Debra Tropp

Consultant to communities and organizations on local/regional food system development

[Ashley Rindsberg @AshleyRindsberg]

How many minutes elapsed between @NickKristof's "dog rape" column appearing in @nytimes and the opinion piece ending up as a source in a @Wikipedia citation?

Months before the Times column saw light of day, a Wikipedia article — "Sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians during the Gaza war" — had laid the groundwork for the narrative.

One of the primary authors of the Wikipedia article, User:Ïvana, was permanently site-banned from Wikipedia after I exposed the account as part of a coordinated influence operation basecamped out of a Discord server run by a group called TechForPalestine (T4P).

Among the handlers active on the T4P servers is Zei_Squirrel, a propaganda account that is among the top Hamas boosters on the internet today, operating across Substack, Wikipedia, Reddit, X, and Discord.

But here's the real twist: Kristof's dog rape piece was added to the article as a citation by editor Cinaroot.

The account did this not by writing that a notable opinion piece had been published on the topic. Instead, it savvily constructed the sentence to imply that the column was news reporting. Here's what Cinaroot wrote:

"In 2026 claims alleging that Israel trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinians were reported."

Seems a bit motivated, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you a little bit about this account.

User:Cinaroot was registered in February 2023. The acount made a smattering of insignificant edits and then went dormant.

The account reactivated nine months later, exactly 19 days after October 7.

In fact, its first post-dormancy edit was to the October 7 article itself. There, Cinaroot argued on the Talk page that editors must present a justification for the massacre committed by Hamas.

Cinaroot wrote:

"According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and we all know it, attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

"We need to add this. right now i feel this is very biased article" [sic].

What came next was far more significant. Over the subsequent two years, Cinaroot would take control over the most important Wikipedia pages related to Qatar's key influence machine: Al Jazeera.

It would scrub negative references about Al Jazeera ties to the Qatari royal family, minimize the Qatari state's funding of the network, and accentuate the network's alleged editorial independence.

But it went one step further, becoming (by far) the dominant editor on the entry Al Jazeera effect, whose central thrust is that Al Jazeera is a democratizing force in Qatar, the region, and the world.

Cinaroot today is responsible for:

> 68.2% of the content on the Al Jazeera effect article (second-ranked editor: 12%).

> 40.5% of the Al Jazeera Media Network article (second-ranked editor: 12%)

> 27.8% of the Al Jazeera English article (second-ranked editor: 11%)

In less than three years, a single account took editorial control on high-volume, high-contention pages that have existed for:

- 16 years (Al Jazeera Media Network)
- 14 years (Al Jazeera effect), and
- 21 years (Al Jazeera English).

For any normal Wikipedia user—who typically spends months, if not years, learning the site's rules, procedures, and culture—that is beyond extraordinary. It defies rational explanation.

I remind you, this is the account that swooped in to insert an opinion column with explosive allegations, falsely construing the column as reporting, into a key article.

This is the face of a coordinated narrative operation.

Look closely.

[Moshe Emilio Lavi @MosheELavi]

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion.

The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else.

The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject.

This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X.

Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility.

The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting.

This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier.

Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price.

It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence.

Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters.

The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record.

Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously.

It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: The Cornell President just obliterated the extremist students who surrounded his car.

Rather than surrendering to them and apologizing, he directly called out their unlawful behavior.

This is what true leadership looks like.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

BREAKING: Fox News just reported that Pete Hegseth fired United States Secretary of the Navy John Phelan because Phelan would not ignore a federal judge's orders!

"Hegseth and Phelan reportedly butted heads when Phelan refused to ignore a recent federal judge’s ruling that said punishing Senator Mark Kelly for making a video which he reminded military officers of their constitutional duty to not to not follow illegal orders would violate his First Amendment rights."

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 @JacobALinker]

You can debate the merits of how Israel fought the war, but the amount of humanitarian activity the Israelis facilitated and the various actions the Israelis took to move people out of combat zones belies the idea that the Israelis had any sort of specific intent to destroy a substantial part of the Palestinian population of Gaza for the purpose of extinguishing them as a national category. And that intent aspect is THE central part of what makes genocide genocide.

