Host Hugh Hewitt and Matthew Continetti discuss New York Times Kristof’s opinion piece on claims of Israeli brutality against Palestinians prisoners: <\/p>\n
HUGH HEWITT: I got to start with Nick Kristof, column in the New York Times, and to help me do that, I have Matt Continetti. Matt, of course, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He is also the head of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He was not on the commentary podcast today where they discussed the Kristof column and a couple other pieces with Ruthie Bloom and others. But Matt, let me begin by asking, I assume you’ve read the Nick Kristof column that alleges widespread rape of prisoners by prison guards and by dogs in Israel as part of the system. It’s a blood libel. Have you read it? MATTHEW CONTINETTI, WALL STREET JOURNAL: I’ve read parts of it, Hugh. I can’t say I was able to stomach the whole thing. I was so disgusted and alarmed by the fact that I didn’t print it in the New York Times and receive such a widespread response from Israel haters and anti-Semites around the globe. But this is just one of many instances where lies are spread about Israel and the Jewish people. You can go back to the second Intifada, rather, at the beginning of this century when it was alleged that Israeli soldiers had targeted a young Palestinian boy. It turned out to be completely a fabrication. You think about all of the accounts of the mass starvation, supposedly, in Gaza during the most recent war, the post-October Seventh War. Those were fabrications. And this libel of genocide that’s been put upon Israel, genocide of the Palestinian people, when of course nothing has taken place. It seems to me that every accusation against Israel is often a confession of wrongdoing by the part of those who would want to destroy Israel. And the greatest evidence of this, it seems, is that one day after that Nick Kristof report comes out, CNN reports on this widespread, rather very detailed study of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas after October 7th. So when it’s an accusation coming from these anti-Israel types, it’s more often than not a form of confession. HEWITT: Now, Matt, what really shocked me about this, Nick has been a friend of the program for most of the 25 years I’ve been on the air. I’ve had him on dozens of times, whenever he had a book come out, occasionally when he had a column. I considered him sort of an old guard Democrat liberal, but not crazy. That column is crazy. It also cannot be verified. If you can train up a half dozen to a dozen people to tell the same lie, outrageous though it might be, the idea of dogs trained to rape humans, it’s so absurd. It’s just so absurd. But you can’t disprove it. It’s an unfalsifiable proposition. How could the New York Times have allowed that to be printed? Why would Nick Kristof go for the bait? CONTINETTI: Well, because I think a great many people are given to the most lurid fantasies and conspiracies about the state of Israel and the Jewish people. And let’s not forget, we’re living in a climate, Hugh, of conspiratorial paranoia. When you consider that, what, one in four Americans think that the White House correspondents’ dinner attack on the president was staged, one in three people believe that one of the Trump assassination attempts has been staged, there’s just this bent toward paranoid, conspiratorial thinking that’s, I think, aggravated by social media. But the point is this, is that the New York Times has very selective editorial standards. And that is, they apply no editorial standards when it comes to Israel and the opponents of Israel. This is the same paper that has, what, lavished praise on this guy, Hassan Piker, in recent months. A person who’s justified murder, who’s justified theft, who, of course, is anti-Israel, wants to see the Jewish state gone, and yet he is being lionized by the New York Times. The same paper that prints Nick Kristof’s scurrilous attack on the Israeli penal system. HEWITT: I’m going to come back to Piker in a second, because I have a proposition for you to explain. You got to have a universal theory to explain everything that’s nuts out there. But first, you’re familiar with the Dreyfus Affair, which was an invented conspiracy to finger a French officer who was Jewish at the turn of the 19th century. That was the first evidence of widespread anti-Semitism within the French military. Is that a good summary of it? CONTINETTI: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I mean, I think it was a sense of rising anti-Semitism in Europe more generally. The Dreyfus Affair there in the late 19th century became kind of the signature issue, the defining issue of the time about the place of Jews in European society, in institutions. And the Dreyfus Affair, of course, signaled kind of the turn that Europe would take toward authoritarianism and totalitarianism in the first quarter of the 20th century. HEWITT: So I think that Nick’s column is the Dreyfus Affair for our time. And I don’t know who’s going to write Jacques Hughes this time, but someone has to write that. And I don’t know where it would come from, because the Dreyfus Affair took a good 10 years to unravel in its conspiracy. Now it was invented by a crazy lunatic anti-Semite who had fallen for the protocols of the elder Zion. But I want to go into later in the program and talk with Admiral Stavridis and Elliott Ackerman about their book about climate war in 2084. And the analogy to climate collapse, what they’re positing climate collapse over the next 60 years, intellect collapse. Hassan Piker’s a dummy. And Nick Kristof used to be a smart guy. And now he writes something that’s just sheer stupidity. Do you think we’re in an AOC is brooded about as a potential nominee for the Democratic Party? And she doesn’t know anything. Are we in the age of intellect collapse? CONTINETTI: It’s so funny you mentioned that, Hugh. Before coming on today, I was reading Henry Kissinger’s memoirs about his trips to China ahead of Trump’s trip to China this week. And as I was closing the book, I was thinking, man, how far we’ve come from Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon plotting out geopolitics with all these concepts, detente, linkage, right? Triangular diplomacy to write AOC at the Munich Security Conference, embarrassing herself with her inability to answer simple questions about foreign policy. I will say this, though. If you’re looking for the j’accuse on the Kristof piece, I urge everyone to look up Javier Rodriguez’s post on this article, because it is just a devastating critique of Kristof and the charges that Kristof makes. And Javier, who’s a friend of the program, of course, is just a brilliant writer. HEWITT: I’m glad to hear he did that. He will be on Thursday. As per Kissinger and Nixon, I went to work for RN in 1978 out in San Clemente. And the first time I sat down with him, he sent me into the library adjacent to his office to get William Blake’s Disraeli. And he said, I think it’s around page 270. There’s a quote. And he gave me the quote. His library was massive. And his recall of what was in his library was impressive. Do you think we’ve got very many intellects in the public sphere now, in the elected public sphere, like Nixon was? CONTINETTI: I don’t think we have as many as we did then. You know, it was something for Nixon to appoint as his chief foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor, and then in the first term to appoint as his chief domestic policy advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another Harvard professor, both of whom were kind of conservative in some ways, not so conservative in others. Nixon really, I think, enjoyed being around intellectuals because he was so bookish and he was so interested in ideas. We have people like that in American public life today, but not of the same caliber. There’s just a difference, I think, in knowledge. I must say that our vice president is coming out with his much-anticipated second book in a few months about his religious journey. We have a secretary of state who is just in Italy talking about the similarities between Spanish and Italian and saying that he’s going to try to learn Italian to deliver a speech there his next trip to Italy. They’re out there. Tom Cotton, of course, has a fiercely sharp intellect. They’re out there, but they just need to be encouraged.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n