The New York Times Has a Source Problem
Don’t quote people accused of sexual harassment in a video on that topic.
The New York Times published an op-ed this week accusing Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.
One of the sources is a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos.
The other is an organization whose chairman calls allegations of Hamas raping Jewish women “propaganda.”
I am not making this up.
The piece is by Nicholas Kristof. It frames Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian detainees and Hamas sexual violence against Israelis on October 7 as a moral symmetry. There is a separate conversation to have about that framing. Today I want to talk about who the New York Times decided was credible enough to make that case.
There are two sources that deserve attention.
The first is Shaiel Ben-Ephraim. He is presented as a credible analyst. His tweet is overlaid onto the video, published on the New York Times Instagram, that Kristof narrates.
In 2020, the UCLA Daily Bruin reported that Ben-Ephraim, then a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, left the university after multiple women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment on social media. According to the Bruin’s reporting, accusers said he sent harassing private messages to adults and minors, invited an underage person for drinks after being told her age, and sent unsolicited inappropriate photos to a 17-year-old girl who had listed her age publicly on her profile. Ben-Ephraim told the Bruin he had “engaged in several instances of inappropriate communications with individuals.” UCLA confirmed he was no longer affiliated with the center. A police report was filed.
The New York Times chose this person to lend authority to a piece about sexual violence.
An excerpt from Kristof’s video, showing the Ben-Ephraim quote.
The second source is Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the organization whose report the Times cites and links to as evidence for the piece’s most serious claims. The case against this source is not a single fact, it’s a résumé.
Euro-Med’s chairman, Ramy Abdu, was named by Israel’s Ministry of Defense in 2013 as one of the “main operatives” for institutions Israel considers Hamas fronts in Europe. In November 2020, Israel placed him under an administrative seizure order under its anti-terrorism law.
Abdu is so deeply embedded in Hamas circles that his own sister was married to Mohammed Daoud al-Jamasi, a senior Hamas figure. When both were killed in an Israeli airstrike in March 2025, Abdu mourned al-Jamasi publicly. Not as his brother-in-law. As “our great commander.”
His organization has officially described allegations of Hamas sexual violence on October 7 as a “propaganda tool” used by Israel to “manufacture consent for its full-fledged, live-streamed genocide.” Those are their words. On their website. In a statement attributed to Abdu directly.
The same organization has accused Israel of harvesting organs from dead Palestinians. A revival of the medieval blood libel against Jews.
Euro-Med’s Board Chair is Richard Falk, a former UN Special Rapporteur. Falk endorsed 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy theories accusing the U.S. government of orchestrating the attacks. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly condemned him for it.
Any one of these facts would disqualify a source. The New York Times built its piece on all of them.
And spare me the crocodile tears from the usual suspects.
The same people who spent two years calling the rape victims of October 7 liars, who told us “believe women” had an asterisk when the women were Jewish, who demanded forensic proof for every Israeli testimony and accepted Hamas-aligned sources without question for everything else, are about to share this op-ed with broken hearts and Palestinian flags. They will call it brave. And they will tell you, if you push, that they have always cared about sexual violence.
They never cared about sexual violence. They cared about who they could pin it on.
I am not saying the New York Times knew about any of this. I am asking how they did not know.
A basic search of Ben-Ephraim’s name and UCLA surfaces the Daily Bruin reporting. A basic search of Euro-Med surfaces NGO Monitor’s documentation, Israeli sanctions records, and Abdu’s own public statements. None of this is obscure. It required typing two names into Google.
If the New York Times cannot vet the people and organizations it quotes in a piece on sexual violence, why should we trust its conclusions about the sexual violence?
The accusations against Israeli settlers and security officials deserve serious investigation. I am not dismissing them. Sexual violence is wrong regardless of who commits it and who the victim is. Full stop. Pointing this out is not minimizing Palestinian suffering. It is insisting on accuracy.
But if you are willing to platform a man accused of sexual harassment, and an organization that calls Jewish rape allegations propaganda, to make your case on the same topic, the conversation is over. The bias blinded the editors to facts a cursory review should have caught. The argument ends before it starts.
This is what the New York Times printed.
A piece accusing a country of state-sponsored mass rape. Sourced from a man accused of harassing minors. And an organization that says when Jewish women claim they were raped, it is propaganda.
The women and men who survived sexual violence on October 7 deserve better. The former hostages still recovering from complex trauma deserve better. Palestinian victims of sexual violence deserve better than to have their suffering laundered through sources who treat their own people’s pain as a strategy.
The New York Times will not retract this. It will not apologize. It will publish another one next month, and the editors who waved this one through will still have their jobs. That is not the paper of record. That is the paper of whoever called first.
The Times owes its readers an explanation.
It owes the victims, all of them, better.
And it owes itself a hard look in the mirror at what it has become.
The NY Times has gone full Jew hatred. You will not see a clarification or an apology on this.
Rebranding: The NYTrash.