In her May 21 opinion column in The Toronto Star, “Sexual violence by Israel and Hamas is stomach-churning. So too is the reaction to it,” Denise Handlarski, an associate professor of history and social justice at Trent University, makes the seemingly innocuous claim that in the Middle East, “all parties need to stop focusing solely on the wrongs of the other, and re-evaluate their own goals and actions.”

Such statements, while vapid, are ultimately unobjectionable. However, in her column, Handlarski relies on unverified and hysterical claims from a widely-pilloried New York Times commentary where author Nicholas Kristof claimed that Israel trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners, in order to make a wide-ranging and false equivalence.

Handlarski writes that Kristof “recounts horrific stories of sexual violence against Palestinians,” comparing it to “a detailed report on the scale of sexual violence on Oct. 7 perpetrated by Hamas.”

She acknowledges criticism of the New York Times allegations, writing that critics say it is “deliberately inflammatory and exaggerated.” While true, that does not even scratch the surface of its problems.

Kristof’s opinion column relies exclusively on claims from Palestinians, including at its source, the organization Euro-Med, whose leader Ramy Abdu has spoken at a Hamas-organized conference aimed at promoting pro-Palestinian activism abroad. Euro-Med has been called a “Hamas front group” by researchers. It is hardly an unbiased human rights observer and as Eitan Fichberger reported: “Euro-Med Monitor has actually been formally designated as a terrorist organization by Israel — since 2015. And nobody realized.”

The ‘Israel uses dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners’ story is not simply uncredible because of a lack of evidence; it is not credible because according to canine training experts, it is not even possible.

Meanwhile, the case for Palestinian rapes could not be more different. The use of sexual violence by Palestinians during their October 7, 2023 massacres – and its subsequent use against Israeli hostages who were kidnapped in Gaza – is well-documented and exists beyond any reasonable doubt, and a recent, 300-page report, authored by noted human rights expert Cochav Elyakam-Levy, chronicles it in extensive detail.

From our perspective, the difference between documented facts and groundless allegations were ignored by Handlarski, who instead placed them on an equal pedestal as if they were equally credible.

Handlarski’s apparent acceptance of the credibility of the New York Times column met swift condemnation on social media, where she claimed that she did not necessarily believe it, but that it was used as an example of a “distraction from other accusations of harm, which I do believe.”

Despite Handlarski’s seeming attempt to distance herself from the Kristof opinion column, in our estimation, she simultaneously used it as a cudgel with which to create a false equivalence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists, who filmed their own murderous crimes for the world to see, clearly proud of their actions.

Rather than seek to use Kristof’s baseless claims as the moral basis for claiming that Israelis and Palestinians are somehow equally culpable, Handlarski could have – and indeed, should have – taken aim at the relentless anti-Israel propaganda machine in the news media, academia, non-governmental organizations and more, which have created fertile ground where just about any allegation leveled against Jerusalem is treated with de facto credibility.

In our view, when Denise Handlarski places documented crimes on the same level as sensational allegations, she risks becoming a participant in the very disinformation ecosystem she claims to oppose.

Photo credit: Denise Handlarski