Why Evolution is True Feed

Welcome to Saturday, May 23, 2026.

Posting will probably be limited to this very short Hili today; I am dispirited because the brood of nine mallards (plus mom) that I rescued yesterday was driven out of the pond area by aggressive mallards.  I do not know if they will return. This is of course the second time this has happened, and it may well be a duckless summer. I will show pictures when I can bear to look at them.

The drakes are simply too aggressive and mean to permit new broods in the pond; there are too many of them and they attack the mother.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.

So that this won’t be a total loss, I invite readers to weigh in on any topic of their choice: ducks, the war, Trump, Nicholas Kristof’s (and his editor’s) response to his column on Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners, the new rules on getting a green card (the Administration has made them much harder to get; you have to apply from overseas), and so on. Anything goes, but be civil, please.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili notices a disparity between the cats’ breakfast and Andrzej’s.

Szaron: He’s eating breakfast.
Hili: And he thinks we’ve already eaten enough.

In Polish:

Szaron: On je śniadanie.
Hili: I sądzi, że myśmy się już najedli

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Dutch Jewish mother and her son were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. He was five years old. https://t.co/6RKhE3rLgu

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 23, 2026

It’s a long story but I got all eight and rescued one yesterday that went to rehab.  Mom and eight are in the pond. I need a name for the hen.

They came out of nowhere. Vashti’s brood is still being incubated. I do not know this mother.

“Chiropractic” (a name that in my mind should really be “chiropracty”) is a form of treatment for various disorders in which the cure supposedly comes from mechanical manipulation of the body, especially the spine. It is considered “alternative medicine,” and, as Wikipedia says, is of dubious efficacy for everything:

Many chiropractors (often known informally as chiros), especially those in the field’s early history, have proposed that mechanical disorders affect general health, and that regular manipulation of the spine (spinal adjustment) improves general health. A chiropractor may have a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degree and be referred to as “doctor” but is not a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.). While many chiropractors view themselves as primary care providers, chiropractic clinical training does not meet the requirements for that designation. A small but significant number of chiropractors spread vaccine misinformation, promote unproven dietary supplements, or administer full-spine x-rays.

There is no compelling evidence that either primary or maintenance chiropractic adjustment is effective for any symptoms or diseases, including low back pain. A 2011 critical evaluation of 45 systematic reviews concluded that the data included in the study “fail[ed] to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition.” Conclusions about cost-effectiveness are limited by low-quality studies, uncertainty about efficacy, and insufficient evidence.

There is not sufficient data to establish the safety of chiropractic manipulations. It is frequently associated with mild to moderate adverse effects, with serious or fatal complications in rare cases. There is controversy regarding the degree of risk of vertebral artery dissection, which can lead to stroke and death, from cervical manipulation.Several deaths have been associated with this technique  and it has been suggested that the relationship is causative, a claim which is disputed by many chiropractors.

Here’s the meta-analysis article referenced by Wikipedia, click to access:

Part of the paper’s abstract:

Results Forty-five systematic reviews were included relating to the following conditions: low back pain (n=7), headache (n=6), neck pain (n=4), asthma (n=4), musculoskeletal conditions (n=3), any non-musculoskeletal conditions (n=2), fibromyalgia (n=2), infant colic (n=2), any medical problem (n=1), any paediatric conditions (n=1), carpal tunnel syndrome (n=1), cervicogenic dizziness (n=1), dysmenorrhoea (n=1), gastrointestinal problems (n=1), hypertension (n=1), idiopathic scoliosis (n=1), lateral epicondylitis (n=1), lower extremity conditions (n=1), pregnancy and related conditions (n=1), psychological outcome (n=1), shoulder pain (n=1), upper extremity conditions (n=1) and whiplash injury (n=1). Positive or, for multiple SR, unanimously positive conclusions were drawn for psychological outcomes (n=1) and whiplash (n=1).

Conclusion Collectively these data fail to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition

Based on the reports of fatalities associated with this procedure (see here for one study of 26 deaths from arterial dissection associated with neck manipulation), I would avoid this therapy: as the paper says, “The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit.”

A new article in the NYT, however, while warning people of using chiropractic for most things, says that it can be useful in alleviating lower back pain.  Click below to read it and you may find it archived here (I can’t access it). We thus have a contradiction between the paper and the analysis above.

 

From the article:

While chiropractors often refer to themselves as doctors, their degree is different from medical doctors.

To practice in the United States, chiropractors typically attend a four-year program where they take courses in basic science and lifestyle and nutrition counseling. They also learn how to perform manual adjustments, which involve putting pressure onto the joints and creating a deep stretch in the tiny muscles that connect the spine’s vertebrae, said William Lauretti, a professor of integrated chiropractic therapies at Northeast College of Health Sciences and a spokesman for the American Chiropractic Association.

(The popping sound heard during this adjustment is a result of gas being released from the fluid that surrounds your joints. While satisfying, Mr. Lauretti said the sound is not the goal of the adjustment.)

After training, chiropractors must pass a national board exam to be eligible for state licensure.

What chiropractors can and can’t do depends on where they practice. For example, in Oregon chiropractors are legally allowed to deliver babies (though they do so rarely) and perform very minor surgery, like stitches and removing skin tags. New York, which has stricter laws for chiropractors, requires them to focus to spinal conditions.

Many insurers will cover many services offered by chiropractors, including adjustments, nutrition counseling and X-rays. Medicare coverage is more stringent, often only covering adjustments, though chiropractors are lobbying Congress to change this.

The paper does say that they’re of some use for lower back pain, in contrast to the Wikipedia article, but I would still consult a genuine M.D. for any pain. As for neck pain, I myself would stay far away:

Chiropractors advertise their services for a wide range of conditions: back pain, arthritis, diabetes, asthma and ear infections. But what the research says chiropractors are effective at treating is doesn’t necessarily match up.

There’s robust evidence that shows chiropractic adjustments can be mildly to moderately effective at managing lower back pain, said Christine Goertz, a professor of musculoskeletal research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and a licensed chiropractor. An analysis of 47 randomized controlled trials — often considered the gold standard of scientific evidence — determined that manual manipulation was equally effective as treatments like acupuncture or massage therapy.

The article referenced above is from the British Medical Journal, and you can find it here. Back to the NYT:

And the risks of side effects are low compared to some other common interventions, like anti-inflammatory medications and corticosteroid injections. Fractures or other serious complications from spinal manipulation are possible but rare, occurring in roughly 1 per 2 million manipulations, according to one study.

For that reason, spinal manipulation is often recommended as a first line of treatment for low back pain, including in guidelines from the World Health Organization and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It is at least as good as, or maybe a little bit better than, other care options for low back pain,” Dr. Goertz said. (Though, as skeptics note, treatments for lower back pain are not very effective in general.)

There is less evidence supporting the use of chiropractic treatment for neck pain. A review of six studies found that chiropractic adjustments did improve acute neck pain. However, the researchers noted that more research was needed to draw any firm conclusion, since many of the studies had only a small number of participants and other limitations.

Some doctors advise against manipulating the neck because of the potential risk of arterial dissection, in which vessels that supply blood to the brain are torn. This can lead to stroke or death. Some analyses have suggested an association between neck adjustments and this injury, but it’s not clear there is a causal link.

I don’t know of a causal link between the spine’s position and stuff like diabetes and ear infections, so I would never go to a chiropractor for anything. But I’m sure some readers have, and perhaps they’ve been helped, though there’s no blind test with individual readers’ cases. If you have experience with chiropractic, describe it below. Note: I am not touting this therapy; use your own judgement. As I said, I will never use it myself.

The article ends with a section on what you should look for if you’re shopping for chiropractors, but I’ll let you read that yourself.

Here’s an entire BBC concert by Joni Mitchell, filmed in September, 1970. I’ve always thought that BBC concerts were the best, as they will always live and without accompaniment.  This one is 48 minutes long, and she had long career after this with some great albums (“Blue,” “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark”).

I have nothing to add to this music save to say that I think she’s the greatest combination of singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of our time, and like most boys my age (I was 21), I was hopelessly in love with her. James Taylor, who also had a BBC concert that same year, rivals her on the male side for the trio of talents, but Joni has the overall edge.