[1] Israel paused fighting in 2024 order to vaccinate upwards of 600,000 Palestinian kids below the age of 10 against Polio; and 1.1 million vaccines total.
[2] 90,000 aid trucks went to Gaza by June 2025, totaling 1.8 million tons. 1.3 million of that was food.
[3] 79,000 trucks of food specifically went in by July 2025, carrying 1.7 million tons of food.
[4] 100,000 large trucks (not all trucks) reached Gaza by mid-August 2025, totaling 1.9 million tons of aid. This apparently included 4,000 tons of baby formula.
[4] 112,000 trucks carrying 1.8-1.9 million tons of aid went to Gaza by early 2026
[5] The IDF and Israeli Electric Corporation restored a power line (which Hamas broke) to supply energy to a desalination plant serving 900,000 Gazans. It also cooperated with the Egyptians and Emiratis to link the Mawasi enclave (relative safe zone) to a desalination plant in Sinai.
[6] As of October 29, 2023, Israel had two pipelines going into Gaza providing 28.5 million liters of water. This was compared to 49 million liters before the war, which relied on three pipelines. The third pipeline was knocked out of operation by Hamas's October 7th attack, so the amount of water Israel was providing was the maximum it was able to provide. At that point 2 of Gaza's 3 desalination plants were operating too.
[7] Israel continued to provide electricity to the Gaza Strip until March 2025, when Hamas rejected extension of the ceasefire. Electricity was restored in July 2025 in response to worsening humanitarian conditions.
[8] In response to worsening humanitarian conditions which were approaching famine by July 2025, the Israelis unilaterally paused fighting
[9] As of late 2023, the Israeli military reported having sent approximately 15 million text messages, 12 million recorded phone calls, and made more than 40,000 personal phone calls to Gazans, alongside dropping hundreds of thousands of warning leaflets, in order to get them to evacuate areas of military operation.
[10] By December 2023 they published an interactive, block-numbered map of the Gaza Strip on December 1, 2023, designed to identify specific areas for military operations and guide civilian evacuations. The map divides the enclave into hundreds of small zones, with instructions for residents to evacuate to designated safe areas, such as Rafah, via social media and QR-coded leaflets.
[11] The Israelis cooperated with the 2024 Gaza floating pier project, intended to provide a new outlet for aid going in to Gaza
[12] The Israelis coordinated with outside countries on air drops
[13] The Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it distributed 187 million meals by November 2025.

The main counter example somebody is going to bring up in response to the above is going to be how from March 2025 to July 2025 the Israelis stopped supplying electricity and how the Israelis put in an 11-week blockade from March to May 2025, and continued to regulate aid tightly until July 2025.

But in the December 2024 to March 2025 truce period enough aid went in that should have lasted for another six months. The Israeli government's assumption was that people in Gaza had adequately stockpiled aid to last a pause until new mechanism of aid provision [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [GHF]] which Hamas and others hopefully couldn't steal from or divert came into effect. This proved to be a stupid and reckless assumption because people didn't stockpile aid equitably during the truce period and the GHF's distribution very effective at distributing aid widely across geography due to a variety of reasons. But being stubborn and obstinate isn't the same as having the specific intent of trying to make people go hungry.

And when the situation got really bad, the Israelis paused fighting to resolve the humanitarian crisis in July 2025. There was international pressure, yeah, but they still participated.

Meanwhile Egypt closed the Rafah Crossing in 2024 and it remained closed throughout the war. And the UN and other NGOs were highly resistant to actively cooperating with the Israelis in aid provision matters, including protection for their distribution (they even said they preferred "Gaza Police" - meaning Hamas - protection). And Hamas and other criminals were diverting and hoarding aid. A bunch of the reasons for there being aid issues were from actors other than Israel.

The Israeli response to a bunch of this was "well if it's not our fault it's not our responsibility to deal with it", which annoyed a lot of people (and I think indicates a shocking degree of inability to recognize that even if not the Israelis' fault its still the Israelis' problem). But the point remains that the source of much of the humanitarian issue was the UN, NGOs, Egypt, Hamas, and Palestinian criminal gangs.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

The Great Hospital Con: Doctors Without Borders (MSF) pulled out of the al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, and just yesterday explained its decision. It has said exactly what I have repeatedly talked about for over a year and shared personal examples of friends of mine being imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured within various facilities inside the hospital from Hamas's intelligence and security services. MSF is two years late to this recognition but it is ultimately confirming what even a child in southern Gaza could have told the organization or the NYT, Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera and countless others had they bothered to ask - which is that Hamas has literally turned Gaza's three main hospitals into headquarters for security, ministerial, and administrative operations.

When I said this time and again, people would yell and scream how I was irresponsibly justifying Israel’s targeting of the hospital, even as the same people would not utter a word about their favorite terrorist fascist organization jeopardizing the safety of medical facilities for two years of the deadly war.

Congratulations “pro-Palestine” activists: you have been conned by your beloved resistance organization which has caused the death of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians by its conduct and behavior.

Get Hamas out of Gaza’s hospitals now!

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

At Haverford College, I didn’t encounter a great and powerful political movement. I met neglected children surrounded by adults who failed to challenge them, teach them or inculcate substance, grit and nuance.

