct military investment in Arab armies was not yielding strategic returns and shifted to a comprehensive campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state through narrative warfare. Those narratives were absorbed by the Marxist revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which over subsequent decades evolved into pan-Arabist and eventually Islamist movements, converging with the Iranian revolutionary sphere, which combined Islamist religious framing with Marxian anti-colonial frameworks. The result is an ideological infrastructure that has been producing the same accusations against Israel for half a century, and which explains why what sounds new to casual observers is actually a well-worn playbook.
On Sebastian Gorka’s statement that Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and other anti-Trump right-wingers could be labeled domestic terrorists under a new national counterterrorism directive due to links with anti-Semitic behavior, Rothman said the characterization concerns him somewhat. He said people who traffic in dangerous ideas and narratives deserve criticism and accountability for contributing to a threatening environment, but that attributing the violent acts of deluded individuals to the people whose rhetoric may have influenced them collapses important distinctions about moral and legal responsibility. That said, he said responsible communicators ought to be acutely aware of the threat environment they are operating in, which he described as genuinely dangerous.
He said the broader pattern of leftwing political violence, including shootings at ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities, assassination attempts against right-wing figures and multiple attempts on the president’s life, and the sustained burning and looting of American cities during 2020, receives systematically less attention and less serious categorization than right-wing threats, a disparity he said is predicated on dubious research produced in an environment where scholars who study left-wing extremism have themselves been successfully intimidated into self-censorship. His book attempts to give that century-long history of left-wing political violence a plain-eyed examination and to identify the recognizable patterns in left-wing terrorist waves that could help policy practitioners anticipate and counter what is coming.