Oh, and some of my favorite songs here are “Chelsea Morning” (at the start), “My Old Man” (16:47), “Woodstock” (25:10), “All I Want” (31:00, on the dulcimer), “All I Want” (31:45), “California” (36:45), and of course “Both Sides Now” (44:25)

Can you imagine being in the audience and hearing these songs for the first time?

The first comment is ineffably poignant:

@chaulahopefisher4064

2 years ago

I am at the end of my life, 68 years old and in hospice…dying with leukemia. I remember owning my first JONI MITCHELL album with clouds and Michael from mountains, Nathan la frenier, etc…. it changed my life and initiated my music career. I have lived lifetimes since then and changed careers several times. Now, resting on my couch, I listen to this old concert and remember how I felt when I was 13 years old and just hearing these songs for the very first time. at the time she was the older wiser woman whom I wanted to emulate…. now, watching this, she is dewy youth and I the rusk, ready to blow away on the wind with a song in my heart

Today’s strip is an oldie called “idea”, and came with the following note from the author:

There’s an old strip up at J&M, page

It’s Draw Mohammed Day, and I’m away, so here’s an oldie from 2013. Remember: “There is no god, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Help J&M to keep going by becoming a patron of Jesus & Mo:

or buy a book: – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here.

Peace and blessings,

Author J&M

Give the author a few bucks a month or so if you like the strip! Meanwhile, here’s “Idea”.

“Shahada pants,” also called “harem pants“, are baggy trousers once worn by Muslim women, and then became popular for women in the 20th century (these are also M. C. Hammer’s baggy trousers). It’s not clear why Mo is wearing what looks like a Speedo, unless he is going to don shahada pants:

Pratyaydipta Rudra is back with part 2 of his duck photo series (part 1 is here), which of course features DUCKS. Pratyay’s IDs and comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Here is the second part of the series of photos that I took while spending time with a group of breeding Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa).

A couple of males doing their things:

A duckling floating by:

Mother showing kiddo how to search for food on/under the floating logs:

The duckling tries some on its ownL

A few more ducklings join in:

Like mother like baby. Part 1: The sweet call!:

 Like mother like baby. Part 2: The wing flaps!:

A couple of ducklings resting on the rock:

There were four in total. I think at this time they were aware of me taking photos and got slightly alert:

Duckling swimming in…

 Checking the “mirror”? Not an ugly duckling for sure:

Father was close by floating on the reflective water of the pond:

If you’re getting weary of the endless but necessary attacks on Nicholas Kristof for his misleading and almost antisemitic column about Israel’s “policy” of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners, Roy K. Altman has written in the Free Press the definitive critique of Kristof’s column—that is, until investigations by Israel reveal more information.

Wikipedia identifies Altman as “a Venezuelan-American lawyer and jurist who serves as a United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida” and also identifies him as Jewish.

You can read Altman’s column by clicking below—if you subscribe to the Free Press.

The “miscarriage of journalism” is, overall, the promulgation of “fake news” by Kristof: accusations that are improperly vetted (if at all), which come from questionable sources, and which are contradicted by existing Israeli policy and behavior. Altman’s thesis is that this kind of journalism subverts the “marketplace of opinions” that, it’s been said, is necessary for the American public to judge what is true. Excerpts from Altman and others are indented; prose that is flush left is mine:

. . . we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

Today, this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false information—especially on the internet. But it’s one thing to have our geopolitical and ideological enemies—whether China, Russia, or the Muslim Brotherhood—pushing unverified claims about our closest allies into our cell phones. It’s another thing entirely for The New York Times, a supposed “paper of record,” and one of its Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to offer a story that—in its disregard of basic evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing side’s position, and its inversion of common sense—violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.

In his explosive essay, Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of “standard operating procedure.” Kristof’s claim is thus not merely that a few rogue Israeli prison guards sometimes behave illegally—as happens in all Western democracies, including our own. It is, instead, that the Israeli government has implemented a systemic policy of deploying sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners on a massive scale.

Altman also faults the timing of the column, which came out the evening before the Civil Commission’s issued its 298-page report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that the Commission offered this report to the paper but the paper wasn’t interested.  The paper denies this, so for the time being we have a “he said/she said” situation. Regardless, Altman avers that the “psychological doctrine of primacy” argues that “a fact finder is often most persuaded by the story he hears first”, implying that Kristof, regardless of the deficiencies of his piece, should at least have held off publishing it until the Civil Commission’s report came out.  We won’t go further into this issue, as Altman finds three major faults with the column:

On the merits, Kristof’s article violates three central precepts of our legal system: It disregards basic rules of evidence gathering; it refuses to investigate the opposing side’s views; and it ignores logic and common sense.

Within this list of three there are buried two other sub-lists, which makes the piece a bit confusing. But Altman’s claims and his accusations of Kristof are pretty clear.  I’ll number the main claims as 1, 2, and 3, with sub-lists given letters as well as numbers.

1.) The column is unfair by making uncheckable claims.  

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.

Here we have four sub-points that expand on this claim:

Kristof justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major problems with this excuse.

1a. There is no evidence of retribution against prisoners who claimed to be sexually assaulted, and some claims changed over time:

Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems with al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he was treated badly,but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing.

. . . But the point here is that, far from suffering any retribution for complaining about his detention, al-Sai was later freed, and Kristof never suggests that he’s since been subject to any form of punishment.

1b. Israel has in place an often-used system for registering and adjudicating prisoner’s complains about mistreatment

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. . . 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.

1c. Kristof’s insistence on anonymity makes his allegations uncheckable. 

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.

1d. The accused has a right to the details of accusations, which gives them a chance to defend themselves. “The accused” here include onot just IDF soldiers and prison officials, but Israel itself, which is threatening to sue the paper.

Four, we should acknowledge that it’s always hard for victims of sexual assault to advance their claims publicly. But any system committed to basic fairness recognizes that the accuser’s preference for anonymity must bend to the accused’s right to confront the claims against him. And that’s not just because we want to allow the accused to test the reliability of the accuser’s claims. It’s also because we presume that the mere act of declaring something publicly itself evinces some degree of credibility.

Kristof fails to mention, for example, that Euro-Med, one of his principal sources, is  an organization with known ties to Hamas and has made false claims about Israel before, including the blood libel that Israel harvests organs of prisoners.

On to the second major point:

********

2.) Kristof failed to investigate “the opposing side’s position”, including systemic aspects of Israeli law that would make widespread abuse improbable.  Again Altman breaks this down into a sublist of three items:

2a. Kristof doesn’t mention Israeli laws prohibiting sexual abuse of prisoners. 

First, in advancing his claim that Israel permits or encourages sexual abuse of detainees as a matter of state policy, Kristof fails even to mention that sexual offenses are strictly prohibited under Israel’s penal code. Indeed, the Israeli legal system imposes enhanced penalties when sexual offenses, including by security personnel, are motivated by race, skin color, or national origin. And Israeli military forces are bound by a host of additional directives, which further protect prisoners from state-sponsored violence, including sexual violence.

Altman implies that Kristof was trying to hide this fact.  Well, yes, probably, but shouldn’t we know that this conduct is against the law? What’s worse is that Kristof also fails to mention that similar Palestinian prisoners’ allegations of abuse have led to serious prison sentences for over a dozen Israeli abusers.

2b. Kristof fails to mention that there’s a special unit of Israeli police designed to investigate claims of prison misconduct. 

Kristof likewise fails to disclose that there’s an elite unit in Israel’s police force, called Lahav 433, tasked with investigating misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service. Now, it’s entirely possible that Israel created this unit inside what’s known as the “Israeli FBI” and filled it with elite servicemembers who do nothing but sit in an office all day, twiddling their thumbs and happily allowing misconduct to go unchecked. The far more plausible inference, I submit, is that Israel didn’t create this elite investigative unit simply to do nothing. But the point is that we don’t know—and cannot know—the answers to any of these questions from Kristof’s “opinion” piece because he never bothered to mention this unit, never thought to interview its members, and never investigated the extent to which it actually enforces Israeli law.

