New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof triggered a media storm this week. Attention has largely focused on Kristof’s publication timing, questionable sources, and insufficient substantiation of extreme allegations. But it’s also worth identifying Kristof’s audience for this conspiracy-influenced piece.
Kristof wrote for readers interested in equating democratic Israel and barbarous Hamas, especially right before Israel released a 300-page report detailing Hamas’s sexual and gender-based violence since Oct. 7, 2023. These readers welcomed Kristof’s claim that “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children,” as it justifies their anti-Zionism.
Kristof’s target audience accepted his citing of unreliable narrators, biased organizations, and anonymous sources.
ANTISEMITISM IS SURGING AMONG THE YOUNG ON BOTH SIDES
As Honest Reporting’s Rachel O’Donoghue noted in the Wall Street Journal, two arrestees Kristof actually named have changed their stories over time. Kristof also relied on Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor, which “Israel has linked … to Hamas. Euro-Med has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel,” such as asserting Israel evaporated Gazans’ bodies. Kristof’s other trusted sources include the overtly anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council and the Open Society Foundation-funded human rights group B’Tselem.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was quoted as confirming, said he “did not validate” Kristof’s “claims” and that his views were misrepresented. Kristof’s most defamatory claim, originated by Euro-Med, that Israelis taught dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, was deemed “absurd” by a “canine behavior expert” National Review consulted. And yet, this isn’t the first time Israel has been accused of employing animals to harm or spy on their neighbors.
Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a Jewish Institute for National Security of America fellow, previously described “a misanthropic and antisemitic conspiratorial worldview” becoming a feature of the Middle East in the last century. “In this worldview … ’Liberating Palestine’ is not a concrete political issue that has to do with concrete problems but a salvific longing that gives history its meaning and purpose and defines a total conception of the moral, religious, and political good.”
That symbolism should sound familiar to Americans. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Gaza has increasingly defined some Americans’ identities. Conspiratorial beliefs about Israel and Jews have also become more common.
In a recent poll of the Democratic coalition, the Manhattan Institute found approximately one-quarter of respondents “believe that the October 7th attack on Israel was an ‘inside job’ or false flag operation carried out or permitted by the Israeli government as a pretext for the war in Gaza.” Splits by age were striking. “Among those aged 18–29, 24% say that the Holocaust of Jews in Nazi Germany was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe (compared with 3% of those 65+) … and 38% view October 7th as an inside job (compared with 11% of those 65+).”
The Manhattan Institute concluded that younger Democratic voters don’t have a “unified conspiratorial worldview” as much as they trust institutions less. Significant numbers clearly accept conspiracy myths about Jews, though.
That trend extends to the Right. While the Manhattan Institute didn’t ask Republican voters about Oct. 7 conspiracies, it reported that 37% of Republican respondents “believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” That figure jumped to 39% for “women under 50” and 54% for “men under 50.”
These distrustful Americans were an integral part of Kristof’s audience. But they’d be wise to heed Mansour’s words about “the struggle against Zionism” becoming “all-encompassing” and sending “many societies on a spiral of moral and social collapse.”
That’s a pattern Americans should eschew. Societies that scapegoat Israel or its Jewish citizens never solve their own very real problems and only make life worse for everyone.
Melissa Langsam Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is an independent writer in metropolitan Washington.