The New York Times Caught Fabricating Israeli Propaganda, Again

Their "mass rape" story is not holding up

Anat Schwartz

For people who have been paying attention, it’s not news that Israel is one of the most untrustworthy nations on the planet. They lie about damn near everything and have an appetite for censorship befitting a Soviet commissar.

We’ve been over many of the aspects of Israeli influence in America, the illegal information operations among them, but it’s a problem that extends even to the heights of the journalism profession.

The latest scandal to hit the lying New York Times is, as a Twitter user put it, the biggest hoax since Judith Miller.

Miller is, for you Zoomer readers, the Times reporter who helped Dick Cheney and the Bush administration fabricate a pretext for invading Iraq, and while she was more or less never taken seriously as a journalist thereafter, she was rewarded for her trouble by Paul Singer with a sinecure at the Manhattan Institute. Miller was the daughter of a Russian-Jewish casino operator. How about that?

The Times’ foreign coverage, especially of the Middle East, is deeply messed up, and we’re at a breaking point, in which the pace of events threatens to outstrip the institution. In general the problem is the Times trying to maintain an institutional tone consistent with the liberal Zionism that was viable decades ago but is becoming less so today.

It’s more or less clear to impartial observers that this doesn’t really work, and so they’ve resorted to hiring literal IDF intel veterans to do their marquee reporting on 10/7.

It really is their institutional bias toward the Israeli point of view that has caused all sorts of problems for the reportorial side of the Times. One of their biggest embarrassments of recent years was the collapse of the Caliphate podcast.

As I’ve said before, the reason why the ISIS story they told had to be fabricated is the truth would be too embarrassing, for multiple reasons. Chief among them is the fact that ISIS suits the strategic goals of Israel and Saudi Arabia. That is not to say your average Israeli has any sympathy for ISIS itself, but it is to say ISIS’s hostility toward Iran and Syria suits the foreign policy doctrine of, more or less, the GOP and Likud.

Moreover, there is an interesting story about the radicalization of former Baathists in Iraq, many of whom ended up in sympathy with ISIS, that would be deeply embarrassing for the paper, which supported the Iraq War.

Today, one of the official lines of Israeli propaganda has been to compare Hamas to ISIS. The groups are both unsavory, to be sure, but there are not very many commonalities beyond that. It’s one of these fake things the Israelis try to get people to argue about.

One of the reporters recently hired, who was a byline on the marquee 10/7 story about mass rape by Hamas, is Anat Schwartz, pictured above, an IDF intelligence veteran who is a documentarian with no experience reporting, whose first byline was November 15. Gimlet-eyed Twitter spotters pointed out that she had liked tweets in which the plan to create the association between Hamas in ISIS was discussed. She also liked a tweet containing a call to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. … Violate any norm, on the way to victory.” Needless to say, the latitude afforded to her by the suits would never be extended in the other direction.

The killing of innocents, by Hamas or Israel, is of course, wrong and horrific. But many of the initial claims about the Hamas incursion on 10/7 have not been borne out by facts, and appear to be atrocity porn fairly typical of the Israelis. In an embarrassing setback for Commentary magazine, it turns out Hamas did not actually bake a baby in an oven. The “40 beheaded babies” claim also appears to be a hoax.

The mass rape story by the New York Times has been fodder for panels featuring Sheryl Sandberg, who comes from a Likud family. She has appealed in PR videos to our sense of decency, but has yet to comment on the hundreds of thousands of American children subjected to sexual exploitation on the platform she helped to run.

The three bylines on the mass rape story, which has reportedly provoked backlash within the newsroom, are Schwartz, Jeffrey Gettleman, and Adam Sella. Schwartz and Sella are related by marriage. Gettleman got cagey on a panel with Sandberg, saying his job is to document rather than present evidence.

The central alleged rape victim in the story is Gal Abdush, whose own family has repudiated the claim that she was raped by Hamas. There is no forensic evidence cited in the story, and no named victim other than Abdush.

There are three named sources attesting to having seen acts of rape—Raz Cohen, Yura Karol, and Shoam Gueta—and a woman identified as Sapir who is heavily quoted.

Cohen’s account is clearly problematic. He is quoted or interviewed in three places and posted a TikTok on October 9, in which he makes no mention of any sexual assault. He posted a photo from the day it happened, in which he’s lying down making the Aloha gesture:

Starting on October 10, he begins to claim that he witnessed rapes. Later he is interviewed by CNN, takes part in a 10/7 fashion show, and his quote becomes the headline for the NYT story, “screams without words.” Cohen’s background is that he is an Israeli security contractor who had recently returned from training militias in the DRC.

Shoam Gueta is described as a friend of Cohen’s—incidentally putting on Instagram and TikTok his adventures in the homes of Gazans, raiding them on behalf of the IDF—who was hiding with him, but Gueta does not make any claim in the story of actually having witnessed a rape. So Cohen is describing a woman being raped in a circle, and the guy who’s with him didn’t see it.

In follow-up reporting by the Times, they did ask about this discrepancy:

In his very first interviews with the media, Mr. Cohen described the terror of seeing people being massacred around him and hiding for his life. Asked this month why he had not mentioned rape at first, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience, and said in a text message that he had not realized then that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was working to recover from the trauma he suffered.

Sapir, whose full name is not printed, “recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.” She goes on to provide this rather lurid account:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

All that’s missing after playing hacky-sack with the severed breast, is Hamas donning grass skirts, tossing it into a pot, and cooking and eating it.

The final main source for the Times piece is the organization ZAKA, whose founder was accused of being a serial rapist, and they helpfully tell the times that no pictures were taken.

According to The Intercept, an episode of The Daily has been prepared calling into question the reporting on this story, but it has been shelved under pressure from the pro-Israel pressure group CAMERA. The Intercept correctly notes that the Times’ famous resistance to issuing corrections has an exception where Israel is concerned. Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the Times, praised the story at the end of the year as an example of fabulous enterprise reporting. His father was on the board of CAMERA. Other close familial relationships between pro-Israel advocacy and the newsroom are Maggie Haberman’s mother being a lobbyist for Worldwide Likud.

The opinion page has changed a fair bit, Bret Stephens seems to be the only straightforward neocon left, but events continue to get ahead of the paper. Tom Friedman’s column about an emerging “Biden doctrine” published in late January seems to be wishful thinking, and the Democratic Party’s base is already well beyond where he, and perhaps Biden himself, are at.