Well, the existence of such a unit doesn’t prove that there wasn’t misconduct, but it does show that there were quite a few deterrents to misconduct.

2c.  A quote from a former Prime Minister of Israel was presented, but a later clarification of that quote by the PM was ignored. Perhaps worse than the two omissions above is Kristof’s shoddy (indeed, slimy) treatment of a comment by a former Israeli Prime Minister. Here’s what Kristof said.

To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.

Of all people to ask! Olmert had been convicted of corruption and bribery as Israel’s finance minister and served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence. Kristof doesn’t mention this, and Kristof might have added, post facto, this clarification by Olmert:

Olmert clarified, in a statement to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, that “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”

Surely this should have been an addendum to Kristof’s piece. It wasn’t, The NYT hasn’t responded directly to this clarification save to say that Olmert’s statement was tape-recorded and presented accurately “in context”. But when when Olmert later denied that he was not validating claims of sexual abuse, that was no deemed worthy of a mention or correction by the NYT.

********

3.) The “dog rape” claims is pure blood libel, in line with previous anti-Israel claims. (And there’s no evidence for it. Indeed, many have deemed the “trained dog rape scenario” to be impossible (I’m not ruling it out with complete certainty, and it will surely need investigating. But I do find it stupid.)

Which brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts: his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab, laughed at the absurdity of the claim.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards, ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?

Altman’s claims add up to a serious indictment of Kristof’s column, which, though presented as an op-ed piece, could easily have run as a news piece, but the paper was apparently too lazy to check its claims. To me, the most serious accusations are twofold: the failure of Kristof to document the accusations so they could be checked, even making the complainers anonymous; and also Kristof’s failure to mention the anti-Israel jostpru of some of the individuals and organizations (especially Euro-Med) making the claims.  It is a one-sided column, even for Kristof, who in the past hasn’t done due diligence in checking claims.

The more I think about this, the more I think Kristof should be fired, as the op-ed is a serious lapse in standards, even for an op-ed. If op-ed editor James Bennet could be fired (as he was) for allowing Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that the military might be used to quell post-George Floyd riots, surely Kristof should also be forced to resign. After all, Cotton was just giving an opinion that didn’t rest on facts, while Kristof made many allegations that he didn’t bother to either qualify or investigate.

But of course Kristof is a golden boy for the NYT, and the his column buttresses the NYT’s well known stance against Israel. The NYT is standing behind his column (it has no public editor), and don’t expect it to fact-check his claims. That will be up to Israel.

This is the last full batch of photos I have save a few singletons and doubletons. But I ain’t too proud to beg. . .

Today we have some lovely photos by Ephraim Heller on, of all things, herring. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) spend most of the year dispersed across the open North Pacific, but each spring they converge on Sitka Sound to spawn. The 2026 spawning biomass was estimated at roughly 233,000 tons of mature herring. This attracts commercial fishermen, fishing birds, Steller sea lions, gray whales, humpback whales, and. . . me. My last post featured humpback whales.

Today’s post features the mayhem taking place off the coast of Sitka on the opening day of commercial herring season. The fishing boats employ purse netting, a form of seine netting, in which a school of fish are surrounded by a net which is pulled tight around them. As the net closes and the herring are forced to the surface, a buffet is created for glaucous-winged gulls (Larus glaucescens) and bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus).

A commercial fishing boat hauling in a seine net filled with Pacific herring:

The herring are forced to the surface by the seine:

Glaucous-winged gulls at the buffet:

It was impressive to watch the gulls catch a herring, quickly reposition the squirming fish in their bills, and swallow them in flight in a matter of seconds:

Such speed seems necessary because kleptoparasites abound:

Now for the bald eagles:

Air traffic control is kept busy:

Right now I’m reading Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book: A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women. It is neither a pure blank-slate social-constructivist book nor a hereditarian, genetic-deterministic book, but takes an evidence-based middle ground, asking to what extent behaviors and mindset are molded by evolution and to what extent social conditioning plays a role.  I won’t give a take on the book as I’m not yet finished, but it does make many arguments I’m familiar with.  One of these is the familiar and well-documented claim that, based on different degrees of parental investment, men concentrate more than women on beauty when looking for a mate, while women are less interested in appearance than are men but more interested in paternal behavior, status, and wealth of a prospective mate. These are not absolute differences, of course: many men want women who will invest a lot in their offspring (we are, after all, generally monogamous), and many women want men who are pleasing to the eye. This is a difference in average preferences, not absolute ones characterizing all individuals.

Although some of this average sex difference in behavior may reflect social conditioning, its evolutionary background is likely based in part on the differential investment between the sexes in offspring: although many societies are polyandrous and monogamous, on average males still have a potentially larger number of offspring than do females. This appears to be true in many societies, as well as in our closest relatives, the apes and in most species of animals. Women, who by virtue of their reproduction (as well as by both the evolutionary and social impetus to do most of the childcare) need fathers who will do their share of parental duties and provide for the offspring.  And of course men do share some of those duties, but are also more interested in casual sex and adultery—a way to spread more of their genes when they don’t invest as much in offspring.

If you want the evidence for this, read Stewart-Williams’s book or the references he cites.

Why am I pondering this? Because when I went to the library the other day, I caught a glimpse of myself in the entry door and thought, “Geez, look at that ugly old man!”  Whatever attractive physical features I once had—and I was never close to being a Robert Redford—have vanished, carried away by time’s wingéd chariot.  Women, too, worry about ageing, and are even more concerned about it because of a key difference between men and women: as women get older and become unable to reproduce, they become less desirable faster than do men.  A man can have offspring even in his eighties, while in their early fifties most women hit menopause, which means no more kids. Since men have largely evolved to be physically attracted to women who can give them children, women try harder than do men to retain the signs of youth: hair color, plastic surgery, botox, and the like. On average, they try harder to retain physical attractiveness because it is that rather than status that is a dominant way of attracting partners—and most people want a partner.

Which brings up a tangential point: what about gay men and women?  I don’t know their preferences but it would be interesting to study (and I’m sure people have) whether men attracted to other men for lasting partnerships are less concerned with looks than are women attracted to other women for partnerships.

Back to the point, which is this. It is my theory, which is mine (and likely many other people’s) that there is really no objective difference in physical attractiveness with age, in either men or women.  Old men and women look different from their younger selves (I now refrain from looking in mirrors), but the beauty associated with youth and the loss in attractiveness associated with age are not anything objective (beauty never is, of course).  We are simply evolved to think that those features associated with having more offspring on us are more “beautiful”, as those mindsets are the ones promoted by natural selection. This explains why women are more concerned with the physical ravages of time then are men, for their physical attractiveness to the other sex wanes faster with time. I’ve often heard older actresses say that by the time they hit forty, Hollywood no longer wants them, while that doesn’t happen so much with male actors.  Why is this difference retained past the age of reproduction in women? I suppose it’s because it’s largely innate and most women didn’t live past menopause during most of our evolution.

Thus beauty is in the eye of the beholder: it is subjective, like all standards of beauty, but the subjectivity is molded in certain directions by natural selection.

I am not, of course, saying that this is good—only that much of it is natural. I do not want to commit the naturalistic fallacy here, but simply consider what aspects of our minds and behaviors might be based on genes, to what extent, and whether those evolutionary bits have been molded by natural selection.

This parallels a point I’ve made before: other aspects of our senses, like tastes, are clearly molded by natural selection.  I have said, for example, that to a vulture rotten meat tastes as good as an ice-cream sundae does to us.  Animals have evolved to search for food that tastes good because, over time, our senses evolve to find the food we need to grow and reproduce to be tasty. In other words, natural selextion has molded our taste buds and our brains so we prefer what is nutritious and fosters reproduction.  This can be hijacked: we now eat too many fats and sweets because those substances were desirable to our ancestors as they were rare but promoted reproduction.  Now they no longer do so because of the surfeit of “bad” food on tap.  But our taste buds haven’t yet caught up to our health.

Why do feces and vomit repel us, smelling foul? It’s very likely that these substances were evolutionarily associated with the spread of disease, and so we evolved smell-detectors that find them repugnant. After all, dung beetles love the odor of feces!