My piece in ⁦@TheFP⁩ https://t.co/lBGgJEEak4

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Did you know that more foreign aid money was spent in the Gaza Strip over the past two decades than anywhere else on earth per capita? Virtually nothing to show for the billions spent by the Arabs and the international community to develop Gaza, while Hamas's terrorism and "resistance" destroyed all hope for a better life.

هل تعلم أنه تم إنفاق أموال مساعدات أجنبية في قطاع غزة أكثر من أي مكان في الكرة الأرضية عبر العشرين سنة الماضية لكل فرد؟ لا يوجد الكثير لنعرضعه نتيجة هذه المليارات من أموال العرب والمجتمع الدولي التي أنفقت لتنمية غزة في حين دمر إرهاب و"مقاومة" حماس كل أمل بحياة أفضل.

[Jeffery Mead @the_jefferymead]

You know what’s interesting..?

If Israel limits press access in Gaza, it faces nonstop outrage.

Iran cuts internet access nationwide to slaughter its own citizens, and the response from those same people is silence.

The double standard is quite obvious and pathetic..

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

12,000 KILLED IN IRAN
Iran International: “In the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history, carried out largely over two nights, Jan. 8-9, at least 12,000 people were killed”

🇺🇳 U.N. Human Rights Council reaction:
0 resolutions
0 emergency sessions
0 commissions of inquiry

[David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein]

One of the most bizarre things about Hamas is that it states explicitly that it's an Islamist movement aiming to replace Israel with an Islamist state, and the Western left insists that it's just a "resistance" movement dedicated to the Palestinian cause fighting "occupation."

[Eretz Israel @EretzIsrael]

Synagogues that have been set on fire, or targeted with arson, since October 7:

- Oct 17: El Hamma, Tunisia
- Oct 18: Berlin, Germany
- Nov 8: Montreal, Canada
- Nov 18: Yerevan, Armenia
- Nov 19: Lakewood, USA
- Feb 28: Sfax, Tunisia
- April 5: Oldenburg, Germany
- April 10: Moscow, Russia
- May 1: Warsaw, Poland
- May 17: Rouen, France
- May 30: Vancouver, Canada
- July 11: Obninsk, Russia
- Aug 24: La Grande-Motte, France
- Dec 6: Melbourne, Australia
- Dec 18: Montreal, Canada
- Dec 30: Mykolaiv, Ukraine
- Jan 11: Sydney, Australia
- July 4: Melbourne, Australia
- Aug 13: Obninsk, Russia
- ⁠Nov 27: Chernivtsi, Ukraine
- ⁠Jan 10: Mississippi, USA

[Howard ✡. 🟦🇮🇱🎗🧡 @HowardA_AtLaw]

It’s worth noting that this was his very first act as mayor. No free buses, no rent relief, just targeting Jewish people. He doesn’t give a damn about the vulnerable, he just hates Jews

[Tali Goldsheft @TaliGoldsheft]

NEW: @RitchieTorres just posted this on Instagram. Thank you, Rep. Torres.

[David Hirsh @DavidHirsh]

The IHRA definition affirms that antizionist antisemitism is real and significant. It gives examples how this kind of antisemitism generally manifests. But it warns: judge a case in context and criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.

What is the Mayor afraid of here?

[Big Cuz @imohumoren]

In the most ironic twist ever, Palestine is against Somaliland’s quest for Independence lol

[L.A. Abe @LA_Abe6626]

A very *Merry Christmas* to "Mr. Antisemitism," @havivrettiggur.

Some #s to ponder.

Don't miss the followup note below!

[Daniel Epstein-O'Dowd @DODubhda]

Piece by piece, the narrative around Israel's offensive in Gaza is starting to come apart. This happens in every conflict Israel is dragged into - false allegations are made, hysteria ensues and it takes months (if not years) for the truth to get it's trousers on.

Just this week, look at what the world has now discovered:

- Hamas starved their own people and hid food to fuel a false narrative that Israel was imposing a famine upon the people of Gaza.

-60% of the so-called journalists killed in Gaza were tied to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

- Many Palestinians were all too willing to play their part in supporting Hamas, with one Gazan Doctor murdering 19 year old hostage, Noa Marciano, by injecting air into her veins - with the footage being subsequently sent to her family in a cruel act of psychological torture.

Truth may be on our side, but the damage has already been done. The jury is already deliberating, without all the evidence. We must do better or it will be our people sent to the gallows for the evil of others.

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

שתי טעויות יסוד נעשו בניהול המלחמה עליהן אנחנו משלמים עד היום:
1) הגדרה לא נכונה של האויב כחמאס בלבד ולא האידיאולוגיה של הפלסטיניזם שבשמו חמאס פעל
2) אי הבנת זירת הלחימה. רק חלקה היה בעזה. הרוב היתה מלחמת תודעת עולמית.

וקשור לשתי אלה: מתן לגיטימציה לקטר במקום הגדרתה כאויב.