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The New York Times and 7 October Sexual Assaults

“The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred  on October 7.  The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon. And to this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented compelling proof to back that explosive assertion.” Full email from The Intercept, 15 March 2024: Over the last few weeks, The Intercept has exposed massive holes in the New York Times’s marquee front-page exposé on alleged sexual violence committed  on October 7. Instead of addressing the gaping flaws in the story and issuing a correction, the Times has launched an internal “witch hunt” targeting employees based on their national origin, ethnicity, and race to track down anyone who may have talked to The Intercept about the story, according to the union that represents the Times newsroom employees. The Intercept is continuing to investigate and expose false

Germany’s Support of Israel – A Continuum

“Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war,  Die Welt  regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. Th