Those appalling Jews are at it again. In what at first glance might sound like a shocking story, first reported in Variety and The New York Times, and then spread around the world by Al Jazeera, two well-known Jewish people said something awful that supposedly warranted condemnation. The pair—influencer Lizzy Savetsky and comedian Elon Gold—had the temerity to joke about rape while on the red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this week. They even had the audacity to put it online.

In response, the film festival posted a statement denouncing them on social media, saying it said it “unequivocally condemns the offensive and unacceptable remarks made by Elon Gold and Lizzie Savetsky.” It went on to say that “sexual violence and human suffering should never be mocked or minimized.”

Under normal circumstances, that alone should be enough to get the pair canceled. And perhaps many in the entertainment industry and elsewhere will take their cues from the Tribeca Festival or coverage in the Times, and treat them as beyond the pale in the future.

A false accusation

Instead of joining in the pile-on, sensible and moral people should be cheering for Savetsky and Gold, not blasting them for insensitivity. Indeed, what is needed right now is for others in the entertainment world to have the guts to emulate them.

The accusation that they were mocking or minimizing actual sexual violence and human suffering was nonsensical. The reason they spoke about the subject was to call attention to the journalistic crimes of the Times. The newspaper’s publishing of Nicholas Kristof’s astonishing claims that Israelis were not only guilty of sexual violence against Palestinians Arabs, but that they had actually trained dogs to rape male prisoners, was a new low point for American journalism. The only sources for the charges were pro-Hamas organizations and individuals who offered no proof for these accusations and clearly had an ax to grind.

That it saw fit to let Kristof write that Israeli-trained dogs could do something that animal trainers say is physically impossible, and which has, despite his false assertions, never been proven to happen, was an egregious violation of journalistic ethics. The lengthy article, run as opinion rather than as news (raising eyebrows throughout the media), was nothing less than a compendium of unsubstantiated claims that were all the more infuriating because of the absurdity of the tall tale about dogs and rape. This was a blood libel against Israel and the Jews.

Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the Times publishing such flimsy and wild charges against any other country or group, especially in an era when feeding prejudice against minority groups is no longer tolerated. Or, at least not, against other minorities.

In this way, the media outlet demonstrated the depths to which it had sunk in pursuing its anti-Israel editorial agenda, but also the way it and other liberal institutions have mainstreamed antisemitism since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

A big lie is normalized and spread

In a saner world, the Times would have been deluged with condemnations from other media as the sources for such a story, as well as its readers, and ultimately forced to retract and apologize for Kristof’s screed. Instead, protests against it have been confined to the Jewish community. The wider world has barely paid any attention. Other, that is, than to add it to the growing list of other examples in which Israel has been arraigned in the court of public opinion for horrible crimes that it did not commit but which are now routinely spoken of as accepted truths.

By standing by its shoddy journalism, rather than acknowledging that Kristof’s bogus smears should never have been published, the newspaper was counting on the rest of the media and the cultural world to stand by their fiction. Like the equally false claims of Israel committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip or being an “apartheid state,” its publishers assumed that the claims of Israeli rapist dogs would simply be accepted by its overwhelmingly liberal readership, as well as colleagues at other outlets.

And that’s why the chutzpah of Savetsky and Gold matters—as does the slavish willingness of the Tribeca Festival, founded in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to help revitalize a devastated Lower Manhattan, to back up the Times.

In this way, the remarks uttered by the two celebrities at the premiere of “The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan),” an Israeli film starring Gold, is a test case in determining the ability of Kristof’s blood libel to be normalized and then accepted as an accepted truth in the public square.

Gold’s excitement at having an Israeli film get a slot at what he rightly termed a “prestigious” cinematic festival was what prompted the two to joke about Kristof’s lies. Speaking of his time in the Jewish state, he said, “I was only raped by two Israeli dogs.”

“I thought they only raped Palestinians,” Savetsky replied.

“No, I got also a dog,” Gold deadpanned.

How blood libels are spread

In its article about the incident, the Times acknowledged that they were making fun of Kristof’s story. But their first reference to the comments read as if they were claiming that Savetsky and Gold were actually laughing at the idea of Palestinians being raped, rather than at the mendacity of Kristof and the Times.

It went on to quote Savetsky’s reply to the controversy in which she said, “If you want to talk about actual rape, then let’s talk about actual rape like the mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7 and onward.”

It then noted that the United Nations had also recently added Israeli security forces for the first time to an annual report documenting sexual violence in conflicts, including allegations of rape and sexual abuse against Palestinians. But that reference failed to note that there was no more substantiation for those claims than those of Kristof, a fact acknowledged by U.N. officials, even as they, too, stood by this latest libel against Israel emanating from the world organization.

This demonstrates how deceptions about Israel are spread and accepted. Anti-Zionist sources, like any of the pro-Hamas groups the Times quoted in Kristof’s article, make a claim and then other journalists and the United Nations treat them as if their repetition constitutes a form of verification. And then anyone who dares to challenge any of it is dismissed as prejudiced or, even worse, also guilty of encouraging or being insensitive to the fictional crimes.

As I noted last month, the Kristof blood libel is not something from which Jews or supporters of Israel can simply move on.

The accusations are demonstrably false and uncorroborated (something even some liberal journalists suspected at the time, though they didn’t dare to speak up about it) and ought to place those who make them in legal jeopardy, even if that will be hard to prove. The egregious nature of the decision to publish such a piece merits comparison to some of the worst examples of mendacious journalism in history. It also demonstrates the “suicidal empathy” of Jews who are willing to treat accusations against their own people as credible while saying nothing about the proven atrocities of Oct. 7. That includes the mass rapes committed by Palestinian Arabs that institutions like the United Nations and the Times questioned, and for which they demanded far more proof, unlike their attitude toward Kristof’s lies.

Simply put, if we stop talking about the article about dog rape, whose publication was clearly timed to overshadow the release of a report about sexual crimes committed by the Palestinians on Oct. 7, it won’t just mean that Kristof and his employers get away with it. It will make it easier for every other blood libel to be accepted. And in so doing, the surge of antisemitism that followed the start of this latest war on the Jewish state and people will become solidified in the public mind as a justified response to alleged Jewish wrongdoing.

More chutzpah needed

The controversy must be brought up at every possible opportunity, especially where general audiences or those, like the sort of people who inhabit the arts world, attend film festivals and still treat the Times as a credible source of information or even as the newspaper of record, as it used to be considered.

Nor should we allow those who lend their credibility to Kristof’s canards, as the Tribeca Film Festival did, to do so with impunity. Those who piously claim that they are demonstrating that they care about sexual-assault victims by backing up these false accusations are—whether they intend to do so or not—equally demonstrating their indifference to Jewish victims, whose suffering these lies were intended to bury.

Rather than being intimidated into silence, Jewish entertainers and public figures should be following in the footsteps of Savetsky and Gold. They should be using their celebrity to shine a spotlight on these blood libels. Along with anyone else with a conscience, they should declare their unwillingness to continue to treat the Times as a journalistic endeavor, rather than an organ of antisemitism.

Though treated as a minor story that few care about, the Kristof lies must be spoken of over and over again. What the embattled Jewish people need at this moment is not to internalize the smears that are treated as reasonable accusations but to utterly reject them. We need more such courageous mockery. We need more Hollywood types and musicians to speak out. We need more Jews who are willing to risk cancellation to make this point. The alternative is acceptance of a public square in which Jew-hatred is normal. That is a world in which no Jew—no matter how famous, wealthy or influential—will be safe.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.