Once upon a time, there was a riot. Weeks after Yasser Arafat refused what President Clinton called the best offer anyone would ever get at Camp David in the fall of 2000, he directed the beginning of what was initially called the second intifada, but what would become the AL Aksa war. Among some Arab residents of east Jerusalem, that meant dragging Tuvia Hoffman, a young American Jewish student in Israel for a gap year program, from a taxi in Wadi Joz, and proceeding to beat and stab him bloody.

Israeli Druze border policeman Gidon Tzefadi saw what was happening and ran to drive away the mob. Tuvia was on the ground, and when Tzefadi got there he waved his short club in front of him to warn them to stay back. An AP photographer took a now infamous picture in which Grossman was identified as a Palestinian being beaten by an IDF soldier, and that photo, with its false narrative, circulated around the world near-instantly, including on the front page of the New York Times.

Within two days, Tuvia’s outraged father had written to the Times to correct their story. They did so, at first still thoroughly inaccurately, and then again, several days later. But the damage had been done, and even today, more than 25 years later, you can still see that image being used on the propaganda and posters of the hateful mob.

Oh, for the good ole’ days.

Now, not only can liars, libelers, and endangerers of Jewish lives use images or videos inaccurately or from completely different parts of the world to vilify Jews, they can create a photo or video or narrative out of whole cloth at the click of mouse. They can engage in a years-long campaign to make 1,000,000 edits to a few thousand Wikipedia articles about or referencing Israel, Jews, and Zionism, and completely pervert the information landscape that hundreds of millions of people turn to to learn more about the conflict.

And they can open the pages of the New York Times, which has long since abdicated even the reluctant semblance of responsibility or objectivity in its reporting and its corrections. Do you remember the Netanyahu walking the Trump dog editorial cartoon in their ‘International Edition’ in 2019? That was just simple Der Stuermer style editorial art, and it got no more than a sulky ‘the dog ate my homework’ kind of smirking excuse from the Times.

Since 10/7, the paper has gone all in, whether it was the Al Ahli Hospital blood libel in the early days of the war, the ‘starvation’ pictures of congenitally ill children, or any of the dozens, even hundreds of stories that leveraged Hamas claims and numbers and disinformation campaigns without question or concern. The Iranian axis extends far beyond Israel’s borders or even the Middle East, leveraging the eager, slavering animus of the Al Jazeeras and New York Times’ of this world.

It is disgusting, it is evil, and it lands on your doorstep, physical or digital, every single morning.

As you know by now, earlier this week the New York TImes published an opinion piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘journalist’ Nicholas Kristof. In it, using unnamed, unsubstantiated, single source accusations peddled by a Hamas affiliated organization called Euro-Med, run by a man named Ramy Abdu, detained for terrorist activities in 2020. It includes among its supporters Richard Falk, who has been peddling scurrilous and far fetched accusations at Israel in international fora for decades.

So it should come as no surprise at all that in a piece purporting to look at what is described as systemic, state-directed violence and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israel custody since 10/7, these miscreants convinced Kristof that the Israeli authorities had trained dogs to rape and penetrate Palestinian prisoners. Notwithstanding that:

• Expert dog trainers and animal behavior clinicians have advised that such training is impossible
• The accusation came without attribution, evidence, or even minimal substantiation
• Kristof's source, Euro Med has also spread the absurd and impossible libels that Israel is transplanting organs from dead Palestinians, dug out of graves, into living Israelis, and has created a weapon that completely vaporizes Palestinians so there is nothing left to bury or be used as evidence.
• The cowardly editors at the New York Times were so deep in cover-your-ass mode that they decided to put this pile of garbage on the opinion pages, instead of publishing it as an investigative report, where they would be subject to more legal scrutiny
• The blood libel follows a long tradition in the Arab and Muslim world of accusing Israel and the Jews of training and using animals in nefarious or murderous schemes targeting innocents. If that sounds like a straight-up medieval blood libel, that’s because it is.
• These include reports from December 2010, trained murder sharks (Egypt); 2016, spy eagles (Lebanon) 2011, griffon vulture ‘Zionist plot’, Saudi Arabia; 2013, spy kestrel (Turkey); 2012, European Bee-eater intelligence gathering platform (Turkey); 2012 spy vulture (Sudan); , 2015, 2016 and 2022, attack dolphins (Gaza and Iran); 2018 plague rats (Jordan) and, my favourite, 2018 irradiated sabotage chameleons (Iran). This is the company the storied, famous, newspaper-of-record New York Times keeps.

You might think that the worst thing about Kristof’s piece is that it is filled with falsehoods and blood libels. And this might be a useful place to add that there are indeed some troubling reports of violence and abuse in Israeli prisons, more than one or two, and one well’publicized incident, with some disputed substantiation, of sexual abuse. There’s no question that these allegations must continue to be investigated and acted upon by and through Israel’s and the IDF’s robust legal systems, and they need to be addressed with more consistency than the current Minister who handles the police and jail portfolio, Itamar Ben Gvir, wants to give them. But that’s not what makes this story stand out. It is no different, sadly, than the real abuse that takes place in prisons across the world, including here in the United States.

No. Here’s the worst thing about it. The Times was made aware more than 18 months ago of the report being compiled by the Civil Commission on sexual violence on October 7th, delivered this week, utilizing more than 10,000 pieces of evidence, testimony from more than 430 victims, from dozens of captured Hamas and ‘civilian’ Gazans who invaded, raped, tortured and murdered on 10/7, and footage taken by the perpetrators themselves. They knew how substantial and damning, and evidence based this report was, and, having received the same information package on it that all major media organizations got, they knew it was coming out this week. So, to mitigate the damage it would do to their continuing policy of vilifying Israel and Jews, using antisemitic tropes and imagery, publishing inaccurate and simply false information and accusations demonstrated over years and decades, they decided to publish this piece by Kristof, engaging in the inversion of Jewish and Israeli pain and suffering to paint a picture of people and a society who deserved everything that happened to them because they are evil rapists and torturers not only once, but always. Kristof ended his piece by saying “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” He closed the circle, diminishing one to elevate the other in his twisted, lie-filled grievance olympics.

The government of Israel is taking the Times to court, as well it should, but as with previous instances of blood libel and Nazi-infused imagery from the Times, the damage is already done.

People who want to believe and weaponize this, and false narratives like it to legitimize their Jew hatred, will do so. Just two days ago, our own congressman was accosted by an individual associated with another politician, and berated with a slew of antisemitic and anti-Israel tropes as he ate a late dinner. You don’t even have to be Jewish to be targeted like this (though as the ADL reported last week, there were still more than 6,300 antisemitic incidents reported last year across the country).

I could go on, as this is a long-lived saga with no happy ending. But I’ll stop here and say this. The New York Times should grace none of our tables or inboxes. They shouldn’t grace the shelves of our newsstands, and their reporters should be shunned and hounded away from anywhere near Jewish communities where they can perpetuate even more harm. We can look at every legal, economic, social, and persuasive means to limit their admittedly global reach, to diminish their already sullied reputation, and reduce their cash flow. They need to be starved of resources and reputation. Even the pennies of profit your cancellation will achieve is a start.

In the end, Tuvia Hoffman continued his studies, made Aliyah and raised a family in Israel as a proud Jew, where he still lives to this day. Raise up Jewish life, Jewish homes, Jewish resilience. That’s how we win.