Michael Goodwin: The Lefts turn against Israel is complete with the NY Times latest antisemitic smear

For those who missed last week’s gutter-level low for The New York Times, here’s a catch-up — and the big picture meaning.The focus is Nicholas Kristof’s bizarre column last Monday that repeated debunked claims that Israeli dogs had raped Palestinian prisoners.Among the landslide of criticism, the most frequent was that the author had swallowed, hook, line and sinker, garbage from sources widely known for peddling Hamas propaganda.The key assertions Kristof makes are so outlandish that the Israeli government vows to file a defamation suit against him and the Times.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the writer and paper “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.”The last reference, of course, is to the well-documented cases of Hamas terrorists raping women and children — and sometimes corpses — during and after the Oct.

7, 2023, invasion.Those proven war crimes are a prime reason why the paper’s dogmatic defense of Kristof’s column is as outrageous as the column itself.By embracing without reservations the Hamas-tainted sourcing and the author’s claims that echo ancient antisemitic tropes about Jews, the Times has tied itself to wild assertions that most rookie reporters would suspect.Despite some internal misgivings about how such preposterous claims got through the editing process and were published, the paper’s top editors have issued unyielding statements defending the column and its extreme assertions.In one of those statements, the editors called the column a “deeply-reported piece of opinion journalism” and insisted it “draws together on-the-record accounts and cites several analyses documenting the practice of sexual violence and abuse conducted by various parts of Israel’s security forces and settlers.”The most laughable claim is that the column was “extensively fact-checked.” ...