I’ll draw one more parallel here. Anybody who thinks about it seriously must admit that male orgasms, intricate and immensely pleasurable physiological mechanisms associated with ejaculation, have evolved as a way of promoting reproduction (the evolutionary basis of female orgasms is more speculative, but there is no shortage of adaptive hypotheses).  Orgasms are a way of getting men to produce offspring, just as sweetness is a way of getting us to eat sugar. And, like eating too many sweets, orgasms can be hijacked—severed from their reproductive function by condoms, chemicals, or medication. Organizations like the Catholic Church have tried mightily to try to reconnect sex and reproduction, but it is largely in vain.

I have undoubtedly written this too fast, as I just had some thoughts and wanted to get them down on paper before I forget them. I’ve considered that I’m trying to dispel my idea that I’m unattractive, and in so doing thought about physical attraction in general. And yes, I’m also reading Stewart-Williams’s book, which considers in detail this and other aspects of human (and animal) mentation and behavior.

Once you get an evolutionary mindset, all sorts of behaviors now become more interesting. That doesn’t mean we should make up adaptive stories and consider those stories to be true, but neither should we ignore possible evolutionary explanations. To explain the evolutionary basis of human behaviors and minds will be hard, as most of them evolved in the unrecoverable distant past—in our ancestors.  But some of the explanations are testable, and here I must stop.

I did one of my favorite shopping expeditions today, stocking up on groceries in Chinatown. A giant supermarket opened there in the last couple of years, and it has everything one would want for Chinese food, including the hoisin sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Botan Calrose short-grained rice that I favor.  But there are many, many aisles of things that aren’t even labeled in English, and tons of goodies like the first two shown below. I love wandering the aisles (usually I’m the only white guy there, and certainly the only Jew), so it takes me much longer to shop than I usually do.  They also have Chinese pastries, including various buns and cakes that are perfect for a weekend breakfast.  Also congee and crullers.

About the title above: no, this, it isn’t food for cats, but cat-shaped food for humans, plus a “veggie cat” nail salon downstairs.  The Chinese do love their cats, and it shows in the many products emblazoned with moggies.  The “good luck cat”  (maneki-neko in Japanese), raising its hand to wish you prosperity, is ubiquitous, and is on this first group of cat pastries:

I have a reclining maneki-neko in my office that is solar powered, so it waves its paw when the sun is out.  No good luck on overcast days!

I’d never seen this one before: cat-shaped butter-and-cheese cookies in a great package. Now I’m sorry I didn’t buy them:

And this was downstairs, but closed on Sunday. What on earth is a “veggie cat,” and what does it have to do with fingernails?

Bill Maher continues his defense of Israel on the country’s birthday by pointing out the pervasive Israel-dissing of the mainstream media, adding that there is one thing that the American Left and Right agree on: Israel is the “monster country of all time” (he includes the NYT in this category). He also calls out Democrats, professors, influencers and young people for hating on the Jewish state.  Some of the quotes Maher gives will curl the soles of your shoes.  As he says, “Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable, now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy; it’s the new Che Guevara tee shirt.”

The guests on view are Dan Jones, a historian and author of Castles: A Fortified History, and David French, New York Times columnist and co-host of the podcast Advisory Opinions. I wonder what French thought of Maher’s slap at the NYT at 1:44.

This is more serious and less funny than his usual bits, but it’s a good one.

British physicist and science popularizer Phil Halper emailed me about two new surveys he and others had conducted with 1675 physicists, asking their views about fundamental questions in the field.  This is not, of course, a guide to the truth, but simply a snapshot of where physicists stand on things like quantum gravity, black holes, and the Big Bang.  The links to the surveys are in the text below, sent by Phil. I’ll highlight a few of their stands on interesting (to me) issues. Phil’s words are indented:

My co-authors and I just released the largest survey of physicists ever done. In conjunction with the American Physical Society we got more than 1600 replies to our Big Mysteries Survey.

What’s relevant for debates between believers and non believers is that we only got a large consensus on one topic and that is the Big Bang should be understood only as a theory that says the universe evolved from a hot dense state that says nothing at all about a beginning of time . Interestingly, we got 68% in both this large survey of a broad cross section of physicists and for a smaller scale survey we did of leading physicists in Copenhagen with the Niels Bohr Institute. This seriously undermines William Lane Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument which is defended by claiming that physicists agree that the Big Bang has shown that the universe had a beginning, we now have strong empirical evidence that physicists think no such thing.

On the fine tuning argument the most popular answer  was that constants are brute facts that need no explanation. This was found in both of our survey and in the Phil papers survey of philosophers.

You can see the results here

And the Copenhagen Survey is here.

JAC: The Copenhagen Survey involved views of 151 physicists attending a conference on black holes in 2024.

And there is a video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani discussing the results here. [JAC: I’ve put the video below.]

You might also enjoy the recent debate I did on science, cosmology and faith with Stephen Meyer here.

I haven’t yet watched the videos, but I did look at the big survey; you can access the pdf for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, a bit of methodology from the paper:

In the summer of 2024, a survey was conducted at the Black Hole Inside Out Conference in Copenhagen to assess physicists’ views on a range of ongoing controversies [1]. Eighty-five scientists responded. One year later, the authors collaborated with the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine on a substantially larger follow-up survey, which polled 1,675 participants from the magazine’s readership and the members of the American Physical Society. The Physics Magazine survey therefore provides a broader view of attitudes within the physics community and allows comparisons with the more focused conference-based Copenhagen sample.

Taken together, the two surveys make it possible to compare views expressed in a specialist conference setting with those expressed by a much larger and more heterogeneous respondent pool. On some topics, the results are remarkably similar; on others, the differences are substantial. This paper presents the Big Mysteries Survey results, offers commentary on their interpretation, and highlights points of agreement and divergence relative to the Copenhagen survey

Here are a few bar charts from the paper. First, what the Big Bang implies (Sean Carroll explains this at the beginning of the video below).  A big majority of physicists think that the Big Bang says nothing about whether it marked the ‘beginning of time”:

Of course tyros like me have no idea why the Big Bang doesn’t imply the beginning of time, but so be it: all of this is above my pay grade but I’m happy to see where physicists stand on these issues now.

What about cosmic inflation? A bit more than half of physicists think that cosmic inflation (the expanding universe) explains “an unexpected uniformity” of the universe.

Dark matter: does it explain anomalies in the rate of rotation of galaxies? No consensus:

Also no consensus on whether dark energy explains the accelerating expansion of the Universe:

There’s no consensus on why the universe’s physical constants appear to be “fine-tuned” for the existence of worlds that can produce life. (This is a favorite theological argument for God.) The “brute facts” explanation brings a stop to searching for explanations, but only 26% of physicists hold it.  20%—and I think this includes Carroll—think it’s explained by a multiverse.

There are more graphs, but I’ll show just one more. What kind of picture of the Universe is provided by quantum mechanics? The Copenhagen explanatoin, which people like me can’t reconcile with physical reality, is the favored explanation. I believe it was Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t. I’m still baffled by the issue of quantum entanglement, and don’t even understand the experiments buttressing it.

And here’s the video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani.  Carroll, as usual, gives some very succinct and lucid explanations. The other physicists are good as well.

Have a look at the paper for more opinions, including about what black holes mean and what they do.

Send in your wildlife photos! I am almost out. Thank you in advance.

Today we have miscellaneous photos from the Catskills taken by reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Here is another batch of pictures from my hikes in the Central Catskills this April and May. They are not too artistic, given the fast pace that a weekend backpacking hike demands, but they give a sample of what common animals a casual hiker can see in these “mountains” (the Catskills are an eroded plateau and, despite being steep in places, they are too low to have an alpine zone).

White‑tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), right in the parking lot at a cloudy sunrise. It was slurping water from a muddy puddle despite a clear stream flowing nearby, so it must have been leftover salt that attracted this ungulate. Woodstock residents like their roads well salted. One has to drive carefully at dusk around Woodstock, as there are many deer browsing on lawns and gardens.

