Lowell Cohn wrote on Substack:
Then there’s the issue of dogs penetrating prisoners in the anus. Kristof’s sources say this routinely happens, but according to testimony from experts I read this is highly unlikely when you account for the physiology of dogs and people.
I grew up reading the New York Times. In my family it was the Bible, the writing, the reporting, the intelligence. When I left the SF Chronicle for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the PD was owned by the Times, and the Times treated me beautifully. They sent a big-deal editor to Santa Rosa to welcome me to the family, and when I covered a story in New York, the Times put me up at a private club and gave me a desk in the Times building. So, I used to love the Times…
Earlier in this piece I wrote the Times has crummy columnists. And how. Consider Michelle Goldberg and Thomas Friedman. Well, Goldberg, because of her atrocious prose style and limited ability to think, is irrelevant. But Friedman is a serious writer. Except that when it comes to the Iran War, he said he’s “torn.” What did he mean by torn?
He said he wants Iran defeated but he doesn’t want two people he disapproves of, Trump and Netanyahu, to be strengthened. Friedman is freaking torn? There’s no torn. Iran can’t have a nuclear bomb or continue to louse up Israel and the Middle East no matter who accomplishes that. I consider Thomas Friedman a sellout Jew.
First, the facts. The report Cohn treats as an “official Israeli report” was not the government’s. A group calling itself the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas released it on May 12, one day after Kristof’s column ran on May 11. Cohn reads Kristof as timing his piece to preempt and weaken an official report. Public suspicion from Israel critics such as Mondoweiss runs the other way, that pro-Israel strategists held the second report in reserve once they learned Kristof’s was coming, then released it to drown him out. Cohn picks the reading that flatters his side. The “official” label does real work in his paragraph, and it is wrong.
Second, his sourcing critique is his strongest move. The American Jewish Committee said the column read as an investigative report while falling short of that standard. Kristof ran it in the opinion section, not as news, and built it on interviews with people who mostly would not be named. That is a fair thing to press on. But Cohn presses it in a way that cuts his own hand. Anonymity for men and women alleging sexual assault, and for Palestinian detainees who fear reprisal, is standard practice. And the column did name some witnesses. Kristof identified Issa Amro, Sami al-Sai, Suhaib Abualkebash, and Mohammad Matar among the fourteen. Cohn’s “12 of them were anonymous” leaves that out. His own counter-sourcing is worse than what he attacks: “experts I read” on dog physiology, named nowhere.
Third, he never touches Kristof’s ask. Kristof proposed Red Cross and lawyer visits to the roughly 9,000 Palestinian security prisoners and argued that if the allegations are false, such monitoring would protect Israel. That is the falsifiable core of the column, and a critic who wanted to win on the merits would meet it. Cohn argues with the framing and the timing and leaves the proposal standing.
The piece is a breakup letter. The best writing in it is about his father’s house and the Times as the family Bible, the editor sent up to Santa Rosa, the desk in the building. He is grieving a tie to his childhood and dressing the grief as an argument about journalistic standards. The grief is real and the standards talk is mostly a vehicle for it.
Where the piece turns is the close. Netanyahu and his foreign minister called the column among the most distorted lies ever published against Israel and threatened a defamation suit; the Times stood by Kristof and called the threat without merit. Cohn’s move is quieter and uglier than that. He notes that Adolph Ochs (1858-1935) was a Jew, that the family running the paper now “is not Jewish anymore,” and that the current publisher “seems to have what we would have called in Brooklyn a hard-on for Israel.” Then he ends by calling Thomas Friedman (b. 1953) “a sellout Jew.” He spends the column accusing the Times of a tribal vendetta and closes by applying a tribal loyalty test of his own. He becomes the thing he names.
The sentence a hostile reader pulls is the last one. “I consider Thomas Friedman a sellout Jew” defines the piece, and it would define Cohn. Everything reasonable he says about anonymous sourcing dies under that line, because a reader can now file the whole essay as loyalty policing rather than press criticism. The Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975) aside, that she has “limited ability to think,” does smaller damage.
