Nicholas Kristof and the Pornography of Accusation
15th May 2026
Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times essay “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” displays a corruption in the moral language used to denounce Israel. Ostensibly a report on sexual abuse in detention, its actual function is to turn Israel into an object of revulsion: a state reimagined as an agent of rape, humiliation, bodily degradation, and bestial violation. Abuse in prisons and wartime detention obviously ought to be investigated, thoroughly and without prejudice. No state, including Israel, deserves exemption from scrutiny. But Kristof’s column—printed in the opinion section rather than the news section of America’s paper of record—is not content to ask for scrutiny. It gathers anonymous and politically mediated claims and arranges them into a grotesque moral tableau. The obscene result demonstrates how sexual accusation can become a political cudgel.