In the woodland, I found the first of many red efts of the Eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens). This is an intermediate land stage of development between the aquatic larva and adult forms. Red efts have lungs, but air exchange through the skin is also important, supplying 30–40% of their oxygen demand. They travel through the forest litter when it is humid enough—after rain or in the early morning:

This is probably a blue‑headed vireo (Vireo solitarius), collecting nesting materials. If my identification is correct, then it is not possible to tell a male from a female, as they are sexually monomorphic and share rearing duties almost equally. Interestingly, however, a female may desert the nest just before fledging to mate with another available male:

Possibly an Eastern comma (Polygonia comma), found at higher elevation:

Black‑and‑white warbler (Mniotilta varia). I think this is a male. If so, he may be led by a female into the territory of another male to provoke a fight and allow her to judge his fitness. These birds occupy a similar niche to nuthatches and brown creepers; they climb and circle tree trunks to find arthropods:

Eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), male. These colorful sparrows hang around the edges of forest clearings:

Eastern American toad (Anaxyrus americanus americanus), hiding in a ramps patch. I wonder whether they would prey on red efts or if the efts’ foul taste would be a deterrent:

While passing through oak woods rich with acorns, I heard many alarm chirps from Eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus). Most made themselves scarce as I approached, but one remained on guard duty:

Not a good picture, but here is a dark‑eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). These are hardy birds, staying year‑round in the forest. In winter they form close‑knit flocks with a few dominant individuals and a strict pecking order:

Chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina) on the side of a quiet road. These migrate to more southern states in winter and in summer nest closer to human settlements:

Mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa). There were a couple of them in the area, continuously jousting in the air for control of the territory. I see them every spring in that exact spot, but this year they were too engaged in battling each other to stay still, so this is a picture taken a few years back:

Brown creeper (Certhia americana), shown here just a moment after eating a couple of mayflies. They are common enough, but I rarely see them due to their near‑perfect camouflage. Without directly comparing the bill length it is difficult to tell a female from a male:

Raising Hare was published by Pantheon books in 2024; it’s a relatively new and short book (2024; 284 pages) by Chloe Dalton, who worked for the UK government as a foreign-policy advisor. But her regular work receded in importance when she came across a baby female European hare—a leveret—huddled in the bush in her country residence.  Her decision to take in the orphaned baby changed her life and character in many ways, all recounted in this wonderful memoir which has won many prizes.  I recommend it very highly.

The book is not mawkish at all, but observant and thoughtful. Most of it is devoted to her perceptions of the hare (which she never names), an animal that she lets run free indoors and out, though it usually spends most of its time in her house. The narrative lasts three years, during which the hare has six leverets of her own. Dalton becomes engrossed with its behavior and studies the literature on hares extensively in addition to her own constant observations.  All this results in the reader becoming deeply educated about an animal that few see—except running away at a distance.

It turns out that hares are not only playful, but extraordinarily patient, sitting in one spot for hours. (The leverets are largely left alone after birth, huddled inconspicuously in the vegetation save for a brief daily period when the mother suckles them.) The adults, too, spend a lot of their time flattened in places where predators are less likely to attack them. After all, hares have been called “nature’s buffet,” for they are herbivores but are attacked by all manner of carnivores.

Dalton spends a fair amount of time in introspection, wondering what it’s like to be a hare (a question never answered) and seeing how she herself has been changed by the constant presence of a wild animal. (I have to say that I’ve gone through something similar with ducks.) At any rate, the writing is first-rate, the natural history is thorough, and this is one of the best human-and-biology books I’ve ever read.

Two friends who have good taste in books recommended Raising Hare, and I didn’t look up any reviews before I read it. Now I will, so I’ve just read the NYT review here.  An excerpt:

Despite less-than-encouraging words from a local conservationist about the leveret’s chances of survival, Dalton committed. For anyone who has hand-fed an unweaned animal in the hopes of saving its life, her anecdote about desperately eye-droppering lamb formula into the leveret’s mouth on their first night together will spark an instant flashback.

As she found out, the internet is full of information about rabbits (the hare’s smaller domesticated cousin), but there’s not much on hares themselves. She dug deep into the research, even consulting the 18th-century poetry of William Cowper for clues on which solids to feed the leveret, and reports, “Porridge oats were the final revelation. When I sprinkled a few oats in a bowl, it swallowed them with every appearance of satisfaction.”

Dalton did not name, tame or cage the animal, turning her house into a free-range hare bed-and-breakfast. Its behavior began to change her own: “I was moved by the leveret’s dignity, the sense of well-being and calm it spread, and the simplicity of its life.”

Adapting her own work-driven existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate, she had an epiphany: “I’d been waiting for life to go back to normal, but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?” The irony of learning to slow down from an animal known for its speed is not lost here.

. . . To divulge much more of the book’s arc would rob the reader of its most revealing moments, especially as the hare matures and her priorities shift. But Dalton’s clear, measured prose and Denise Nestor’s delicate drawings provide a gentle cottagecore vibe and a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state. In “Raising Hare,” nature, indeed, takes its course.

The review is, in my view, far less enthusiastic than the book deserves, so here’s a bit from the Guardian review:

The cover and endpapers of Chloe Dalton’s debut, Raising Hare (beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor) at first seem to resemble these children’s books: there are no rabbits, but hares, doing what hares do: inspecting berries, leaping, boxing, feeding young and gazing outward, apparently, towards the reader. The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy. Unlike my daughter’s books, this is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes.

That’s more like it. Here’s the cover, and you can click on it to access the Amazon review.

The NYT gives a photo of Dalton’s hare attributed to Dalton, so I don’t think I’m violating any journalistic rules to show those photos. Isn’t she beautiful?

(From the NYT): The hare at the heart of Chloe Dalton’s memoir.Credit…Chloe Dalton

Here’s an 18½-minute video of Dalton reading from the book and discussing its contents, including the changes the hare wrought in Dalton herself.

By now the whole world–at least the world that reads the news–knows about Nicholas Kristof’s long NYT op-ed column accusing Israel of systemic, institutional sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. For those who already hate Israel, his unsubstantiated allegations will serve only to reinforce their hatred and antisemitism. For those who are open-minded or sympathetic to Israel, well, they do have to admit that the allegations are unsubstantiated.  But, as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Kristof is no dummy, and surely he knew that his claims would be snapped up by Israel haters and antisemites.

That is a good reason for Kristof to have verified all his sources and ensure that they had no history of bias (or at least the bias should have been made explicit)—something he did not do. This is in contrast to the Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse during its invasion of Israel. The Commission has verification of all of its sources, including forensic evidence like photographs and bodies.

As most of Kristof’s critics have said, it is impossible to affirm that there was never any abuse of Palestinians by the IDF.  But if you make an accusation that the abuse was both widespread and systemic, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Unfortunately, the NYT sees no need for that. relying on Kristof’s two Pulitzer Prizes and his claim that he interviewed witnesses brought forth by groups or people who can hardly be said to be unbiased.  But yes, his claims should be investigated, but he would have to help the investigators by providing identities and documentation. I wouldn’t hold my breath until he does that.

In the meantime, it’s not hard to find criticisms online. I’ll just link to five new ones, showing an excerpt from each. I haven’t found people approving of Kristof’s claims, but then again I don’t read the kind of site that would do that. And those sites would have to independently try to verify Kristof’s claims, which nobody has done.

Amit Segal at It’s Noon in Israel: “Anatomy of a blood libel.“

In [Kristof’s] piece, published curiously as an op-ed rather than a news investigation, Kristof accuses the State of Israel, its prison system, the IDF, and the Shin Bet of systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners—primarily men, but also women. These are serious accusations, and it is certainly possible, if not inevitable, that abuse, even sexual, occurs within the prison system, as it does in almost every prison system worldwide. Whenever there is real evidence of such acts, it must be properly investigated and the guilty punished. However, for accusations to be taken seriously, they must be backed by actual evidence. In this regard, Kristof’s column is an absolute failure.

