Victor Davis Hanson Calls Out The New York Times Over Explosive Israel Story
• May 21, 2026
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
There’s been a very strange story that was printed not long ago by the liberal opinion journalist Nicholas Kristof. Now, apparently, he’s been retired. He’s written for decades at The New York Times.
He’s sort of a social activist. He does some good things sometimes, but he tries to draw attention of The New York Times readership to supposed crises of morality all over the globe, such as the so-called genocide. And it depends on who you talk to. In Darfur, he visited it very many times. But he’s had a checkered career.
During the anthrax scare near the millennium, he wrote a series of articles suggesting that a government scientist was responsible for sending that deadly anthrax bacillus in the mail to particular people.
There was no real evidence of that. The person was never formally charged. And there was litigation back and forth.
He also ran for governor of Oregon, where he moved as a young man, and his family has a farm. But he hadn’t lived there. He’d been, of course, living on the East Coast because he was working at The New York Times. The Democratic secretary of state disqualified him from trying to run for governor in 2022, arguing that his main residence was elsewhere, out of state.
She was a liberal Democrat like he is, and yet he got very angry and accused her of being politically biased and corrupt. The Oregon Supreme Court, very liberal, upheld that decision, so although he’d raised $1.6 million, he could not stay—he could not run for governor.
But here’s what he’s done recently. He’s written an article that alleges that prisoners following the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in Israel by the Hamas terrorist organization and people of Gaza, who tagged along. Many of them were caught in jail, and some directly involved in the assault, some just in the subsequent operations in Gaza itself.
And he’s interviewed them. Many of them are anonymous. And he says that they have been systematically raped, molested, tortured.
But what got the sensational coverage for these allegations was that he said that in some cases, and one in particular, a former Hamas person said that he had been raped inside an Israeli jail by a canine, by a dog. And that this was a part of an Israeli policy to train canines to rape inmates and to abuse them.
There’s a lot of things wrong with that.
First of all, most of the sourcing for the article either came from the Euro-Med website, which is hard-Left, anti-Israeli, and founded by someone who’s closely connected with Hamas.
Second, most of the sources were anonymous. Third, the ones that were not, are affiliated in many cases with the Hamas terrorist group.
But most strange of all, there is no scientific proof that a trainer or an owner can prepare a dog to commit sexual intercourse against a human’s will or against a human at all.
Dogs don’t rape people. To the degree that there has been any recorded incidents of dog-human sexual content, it’s in the context of bestiality.
That is, an owner coaxing a dog in some fashion to have intercourse, but there’s no … Dog sexuality is so different from humans. You can’t just say to a dog, “Achieve sexual preparedness and go have intercourse in a forcible manner against that victim.”
It doesn’t happen. And yet, Nicholas Kristof doubled down and said there was scientific evidence that it happened, and it didn’t. That was a complete fabrication.
And when he said that it wasn’t necessarily the rule in Israeli jails, he said it was systematic. So the article is self-contradictory.
It’s based on either left-wing, anti-Israeli sources or pro-Hamas informants. Most of them anonymous.
He has a history of not being reliable, even though his reputation is one of being a global humanitarian who tries to draw our attention to abuses.
There’s one final thing. It wasn’t just a sin of commission. There was a sin of omission. Let me define what I mean by that. He knew, as did The New York Times, that Israel had been conducting an exhaustive investigation, exhaustive, over almost two and a half years, to find out what actually happened on Oct. 7.
And they had all sorts of evidence. They had prisoners who confessed to what they did. And remember, these didn’t need to be coerced. In the Hamas mindset, they want to brag on what they did. They’re proud of it. They had instruction booklets telling them how to say, “Spread your legs,” and other commands in Hebrew.
They were greeted as heroes by Gazan civilians when they came back and heard the story. When they brought back over 240 hostages, the hostages were in danger of losing their lives from an angry mob.
So, there was no reticence on the part of cooperating with the Israelis. Then they had people who survived the attack who had testimonies. Then they had extensive photographs of the bodies of the slain.
They had camera footage from the Hamas terrorists who were so exuberant and happy to kill Jews that they actually filmed it on their military helmets.
And they collated all of that evidence together, and the result was medieval. It was a story of people losing their limbs, of women being raped repeatedly, gang-raped, being shot, being mutilated, being sexually—in a sexually perverted manner tortured, children beheaded. It’s horrific beyond words.
That systematic report was coming out and has now appeared.
And so, the supposition is that Nicholas Kristof, who’s very anti-Israel, cooked up an idea that he would preempt this story by an even cruder, weirder, surreal story that, well, whatever Hamas did to the Israelis that you’re going to read this week, that’s the implication—not explicit, but implicit.
It’s not going to be as bad as what I’m going to tell you, because the Israelis train dogs to rape people.
That is the biggest blood libel and slur against the Jewish people that I’ve ever heard. And yet, The New York Times, which always brags about fact-checking, didn’t fact-check it at all.
And the result is he is now being sued by the Israeli government and the Netanyahu administration. I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. It’s very hard for a foreign country to sue an individual, especially when the prime minister is in the public realm. But it’s going to draw attention to The New York Times in general and Nicholas Kristof in particular.
He has skated on thin ice for a long time. And he’s not a reliable opinion journalist. And this confirms that he should not be writing for The New York Times.
It’s a free country. If they want to peddle these lies and these libels, they’re welcome to. But it’s going to destroy their reputation if he comes back again and pursues what he’s been doing for a long time.
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