NY Times’ Top Editor Joe Kahn Says Newsroom May Not Have Done Nicholas Kristof’s Controversial Israel Op-Ed

(Screengrab via Axios/YouTube)

Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, said his newsroom would not have published the newspaper’s controversial opinion column detailing alleged grisly sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities.

Speaking during an interview for the Channels podcast with Peter Kafka on Wednesday, Kahn was asked whether the newsroom would have published columnist Nicholas Kristof’s May opinion essay, ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,‘ in the same form.

The article chronicled alleged sexual abuse experienced by Palestinians at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers, and interrogators — including one case involving a dog trained to rape prisoners.

Kristof’s column drew fierce criticism from Israeli officials and Jewish advocacy groups after publication. Israel’s foreign ministry described it as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel.”

The article also prompted legal threats from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Noting the podcaster’s question as “a little bit of a hypothetical,” Kahn defended Kristof as “a very accomplished New York Times foreign correspondent” with his “own brand,” but underlined that he was “an opinion columnist.”

“That piece was edited by our opinion section — it wasn’t edited by our newsroom. So it’s distinct, but it’s not a categorical difference,” he said.

He continued: “It’s impossible to say whether we would have done the identical piece. We probably wouldn’t have because it’s not — you know Nick has a particular focus on human rights and war and it is kind of part of his area of focus as a columnist. So to say, ‘would we have done that exact piece?’ No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece.”

He added that the newsroom had “reported very similarly on abuses in the Israeli prison system” and “on sexual abuses by Hamas against Israeli prisoners or against Israelis during the Oct. 7 attack.”

“So we’ve reported on sexual abuse on both sides of that, and every time we do it, it excites a lot of controversy,” Kahn said. “Nick’s piece did as well, this one happened to be done by the opinion section, by him as a columnist.”

Responding to a Free Beacon article characterizing Kahn as having said he would not have “run” the article, a New York Times spokesperson said the take was “inaccurate” and “taken out of context”:

The newspaper has consistently defended the column. A Times spokesperson previously described Kristof as “a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist” whose reporting was “backed by independent studies,” while calling the essay a “deeply reported piece of opinion journalism.”

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