The column falls short of almost any journalistic standard, according to [Hebrew University professor Danny] Orbach. He points out that the reporter relies on only 14 unverified and uncorroborated testimonies, lacking details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system. For comparison, in 2020, approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents. Of Kristof’s witnesses, only two identify themselves by name or provide details that could help locate the case. One of them, Sami al-Sai, is presented by Kristof as a “journalist.” In reality, he is a Hamas propagandist who cheered the mass murders of October 7—hardly a reliable source. At the very least, Kristof owed his readers a disclosure regarding who this man is. Prominent journalists have already pointed out that the two identified witnesses provided Kristof with “reheated noodles”—versions that changed and became “more sophisticated” over time, adding new gruesome details every time they spoke to a different reporter.

If it ended there, one could dismiss Kristof’s article as merely a negligent op-ed, but Orbach stresses that from here, things deteriorate. He explains that a large portion of the anonymous testimonies come from Euro-Med Monitor, which Kristof presents as a “human rights monitor.” In reality, this is a Hamas front organization whose chairman, Ramy Abdu, cheered October 7 and spread debunked lies and conspiracy theories—such as massacres at Shifa Hospital, organ harvesting, or the claim that humanitarian aid contained only burial shrouds—claims not taken seriously even by most anti-Israel journalists during the war. Unsurprisingly, Kristof mentions nothing to his readers about this organization’s reputation. Furthermore, another “source” Kristof cited in a video interview as a “man in the know” is actually an Israeli Hamas supporter and delusional conspiracist who was dismissed from the university where he worked due to sexual offenses. A “man in the know,” indeed.

The interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s “fixer”? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through “human rights organizations,” which Orbach suggests points to a pre-planned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk. In the Palestinian arena, there is a documented pattern of witness coaching and bias, a phenomenon rarely caught but exposed during the “Jenin Massacre” libel that never was in 2002.

. . . . So, what do we have here? A “respected war correspondent,” winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, accusing a state of systematic rape based on 14 testimonies—12 of them anonymous, two public but highly problematic—with zero disclosure regarding the witnesses or the biases of the organizations providing the information. Unlike the Civil Commission’s report on October 7, Orbach emphasizes that Kristof made no real attempt to cross-reference the testimonies, used no forensic evidence, and did not attempt to interview Israelis who served in prisons or civilian doctors. The only senior Israeli he did interview, Ehud Olmert, apparently never said what was attributed to him.

This is not Kristof’s first time. In the early 2000s, Kristof championed a Cambodian anti-prostitution activist, calling her a “hero” in column after column. When it turned out she was a fraud who staged the scenes that brought her fame, Kristof admitted the mistake and the paper apologized. His current column shows that his tendency to believe anyone who seems “just” to him, without critical source analysis, remains intact. He has learned nothing, Orbach concludes.

Douglas Murray at The New York Post: “Why would the NY Times make such horrific claims about Israel. The reasons are several-fold.”

Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.

As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.

In a piece which has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.

. . . So here we get to the true question. Why would anyone make such a claim? And why would a purportedly serious newspaper publish it?

The reasons are several-fold. The first is that the New York Times story landed just a day before an anticipated report into Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023.

Many of us did not need further evidence of the crimes of that day. But the release of the commission of inquiry sets out in remorseless detail the “systematic, widespread” use of rape by Hamas on that day and the way in which sexual violence was “integral” to their attack.

It lays out the calculated way in which Hamas terrorists raped men and women on the day of the attack and raped Israeli hostages — men and women — while they were held in captivity in Gaza.

The findings include descriptions from footage, first-hand, eyewitness accounts and from mortuary photographs of the way in which Hamas members gang-raped women while killing them, and even raped their victims after killing them. It is impossible to think of crimes worse than those which Hamas committed on that day.

Unless you are Nicholas Kristof.

Because if you know that a report is coming out into Hamas’ use of sexual violence then it is clearly very important to invent a claim even more appalling than the real-life crimes of Hamas.

For the New York Times, it seems to have been crucial to throw a lie into the system in order to overwhelm or block any sympathy or understanding that might go in the direction of the Israelis.

The New York Times has leveled claims of antisemitism against a number of people in the past year. Sometimes accurately, sometimes not. But none of the worst things that Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes have ever said even comes close to the lie the New York Times has printed in its own pages. A paper that claims to be opposed to conspiracy theories has just mainstreamed the most disgusting conspiracy theory imaginable.

And just consider the effects of this.

The effect is to portray the soldiers and prison guards of the Jewish state as uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting and uniquely inhuman.

What wouldn´t someone do to express their disgust at such people? If Jews are the sort of people who can even turn dogs into rapists why shouldn’t a mob assemble outside the synagogues of New York? Why wouldn’t masked “activists” demonstrate their outrage by hounding Jewish children on the streets of this city? After all, the people they are going up against are uniquely evil. Right?

Matti Friedman and Dan Senor at the Free Press (a conversation): “How the ‘New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy.”

 

DS: You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sources are used, how the editorial decision-making works, and what the checks are on a reporter. Walk me through how a piece like this gets through.

MF: I was a correspondent for the AP from 2006 to 2011, and one thing that often isn’t clear to readers is the role NGOs play in creating the reporting readers actually see. The press corps is much weaker than it used to be—smaller staff, less experienced reporters, poor pay—and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle are much greater.

Into the vacuum created by that change come political NGOs, who have a lot of money and an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. When I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as smaller ones operating around this conflict, were mostly funded by European governments and progressive foundations. They became, essentially, the source of information for reporters. Human Rights Watch, for example, would come out with a report, and the AP would write it up as news.

When I read Kristof’s article, I saw this machinery right away. Kristof was handed a package by NGOs. He mentions Euro-Med [Human Rights Monitor], which has proven ties to Hamas and has openly claimed that Israel is using weapons to “vaporize” Palestinians and that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euro-Med is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. Kristof also mentions an anti-Israel activist named Sari Bashi, who is based in Ramallah. So local activists handed him the story, introduced him to his sources, and fed him the inflammatory, unverifiable material.

Senor also says this:

When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees.

. . . we have to be able to look at our prison system and our military and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard, and we’re clearly failing. Terrible things are happening, as they are in the carceral systems in New York, or in Iraq. I wish Israel could say that we’re better than everyone else. I’m not sure that we can say that. We need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.

Yuki Zeman at Quillette: “Nicholas Kristof and the pornography of accusation.”

. . . Allegations involving sexual violation by animals do not enter political discourse as neutral facts. They belong to an old repertoire of dehumanising horror. They turn the accused into something beyond cruel: a corrupter of species, a handler of filth, a director of bestial desecration, and a violator of the most basic taboos around moral and sexual hygiene. Is the claim true, false, exaggerated, mistranslated, or planted? Kristof does not know nearly enough to employ the claim in the way that he does. He treats it as a detail within a larger moral picture. A responsible and competent editor would have stopped reading right there and demanded to know what, exactly, has been established.

. . .None of this excuses abuse. The Sde Teiman case, involving alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli reservists, deserved investigation so that truth could be separated from rumour and accusation. Where Israeli guards, soldiers, interrogators, or settlers have committed acts of sexual violence, they should be exposed, investigated, tried, and punished. Any attempt by Israeli politicians or mobs to shield abusers deserves condemnation. A society at war must still guard its own standards.

But it must also guard the truth. Taking rape and abuse seriously does not require us to accept propaganda dressed up as sexual horror. Nor does it require us to pretend that anonymous testimony, activist reports, and humanitarian vocabulary automatically produce truth. The harder task is to investigate abuse without surrendering judgment. A serious press should be able to do this. It should also be able to honour Israeli victims without handing their suffering to those who spent months demeaning it.

A columnist like Nicholas Kristof may even believe he is writing in defence of Palestinian victims. But when his essay relies on the same information ecology that sought to excuse, minimise, and invert the atrocities of 7 October, it risks becoming something else: a mouthpiece for those who defended the events of that day, or who needed its victims to disappear beneath a more useful accusation. This is what divides moral inquiry from propaganda.

Sherwin Pomerantz at the Times of Israel: “Nicholas Kristof’s illogical overreaching anti-Israel rant in the NYT.“

there does appear to be some level of sexual violence that goes on in Israeli prisons and, similar to the rest of the world, often the perpetrators are not held accountable. The fact that this goes on in prisons worldwide does not, of course, make it acceptable practice and Israel has taken a strong policy position against such activity.

