a scandal erupts at the new york times

a well-circulated report about sexual violence on October 7th has been discredited. what happens next?

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Questions are emerging as a scandal plagues The New York Times over a discredited report on the events of October 7th, and I wanted to offer some thoughts on it.

If you’re not caught up to speed, The New York Times is currently investigating serious claims concerning a report that claimed systemic acts of sexual violence on October 7th. According to a report by The Intercept, one of the people who reported on the story, Anat Schwartz, is not actually a journalist. During a podcast interview produced by Israel’s Channel 12, Schwartz herself revealed that The New York Times insisted that she take on the story despite her lack of knowledge and expertise. “I have no qualifications,” she said on January 3rd. The piece was also reportedly planned to be featured on The Daily before it was pulled because it couldn’t pass a standard fact check. Even more damaging, is the fact that Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse” and that referred to Palestinians as “human animals.” A New York Times spokesperson responded to The Intercept admitting that Schwartz’s actions were “unacceptable violations of our company policy.”

These findings have significant implications given that these tales of mass rape were used to bolster the argument that bombing tens of thousands of women and children was an acceptable response. “The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed” wrote the team of reporters at The Intercept.

Why was the New York Times so eager to report on a story that didn’t pass its own standards of reporting?

While it seems egregious, it’s not the first time the media has precipitously jumped to conclusions to fit this kind of racial narrative. We all remember the "Islamic rape of Europe" cover of the right-wing Polish newsweekly, wSieci or "The Network," that featured a white woman being raped by “Islam.”

While The New York Times is responsible for their alarming oversights, Hollywood also bears responsibility. It has consistently depicted Arab and Muslim men as bearded, dangerous and potential terrorists, and this kind of media diet has impacted the public’s views. Studies show that Americans view Muslims as less human than other demographic groups, and these lies are recycled and repeated by those with power and reach in our media ecosystems.

This perception of men of color as a threat, even shapes our views about foreign policy. One study by Nour Kteily and Emile Bruneau whose findings were published in The Washington Post, found that people who perceive Arab and Muslim men as more dangerous, are more likely to support policies that harm or kill them.

Even more troublingly, we observed that dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims was associated with supporting highly aggressive policies such as drone strikes in the Middle East and torture of Arabs and Muslims. Across our work, dehumanization tends to be associated with aggressive responses even when we statistically account for individuals’ dislike of Arabs and Muslims, suggesting that dehumanization has a unique influence. -The Washington Post

And it’s not just that the press pays more attention to stories that depict Brown men as menacing— it also spends a disproportionate amount of time on stories that cast white women as victims. The Missing White Woman Syndrome has resulted in a preference and near obsession with the security of white women over the safety of women of color. “They’re raping our women” has long been used by racists to feel vindicated in their violence and oppression of Black and Brown men. These racial hoaxes take advantage of racist stereotypes that paint men of color as predators, and views the supposed protection of white women from them, as the state’s priority. These manufactured lied were used to justify mass lynchings of Black men in the 1800s in the United States despite historians finding that most of the rape accusations against them were baseless or used to criminalize their consensual inter-racial relationships.

This historical over-indexing on the threat of Black and Brown men has also lead to the misuse of feminism to reach violent foreign policy goals. Just look at the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, where female liberation was weaponized to validate the lie that bombing women would help liberate women. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” First Lady Laura Bush declared four days after US troops and their allies captured Kabul in 2001. “Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment.” Maintaining the separation of white women from the dangerous savage (a.k.a the non-white man) was also one of the most consistent principles used in colonial empires throughout history to justify their most violent forms of subordination. Notably, In in the 1920s in Papua, New Guinea, an actual law called The White Woman Protection Ordinance sentenced indigenous men to the death penalty for the rape of a European woman.

And yet when it’s women of color who are endangered by white men (as most colonial regimes do), the same kind of enthusiasm to report it seems to fade. It’s worth noting that The New York Times hurried a report on violence against Israeli women, but hasn’t given the same front-page spread to reports about Palestinian women being sexually abused by Israeli military forces. “On the whole, violence and dehumanisation of Palestinian women and children and civilians has been normalised throughout this war,” Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls said. The UN report found reports of Palestinian women and girls in detention being “subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers,” and that “at least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence.” And if the Times is in fact working on a deep investigative report that goes beyond a simple article on it, let’s hope that this one relies on credible sources and reports.

And finally, because they’re so often being depicted as perpetuators, stories about Arab and Muslim men as victims rarely get the same kind of attention from major outlets. For years, the sexual degradation and torture of Palestinian men and boys by the IDF has been well-documented and yet, their stories don’t get the same kind of resources and public concern. “The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) collected thousands of testimonies of Palestinian men allegedly tortured or ill-treated by Israeli authorities,” wrote the clinical psychologist, Daniel J N Weishut in paper published in 2015. “Physical assault in most cases concerned pressing and/or kicking the genitals, while one testimony pertained to simulated rape, and another described an actual rape by means of a blunt object.”

Sexual violence is despicable, no matter who does it, and who it happens to. Violence against Israeli women must be condemned and thoroughly investigated, in all its forms. If sexual abuse was committed during October 7th, those stories should be researched and published with forensic precision by credible sources that the public can trust. And so should the rise in anti-semitism and how it has disparately impacted Jewish women around the world in their vulnerability to gendered violence. That same kind of focus must also be given to sexual abuses against Palestinians, and that includes men and boys. Survivors of sexual violence are so often ostracized and marginalized when they come forward, and journalistic fiascos like what occurred at The New York Times jeopardize the safety of everybody.