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So Nick Kristof published an op ed in the New York Times alleging mass sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. A lot has already been said. I decided to say something else. My first thought when reading it was everyone else's thought. It's horrifying. There are testimonies there of pain, of torture. We know that the Israeli prison service is often notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other. There have been famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know prison systems are susceptible to this problem. Generally, there are 2,000 claims against new York prisons by prisoners who faced abuse there. Abuse of prisoners is not something that's impossible. It's something that's virtually guaranteed in any prison system. And I was expecting to go into this op ed and read about a terrible reckoning with things that actually happened October 7th, by the way, sent thousands of new detainees into the prisons. And in the early months it also drafted into the prison system as guards under trained reservists. Reservists who had seen Hamas videos gleefully documenting their crimes. So I really did expect a hard hitting story of real abuse that Israeli leaders had to take notice of. And then I read it and I came across the first obvious lie, and then the second obvious lie, and then a claim so odd that maybe it was possible, but how exactly? And how would they have kept it quiet? And then another claim like it, and then one source who's a famed Hamas propagandist, laundered as a reliable source, and then another one. If there's no doubt that abuse occurred, and there is no doubt that abuse occurred, why is there so much propaganda, so much obvious propaganda in Christoph's op ed? I'm going to be honest here. I was relieved by the lies. I was. Because it's agony to read about Israeli criminality and the lies. Let me cast doubt on the whole thing. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here. But as I read, not every claim was impossible. And I started to wonder, despite the propaganda, despite the obvious lies, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So I want to try and lay out what we know, or at least what I think I know. There's a campaign that seeks our destruction, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that are terribly wrong. Kristof quotes people who celebrated Oct. 7, who celebrated death, who don't care about sexual crimes if the target is the right target, who want an entire people destroyed and will lie to achieve that goal. He quotes people who are explicit and public about those views. And the timing is extraordinary. The UN Secretary General is considering which countries to put on a blacklist for sexual violence. Kristof seems to be timing his op ed for that to pressure the UN Secretary General on that. And there's now a report coming out in the press, including on CNN and in the British press, that dove into thousands of interviews and Hamas videos. It's a brand new report on mass sexual violence by Hamas and it came out a day after Christophe's op ed. In other words, this is not about revealing sexual criminality, it's about covering for it. We know how the lies made their way into the story. We know where they came from. Dogs being trained to systematically rape prisoners. That's a claim that. We know where it began. We know how fake it is. We know why it's spreading. We know why suddenly everyone's saying it. And even so, that doesn't mean there's no truth at all just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence. They knew that nobody, certainly not self appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristoff, would ever bother checking the providence of the claim. Because they never do. Because why would they? So the claim spreads through a millions strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing, not because anyone understands how it might even be possible, but for the sheer thought thrill of it. And Christoph cites it as a reliable report. There was recently a report by Norwegian ngo, which is also referenced there, the Refugee Council, that claims systemic sexual violence in the west bank by citing 16 cases across three years in a geographic region that contains maybe 3 million Palestinians, half a million Israelis. Sixteen cases in three years. And some of the examples barely clear the bar for harassment. That's the evidence of systemic sexual violence. But the NGO that wrote that report knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. It wouldn't go beyond the headline. And no journalist did. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they. Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza. Mass starvation that was first claimed in the first months of 2024 and then claimed again and again and again by NGOs, by the UN, by everybody. Some were nuanced warnings, some declared that mass starvation had already arrived. The headlines from both of them were basically the same. And then, in absolute thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized. Nobody checked their facts, nobody asked how they had missed it. What went wrong? Billions of Ordinary people around the world who don't follow the day to day too closely are convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation, something that simply never happened. And then they moved on. A letter to the Lancet that claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire. Mostly because nobody actually read or understood what it claimed. And also nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anybody forgets the Lancet, comes the claim by a UN rapporteur of the death of hundreds of thousands of children. I think it was 380,000 infants under five allegedly had died. Were going to die. That's more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Under 5. More were going to die than existed. It's stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists, by protesters. Nobody checks. No costs are ever exacted for the never ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the activist left. To parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. If you notice, an enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent up religious rage. And by complete and utter coincidence, how dare you suggest that on purpose, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate, that enemy of humanity is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, friends, it really is that simple. And also, bear with me, it isn't that simple. All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions again and again and again for weeks and months and years. Marches completely unprecedented in size, regularity and duration in all the history of the west, in all the history of larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering currently underway on this earth combined. Even those caused by their own governments, larger than any movement there had ever been in the past. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever coalesce or will ever coalesce again, unless Israel is involved. The American activist will shout at us, but we fund you. To explain a mind numbing selectivity. Yeah, but one third of the city of Amsterdam marched. Millions of Spaniards and Brazilians and Indonesians. They also fund us. It was unprecedented. It was everywhere. And Nick Kristof has joined the new religion. He's not concerned about abuse. He doesn't care one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ever ask to suss out and distinguish the nuance between what is true and what is a lie. Nobody else gives A shit. He throws it on the page and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. The Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and so fundamental in a culture, in a society, they're so assumed, they're so widespread, that they become hard to see in the same way that fish don't notice the water. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. And throughout the lands of Christendom and Islam, the Jew has returned to his proper place in the social hierarchy, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies are not the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story, a campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering or sexual violence. Nobody ends sexual violence by trying to cover for sexual violence. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of the fantasists. Not by an order of magnitude, not by several orders of magnitude. If it was that much, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without sexual aspects. But still wanton violence. It's hard to come by exact numbers. The army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and an uncompromising hand and real and hard enforcement, it will continue to fester and it will continue to grow. And it must be said, even though we don't feel like saying it right now, but it must be said, neither Ben GVIR nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear about this. For the first time in my own life, I supported death penalty. Nobody who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive. They came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always in its totalizing brutality, forces the if their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children so that there are no more hostages. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred. They can't be reformed. They can't be de radicalized. They say so, and they show it they murder their own on a mass scale to clear a path to murdering ours. So I believe, I believe them. And that's why I believe they have to die. We have to try them, convict them and destroy them. And even I radicalized in this narrow, specific way and putting it all on the table, I say we can't collapse into torture and abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It's participation in Hamas's way of war. Our leaders also don't seem to care about just the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent. The kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the looting incidents in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light. That kind of breakdown in discipline will also reveal itself on the battlefield. So no, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering half wits and no Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so that my family can live. The whole world may turn on them. I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Nick Kristoff, a willing purveyor of propaganda thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would be genocidaires he pretends not to understand, is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what? Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world. Let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny. Let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact checks. Yes, they're lying. We still, for ourselves, because fuck them, must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far, far smaller than they claim, but it's real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it will only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and we watch it grow. And our own Bengvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we're caught in a strange sort of vice, the same vice we find ourselves in with the genocide lie, a vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us. Countless activists too high on their own self regard to see the irony of raging against a genocide while calling for the erasure of a people. All while our own incompetent, venal, self absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer bald egomania. Every time you say Israel's definitely not pursuing ethnic cleansing In Gaza, there's Benvir and Smotridge saying otherwise. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on the evil Jew, doesn't mean there isn't also separately a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? To me, it's simple. We see it. We acknowledge it's happening. We bring our anger and our rage and our sense of betrayal to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown. And then we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the Ayatollah's Bitlr hold damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and the simpering Kristoffs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists trying to clear a path to our death. But we do owe answers to ourselves. Despite the raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction. And yes, despite feckless incompetence like Bengvir, our Minister of Prisons, currently overseeing a vast spike in crime across all parts of Israeli society who claim to lead us. Despite it all, we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self destructive enemies ever imagined us to be. We do not waver. We do not stumble. We soldier on because fuck them all. Thank you for listening.
Host: Haviv Rettig Gur
Date: May 12, 2026
In this episode, Haviv Rettig Gur critically examines Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed which alleges mass sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. Haviv’s central aim is to pull apart the claims, expose what he sees as propaganda, but also to grapple honestly with the reality of abuse and the need for Israelis to confront uncomfortable truths. He juxtaposes media and activist-driven narratives with the realities of Israeli governance, societal pressures, and the importance of internal moral reckoning—even when facing hostile global opinion.
Haviv Rettig Gur’s episode offers a nuanced, emotionally raw, and fiercely critical perspective. He denounces propaganda and the global machinery that, in his view, weaponizes lies against Israel while acknowledging the imperative for Israelis to confront and fix internal failures. The episode is a call to moral clarity: to reject external manipulation while never excusing or covering up the real problems at home.