But Kristof often relies on sources that themselves have been found to be unreliable. In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts in his op-ed came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”

For example, one of Kristof’s sources, Sami al-Sai, had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”

HonestReporting also noted that, about a year ago, Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, and did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood, and broken teeth” in his skin.

It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who told Kristof in 2024 that he had been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post that he had been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he had been assaulted.

None of this, of course, excuses illegal activity of prison guards or, here in Israel, members of the IDF. Nor does it give a pass to a government that drops the charges against the accused, as it did in the Sde Teman case, simply because of community pressure.

This kind of activity is certainly not in keeping with the values of a county such as ours, which promises in its Declaration of Independence: The State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations.”

. . . Finally, Kristof engages in illogical overreach when he states: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

Truth be told, the $3.8 billion of annual US military aid to Israel is used to purchase armaments from US defense manufacturers and, of course, has nothing to do with the prison system or its faults. A weapon used by an IDF soldier in Gaza cannot be linked to prison abuses. Actually, it is the weapons used against us on October 7th and afterwards, paid for by the Iranians and Qataris, that are more logically linked to the alleged abuses in Kristof’s piece.

The commonality of these stories is that they admit the possibility of sexual abuse of prisoners, but argue that, given the fact that interrogations are recorded and photographed, and Israel’s history of prosecuting those who violate its law, the likelihood of widespread and systemic abuse known to the authorities is low. The articles argue that Kristof’s sources are biased and that some of their stories have changed over the years. And they say that the dog-rape story is not credible.

What should happen now? Well, Israel should conduct an investigation of the allegations.  And so should the NYT, making Kristof reveal his sources and check them itself.  The former will happen; the latter won’t.

If anybody else had done this rather than Kristof, they would be fired by the NYT. Remember that editorial-page editor James Bennet was forced to resign in 2020 after a social-media outcry following the publication of an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Cotton’s argument, that U.S. troops might be used to quell riots following the death of George Floyd, was at least worthy of discussion, but the editor who approved it became the victim of “progressive” ire.

Kristof won’t be fired, though his careless accusations were far worse than the argument made by Cotton.  But at least some of the shine is off Kristof’s Pulitzers, and the sentient world now knows him to be a crappy journalist, willing to tar an entire country on the basis of unverified claims.

The caption for this week’s Jesus and Mo, called “Hide,” is “In light of the Tickle v Giggle verdict in Australia, a Friday flashback to J&M’s first terfy strip from 2016.”

If you’re not familiar with Tickle v Giggle, click on the Wikipedia link above. Here’s the summary:

Tickle v Giggle is an Australian federal legal case regarding the legality of the membership policies used on Giggle, a social media app for women. Giggle excluded trans women in their membership policy, and withdrew membership from Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from New South Wales, on that basis. In 2022, Tickle brought the case against Giggle, and in August 2024, the court found that Tickle had been indirectly discriminated against under Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, and ordered Giggle to pay costs of the case and damages. That finding was appealed both by Tickle and by Giggle’s CEO, Sall Grover, with hearings on those appeals held in the Federal Court of Australia (NSW Registry) from August 4 to August 6 2025. The appeal judgment was delivered on 15 May 2026 at 2 pm AEST.  The court upheld the original judgment, dismissing Grover’s appeal and allowing Tickle’s cross-appeal, with the court finding two instances of direct discrimination against Tickle and awarding damages of $20,000, double the award at first instance.  Grover has said she will appeal to the High Court of Australia.

x

There have been a ton of articles criticizing Nicholas Kristof’s poorly sourced and dubious NYT column accusing Israel of widespread sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (yes, with dogs, too)—most of the critiques noting that Kristof’s sources were unnamed, undocumented, and those that were named had histories of being pro-Hamas.  You can easily find these critiques on social media, but Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, levels a different accusation: not so much at Kristof but at the New York Times itself.

He notes something I overlooked: the paper used to have a “public editor” whose job was to call attention to errors and misreporting in the paper, but the NYT ditched that position nine years ago. Now there is no public editor: their job has been sourced to—get this—social media and readers.  The rationale is that social media itself, combined with reader reaction, will correct errors.  But that’s completely bogus. Yes, readers and social media may point out errors, as they have in this case, but thety also can reinforce them. As you know, social media is a dumpster fire and there’s no guarantee that a clash of ideas and assertions will surely out the truth.

Beyond that, it is the responsibility of the paper itself to correct errors, apologizing for them and admitting guilt. The NYT won’t do that, for it’s pushed back on the criticism of Kristof’s delusions, defending them by asserting—get this again—that he won two Pulitzer Prizes. With two nods like that, how can he be wrong? Here’s all the NYT has said:

pic.twitter.com/wXROg0OIwE

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) May 13, 2026

In larger print; you can judge for yourself how extensive the “fact-checking” was, given that there was no public editor to describe it:

The deep-sixing of a public editor is almost an admission that a paper has no interest in correcting itself. You can see from the Times‘s doubling down in this latest case that the NYT is standing behind assertions of systemic sexual torture in the Israeli government, as well as in using trained dogs to rape prisoners.  The fact that Kristof’s factual claims were made in an op-ed does not excuse the paper.

Click below to read:

Some quotes:

In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.

In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.

This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.

That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.

Yesterday I wrote about the sources:

The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.

I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.

Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

This was what happened when there was a public reporter and Kristof got his tuchas smacked:

Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.

In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.

His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.

This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.

The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.

There are other examples, but the point is that no such internal mechanism of correction exists. Instead, we get a defense, which Mazzig summarizes:

. . . The defense

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.

Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.

It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.

In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.

Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.

Mazzig hastens to add that he’s not saying Kristof is an antisemite or the NYT decided to hurt Jews. Nor is he claiming that Israel has never mistreated a prisoner, nor attacked one with dogs (I’d ask for evidence for both such claims, though). What he’s saying is this:

I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.

And he winds up going after the paper again:

The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.

What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.

That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.

We know that the Times staff is full of young progressives—people who helped push out Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil, Jr., and James Bennet. They are sensitive to social media and public opinion, and the combination of progressive staff and social media is toxic.

The paper needs to correct Kristof’s column, for it’s clear he will not do so himself.

A new Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, released Tuesday [The organization is Israeli, but some of the “principal contributors” were not], includes a 298-page pdf called “Silenced no more: the untold atrocities of October 7 and against hostages in captivity.” It includes description after description of horrific sexual violence enacted against the attendees at the Nova Festival, as well as on Israelis living near the border, and is hard to read. (You can see the Daily Mail summary here).  The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli investigative body, and investigated reports of assaults over a period two years

Nearly simultaneously with the report’s release—some say this is no coincidence—Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed for the NYT called  “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians“, with the subtitle, “Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators”. (His article is archived here.)  It is very long (it took up eight pages of 10-point type in Word when I printed it out) but is filed under “op-ed” rather than “news” or “news analysis”, though it is more a news piece than anything else. Kristof very briefly mentions his own views, but if his data were sound, I think the Times should have run some of his allegations as a separate news piece, for those allegations are startling.

But that’s no reason to dismiss Kristof’s claims. The sources need to be checked and verified, and any allegations that turn out to be true should be punished by Israel, as they have been before. (Of course Hamas doesn’t punish sexual brutality against Israelis, but in fact encourages it.)

Kristof says that Israel has been guilty of systematic sexual abuse against Palestinian men, women, and children, abuse that was known to but ignored by both Israeli and American officials. He also mentions a Euro-Med report on the same subject, which is linked in the comments below.

The question, then, is are Kristof’s allegations true? The Israelis at least had and photographed the bodies of victims for corroboration, but Kristof bases his evidence on hearsay, and he sought out the victims by asking around (something he later ignores when drawing conclusions). And there is no shortage of criticisms of his report, which I’ll link to below; many question the accuracy of the sources and/or accuse Kristof of being credulous. But first, read Kristof’s allegations. A summary:

. . . . in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

. . . It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Some examples of abuse (Kristof himself found 14). :

The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.

One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.

. . . Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.

For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.

