[News] NY Times found no 7 October rape victims, reporter admits

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ny-times-found-no-7-october-rape-victims-reporter-admits>
NY Times found no 7 October rape victims, reporter admits

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> Media
Watch <https://electronicintifada.net/blog/media-watch> 1 March 2024
------------------------------

The scandal is growing around *The New York Times’* fraudulent
“investigation” of mass rapes supposedly committed by Hamas fighters on 7
October – claims made by the newspaper that The Electronic Intifada thoroughly
debunked
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-ny-times-investigation-mass-rape-hamas-falls-apart>
in early January.

On this week’s Electronic Intifada livestream we looked at some of the
latest developments – in particular the revelation that Anat Schwartz, one
of the two Israeli propagandists who assisted lead *New York Times*
reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, apparently endorsed extreme anti-Palestinian
views.

You can watch that segment above.
The third writer, Adam Sella, turns out to be a fresh graduate with little
journalistic experience, and is the nephew of Schwartz’s partner,
heightening concerns about nepotism and conflict of interest at the
so-called newspaper of record.

Schwartz herself has never been a reporter, but advertises herself as a
filmmaker.

As we explain, Schwartz and Sella convinced one woman to hand over a video
that they believed would boost the evidence-free claims of rape by telling
her it would help Israeli propaganda – or hasbara
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hasbara>.

“At first I didn’t consider it meaningful, I didn’t understand how
important it was, but they didn’t give up. They called me again and again
and explained how important this is to Israeli hasbara,” the woman told
<https://www.ynet.co.il/laisha/article/h1gzxtbtp> Israeli news outlet *Ynet*.

Revelations keep coming

Since Wednesday’s livestream, more explosive revelations have come out
about the scandal around the now notorious *New York Times* article
published in late December with the provocative title “‘Screams Without
Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html>
.”

On Wednesday, *The Intercept* reported
<https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/>
on an interview Schwartz gave in Hebrew to a podcast produced by Israel’s
Channel 12.

Schwartz admitted in the 3 January podcast that “I have no qualifications”
to conduct such a sensitive and complex journalistic assignment.

Also in that interview, “Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get
confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery
facilities and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to
get a single confirmation from any of them,” *The Intercept* reports.

Schwartz contacted 11 specialized facilities at Israeli hospitals that
treat potential survivors of rape and sexual assault, but to no avail.

“First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of
sexual assault was received,’” she said in the Channel 12 podcast. “I had a
lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds
of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully
committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

She then followed up with the head of the sexual assault hotline in
southern Israel, only to be told that there had been no reports of sexual
violence related to the 7 October events.
Times defends fraudulent reporting

This total failure to find a single victim ought to have alerted the *Times*
that the only story here was of a massive hoax intended to incite genocidal
hatred and violence against Palestinians.

But even to this day, the newspaper is defending its fraudulent reporting.

Schwartz “was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,” a
*Times** spokesperson told *The Intercept**. “This however was just the
very first step of her research. She then describes the unfolding of
evidence, testimonies and eventual evidence that there may have been
systematic use of sexual assault.”

This spin cannot conceal that, in fact, Gettleman, Schwartz and Sella never
positively identified a single specific victim of rape, living or dead. Nor
do any of their four “eyewitnesses” of alleged mass rape incidents have any
credibility
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-ny-times-investigation-mass-rape-hamas-falls-apart>
.

The best they could do was imply that an Israeli woman who was killed that
day, Gal Abdush, had been raped.

But that innuendo has been rejected
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/family-of-key-case-in-new-york-times-october-7-sexual-violence-report-renounces-story-says-reporters-manipulated-them/>
by members of Abdush’s family who say they have never been shown any
evidence that she was raped.

They also accused the *Times* of manipulating and deceiving them into
taking part in the Gettleman-led story.
At an event at Columbia University last month, Gettleman too backed away
from his own reporting, claiming
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/columbia-students-confront-hillary-clinton-her-war-crimes>
that it wasn’t his job to produce “evidence,” but that he was merely
sharing “information” and working to “give people a voice.”

As *The Intercept* notes, the statement from the *Times* in effect “walked
back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had
weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that ‘there may have been
systematic use of sexual assault.’”

But rather than re-examining its reporting honestly and transparently, the
*Times* has launched an internal witch hunt
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/new-york-times-israel-gaza-leak> to root
out staffers who have leaked their concerns
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ny-times-tries-cover-its-7-october-mass-rapes-fraud>
about the fraudulent reporting of the Gettleman team.

And clearly the newspaper is rattled. Speaking on *Democracy Now*
<https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz> Thursday, *The
Intercept’s* Jeremy Scahill revealed that instead of correcting its own
egregious errors and deceptions, the *Times* demanded a “correction” from *The
Intercept*.

The *Times’* demand was based on the ludicrous grounds that Sella could not
be called Schwartz’s “nephew” because he is actually the nephew not of
Schwartz but of her partner.
Schwartz also broke her silence Wednesday, thanking
<https://twitter.com/Anatschwartz/status/1763148587444076821> the *Times*
for standing by her fraudulent reporting. She also lied that she had only
“liked” one anti-Palestinian tweet and that it was “inadvertent.” The role
of independent media

While *The Intercept* has done some important reporting, adding to the
pressure on *The New York Times*, it comes late to this story.

Weeks after The Electronic Intifada
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-debunking-israels-mass-rape-propaganda>,
*Mondoweiss*
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/despite-lack-of-evidence-allegations-of-hamas-mass-rape-are-fueling-israeli-genocide-in-gaza/>,
*The Grayzone* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPMf3CIa_BA> and the
popular Twitter account @zei_squirrel
<https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40zei_squirrel%20mass%20rapes&src=typed_query&f=live>
had debunked the “mass rape” claims, *The Intercept* was still credulously
promoting them.

“One thing is true: Hamas and other Palestinian militants committed
unspeakable sexual violence against Israeli civilians on October 7,” begins
a 24 December article
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence-hamas-israel/>
in *The Intercept* by Judith Levine.

“Yes, some individuals and extreme-left organizations have denied these
atrocities or upheld them as justified resistance,” Levine claims, an
appalling smear *The Intercept* should retract.

What we did and will continue to do is report based on facts.

Will *The Intercept* show the level of accountability it now rightly
demands of *The Times* for spreading Israel’s deadly lies?
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