He had a real point and spent his credibility before he could land it.
One thing has surfaced in this story. B’Tselem’s January report documented forced anal penetration with objects and dogs set on prisoners, and one of its witnesses was also a Kristof source, but it did not include the claim that dogs raped prisoners. So a hostile-to-government Israeli rights group, working the same prisons, corroborated the broad pattern of sexual abuse and stopped short of the one claim that drew the blood-libel charge. That isolates the disputed item. The question is no longer whether abuse happened, which several bodies have documented, but whether that specific allegation holds. And that is exactly the claim no current process is set up to test.
The dog claim has been argued against, and by careful people, not just the Foreign Ministry. Eli Kowaz, an American-Israeli analyst formerly at the Israel Policy Forum, published an essay days before Kristof ran calling the dog-rape allegation not credible. A researcher traced the claim’s path to virality through an unsourced tweet by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim and said he could not confirm it true, and a dog-behavior expert was skeptical of the penetration claim while allowing the trained physical behaviors. The claim runs back to Euro-Med, the same group that has also claimed Israel exhumes Palestinians to steal organs, which medical experts call impossible. So the dog claim is not undebunked. It is wounded. What it is not is resolved, because no outsider can prove a negative about a cell with no record.
Otherwise, there is little movement on this story because the initial layout of incentives remains unchanged. Neither side has an interest in altering the current stasis.
The threatened lawsuit from Benjamin Netanyahu and Gideon Sa’ar remains unfiled. A defamation suit in a U.S. court would trigger broad discovery. The New York Times would demand access to internal Israel Prison Service logs, Shin Bet interrogation records, and medical files to establish substantial truth. The Israeli government is unlikely to trade control over those sensitive operational records for a public trial on the merits of prison conditions.
The Times maintains its position. Kathleen Kingsbury and Nicholas Kristof confirmed that the paper completed its standard fact-checking review after the initial backlash and found no basis for a retraction or correction. The specific allegation regarding trained dogs remains the core point of contention, isolated between the broader pattern of physical abuse documented by groups like B’Tselem and the specific, uncorroborated claim that provoked the state’s reaction.
Without an active lawsuit, a new third-party investigation, or an internal data leak, the story lacks a commercial or legal hook to generate fresh reporting. The public statements from May accomplished the immediate political and defensive goals for both camps, and the matter rests there.
A well-funded apparatus has every reason and resource to damage and debunk this column: the embassy, the Foreign Ministry, the Lawfare Project, the AJC, JNS, Quillette, and a stable of online researchers. Ambassador Leiter went on offense within a day, tying Euro-Med Monitor’s leaders to a 2011 photo with Ismail Haniyeh. If the column rested on fabricated testimony, that machine probably finds the smoking gun by now. It has not. The named sources took hits, but nobody has shown Kristof invented a witness. Survival under motivated fire carries information.
The base claim is that sexual abuse and torture in Israeli detention is widespread. That part is not Kristof’s. B’Tselem called the prison system a network of torture camps, Save the Children reported sexual violence against detained Palestinian children, and Euro-Med described systematic abuse. The West Bank Protection Consortium documented at least sixteen cases of sexual crimes by settlers and soldiers, and the Sde Teiman case produced arrests. You cannot debunk this tier because it is documented across bodies that do not share a source.
The Kristof column contains a bundle of claims against Israel and it is built so no single strike destroys it. Wound the dog claim and Kristof falls back on the documented abuse. Discredit Euro-Med and the UN commission and B’Tselem remain. The load-bearing claims are well sourced, and the vulnerable claim is unfalsifiable. A structure like that survives motivated attack whether or not its worst allegation is true. Non-debunkability and truth are not the same thing.
Mondoweiss, CounterPunch, Middle East Eye, the Grayzone, and the Intercept rushed to confirm and amplify, and sixty journalism professors asked the Times to commission an independent review. When both camps are this motivated, the absence of a knockout tells you mainly that there is no neutral arbiter with access to the prisons. The review that might settle it has not happened. That is missing process, not a verdict.