. . . “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

If those photos still exist, they can be used as evidence.Some of the most shocking claims involve dog rape:

. . . .Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.” Kristof has defended his allegations of dog rape on X, but the articles he cites appear to be examples of bestiality involving people using dogs for sexual satisfaction.  Here are some screenshots:

And according to Kristof, Palestinian children were not spared, either:

Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

There are claims that the sexual violence was systematic:

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”

Why Kristof finds the allegations credible:

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.

Note, though, that he said earlier, “I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves.” Thus they didn’t really seek him out to tell their stories, but were volunteered by organizations or individuals who knew of allegations.  These claims can’t both be true.

Sexual violence is especially horrible as humans, especially women, have evolved to choose with whom they mate, and forcible rape is a form of not only traumatizing physical violence, but also an odious abrogation of mate choice. And of course for men, who are embarrassed to admit they were sodomized, it can be equally humiliating.  The abrogation of choice in this manner is to me one way of understanding why sexual violence is considered more horrific than other types of physical violence.

At the end, Kristof gives his take, but it’s short compared to his recounting of the incidents:

Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”

Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?

Although I’ve been generally sympathetic to Israel (as opposed to Hamas), I can’t simply dismiss Kristof’s report as made up.  Any Israeli committing sexual violence on others needs to be punished to the full extent of the law. I expect Israel will investigate Kristof’s claims, though that will be hard as many sources are anonymous or unwilling to go public.

In contrast, other news venues have sharply criticized Kristof’s report: Here are some links, though I can’t quote from all the articles:

The Israeli government responds in theTimes of Israel c

The Free Press

The National Review

The Hollywood Reporter (by Hen Mazzig)

A video by Haviv Rettig Gur

NGO Monitor

The Jerusalem Post

aish

And

the NYT stands by its report/

I’ll quote two: Eli Lake in the Free Press and the National Review article. First, though, a tweet sent me by Maarten Boudry.

To address the stories from Chile and maybe others about “dog rape:” the “Gaza journalist” cited and trusted by Kristof made a highly specific claim of mounting and anal penetration only by verbal command. That has never been before documented. (Crazy that I have to write this). pic.twitter.com/mkEppIY0sh

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) May 13, 2026

If rape by trained dogs isn’t credible, what does that say about Kristof’s other claims? Did he not investigate the biology of his dog-rapist claims? There’s more below in Eli Lake’s piece:

And now quotes from Lake’s Free Press piece:

But Kristof engineered his piece to lend the scandalous claims more credibility than they deserve. He purported to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and sought his reaction. “Do I believe it happens? Definitely,” Kristof recorded Olmert as saying. “There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”

Yet Olmert later said that Kristof misrepresented their conversation. In a statement sent to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, Olmert said: “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

The story of trained rape dogs does not hold up. Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible.

“When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

Kristof claimed on X on Tuesday that “at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs.” He did not provide links to those studies. There is one historical claim of a dog trained to rape prisoners. A German shepherd named Volodia was allegedly trained to rape female prisoners during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile at the Venda Sexy torture facility. This was reported by a Chilean truth-and-reconciliation commission based on the testimony of victims. These reports, however, do not account for how Volodia became erect in the absence of female dogs in heat.

Lake alleges that some of Kristof’s sources are connected to Hamas, but he does mention the credible story I mentioned above about the sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner. Unfortunately, the victim returned to Gaza and the IDF dropped the charges.

More:

Another problem with the report is that Kristof cites the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which amplified the dog rape claims in April. The Switzerland-based organization purports to be a neutral human rights group, but it has a history of spreading libel against Israel, such as a November 2023 report that raised “concerns” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was harvesting the organs of Palestinian corpses.

In 2013, Israel designated Euro-Med’s founder and current chairman Ramy Abdu as a Hamas operative in Europe. On the day after the October 7 massacre, Abdu posted on X: “In this battle, Palestine offered the elite of its youth and men on the path of freedom and dignity. Succeeding generations will remember you, and history will immortalize you as knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud. Preserve their names well, and teach the tales of their immortal valor to your children and grandchildren.”

. . .Was Kristof’s “journalist source” an example of a militant using a press affiliation as cover to advance his side in an information war?

To be sure, Kristof does include interviews with named victims who claim to have experienced sexual torture, which has been documented in Israel and many prisons throughout the world. Israel was rocked last year by the scandal of an alleged sexual torture at a detention facility known as Sde Teiman. Grainy and inconclusive video emerged in 2024 that appeared to show guards abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me that he thinks the allegations that guards sexually abused a prisoner at Sde Teiman were credible. The problem, according to Conricus, is that the victim and witness to this abuse was allowed to return to Gaza, after which the IDF dropped the charges against the guards.

. . .“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Conricus said. “So many terrorists infiltrated Israel on that day, there were too many to process, and reservists without the right training were called up to be prison guards.”

Conricus, however, said there was no evidence that sexual abuse was a systemic practice in Israeli jails as Euro-Med and Kristof claim. “There is no comparison to be made between terrorists who invaded a country, who raped, killed, and mutilated people, and the heavy-handed treatment by some Israeli guards against Palestinian terrorists who have been caught,” he said.

That is a vital distinction. Israel faces an enemy that filmed its atrocities on October 7 and celebrated the barbarism as an act of resistance. Now that same enemy is trying to persuade the world that Israel is no different than Hamas. Woe to any journalist credulous enough to believe them.

Finally, from the National Review‘s article by Brittany Bernstein: “Kristof’s extraordinary claims about Israeli rape require extraordinary evidence. The Times doesn’t have it.”

But media watchdogs have now raised questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.

.. . . Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.

. . .Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.

While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report last month containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.

And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould tells National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”

“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”

. . .Kristof, in his piece, further writes that, “Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

But questions remain about the stories told by the few named sources in Kristof’s article.

Sami al-Sai, whom Kristof describes as a “freelance journalist,” says he was arrested because Israeli authorities hoped to pressure him into becoming an informant. “Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused” to become an informant, Kristof reports.

However, al-Sai had previously been jailed in 2016 for incitement, the same charge he faced under his 2024 arrest. The charge is a criminal offense related to the publishing of material intended to encourage, support, or provoke violence or terrorism.

And al-Sai’s social media offers blatant evidence of his celebration of terrorism [Examples are given.]

. . .Kristof says it was another source, Issa Amro, who first sparked his interest in reporting on alleged sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners. He says Amro, “a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’” told him that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.

But Amro initially said in February 2024, according to the Washington Post, that he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention on October 7, 2023 — not that he was actually assaulted.

However, Kristof’s column describes Amro as a victim of sexual assault.

And the Israeli response (so far) as given in Bernstein’s article:

. . .Israel’s prison service told the Times it “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse.

And the Israeli Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the statement from the foreign ministry adds.

“Israel – whose citizens were the victims of the most horrific sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, and whose hostages were later subjected to further sexual abuse – is portrayed as the guilty party,” the statement concludes. “This publication is no coincidence. It is part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist.”

The ministry further accused the Times of purposefully timing the release of Kristof’s column to pull attention away from the findings of Israel’s Civil Commission to investigate Hamas’s systemic violence during, and since, the October 7 attack. The ministry said the commission approached the paper “months ago” about the planned release of the 300-page report, and that the Times “was not interested” in reporting it.

The report was released on Tuesday morning, one day after Kristof’s column was published. It found Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted, and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023, terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering.”

I don’t know if the timed publication of Kristof’s “J’accuse” column and the Civil Commission report were coincidental or planned, and I don’t much care. What happened are claims about reality, and should be verified, as far as they can, with evidence. And witnesses should be credible and not have given contradictory statements.  These are early days, and no doubt Kristof’s allegations will be investigated. For now, just read the allegations and the responses, and weigh in below if you have any thoughts.

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called lead, says in one email that it’s new and in another that it’s old.  Well, I haven’t seen it, and the accompanying note says this:

A comparison that has been made before and is hard to ignore.

And consider subscribing or buying a book:

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Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here:

And the strip, in which Mo is pretty close to having an epiphany:

A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here).  Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.

Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk.  They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)

John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”

As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”

As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:

Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind

And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!

And it’s great watching Beato blow off steam.

My favorite: