The Intercept: New York Times Exposé Lacks Evidence to Claim Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence Oct. 7

this is democracy Now democracynow.org the Warren peace report I'm Amy Goodman the New York Times is reportedly conducting an internal investigation to identify the source behind leaked information about its coverage of Israel in Gaza according to Vanity Fair the internal investigation follows a report in The Intercept about the time shelving an episode of its podcast the daily over doubts regarding the accuracy of a highly controversial Blockbuster New York Times article published at the end of December alleging Hamas members committed widespread sexual violence weaponized it on October 7th Vanity Fair reports that in recent weeks management of the New York Times have questioned at least two dozen staffers including producers of the daily the podcast in an attempt to understand how internal details about the podcast Ed editorial process got out democracy now ask the New York Times about the internal investigation the papers International editor Phil pan said in a statement quote we aren't going to comment on internal matters I can tell you the work of our Newsroom requires trust and collaboration and we expect all of our colleagues to adhere to these values end quote the New York Times article at the center of the controversy was published December 28th it was headlined scre screams without words how Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7th in it the times reported they had found evidence of systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas and that their two-month investigation quote uncovered painful new details establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence October 7th unquote however not long after the highly publicized article was published major discrepancies began to emerge including public comments from the family of a major subject of the article contradictory claims from a key witness and criticisms over a lack of solid evidence in the overall investigation then news emerged last week that one of the three authors of the New York Times piece named anat Schwarz had liked multiple post post on social media advocating for violence against Palestinians including one that called for turning Gaza into a slaughter house anat Schwarz is an Israeli filmmaker who had no prior reporting experience before she was assigned by the times to work on the major investigation along with Adam cah and Veteran Times Reporter Jeffrey Gelman on Wednesday The Intercept published another in-depth investigation that further questions the times are article and the reporting process behind it it's headlined between the hammer and the Anvil the story behind The New York Times October 7th Expose and the two intercept reporters who wrote it join us today Jeremy skill is a senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept he's joining us from Germany and Ryan Grim is the intercepts bureau chief in Washington DC where he joins us from we welcome you both to democracy Now Jeremy let's begin with you can you lay out first the significance of the New York Times article that's at the center of the controversy and then talk about your latest piece that looks into how it all came about well Amy in early December uh you had the death toll skyrocketing in Gaza you had a number of nations including those that are allies with Israel starting to speak out about uh the death toll among women children the elderly um and part of a pattern of what we've seen throughout the course of these five months of scorched Earth attacks against Gaza is that whenever Israel perceives itself to be losing the narrative war or when it needs to uh remind the public uh of its perception that Israel is the only victim in this story um they unload a new round of of attacks against a variety of uh of individuals uh or organizations that um are working in Gaza or living in Gaza human beings um we saw that with the attacks against unra we saw that with the attacks against elifa and other hospitals and in early December uh prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government really began an intense propaganda campaign uh to convince the world that Hamas um had engaged in a syst systematic campaign of rape aimed at Jewish women uh and girls and then they launched this uh this fake criticism of feminist organizations saying that they had all systematically failed to stand up and denounce this um systematic rape regime that had been intentionally implemented by Hamas in the October 7th attacks and on the day that Netanyahu made his most prominent statement about this uh President Biden was at a fundraising event in Boston and he issued he made a statement at his speech that echoed what Netanyahu said and said the world you know can't turn away and and ignore this um well what was happening at that very moment was that the New York Times with one of its most prominent International correspondents Jeffrey Gelman he had recently um uh hit the ground in Israel and um he was working gettelman uh Enlisted the help of two individuals um that were going to work with him there and Gelman had proposed three uh lines of investigation and one of them was uh SE the issue of sexual violence and the two individuals that Gelman was working with um one of them is a very young person who's only recently gotten into journalism Adam Cella and he had mostly been like a food journalist and has a background in looking at agricultural issues ETC he had started to uh write some freelance pieces that were dipping into the Waters of uh of politics and the and the conflict but uh a quite inexperienced reporter and then the other was someone with no reporting experience outside of making some uh documentary films and that is an not Schwarz um it's unclear how anat Schwarz in particular um got involved with this project and as you mentioned she had early on in the Israeli attacks against Gaza um liked a tweet that actually was cited by the international court of justice um as a potentially uh a statement of potential genocidal um incitement she also liked a tweet from the Israeli government uh promoting the debunked uh allegation that 40 babies had been beheaded on October 7th which is entirely false um as well as another tweet that said we must just refer to Hamas as as Isis um and so they they start off on this investigation and our understanding from sources is that the overwhelming majority of the interviews and reporting that was being done on the ground was being handled by um anat Schwarz and Adam cah and we uh we discovered a a podcast interview with anat Schwarz in Hebrew uh that she gave where she it's a shocking um podcast in how much detail she offers about the process that they used when they were reporting it um and just to to put it in a nutshell she describes how uh the first thing that she did was start to call around to what she describes as all of the Israeli hospitals that have facilities that are called room four facilities these would be the the intake places uh where people uh who have been victims of uh sexual crimes including assault and rape uh Etc where they would be examined or their cases would be referred and she said that not a single one of them uh reported that they had any reports of sexual uh assault or rape on October 7th uh she then um started calling around to uh Rape Crisis Hotline and describes how uh she had this what she described as an intense conversation with the manager of the Rape Crisis Hotline in that part of Israel where she was dumbfounded when he was saying he didn't have any calls reporting sexual assault or rape and uh she's saying how is this possible and um then she starts talking she goes to a holistic uh therapeutic center that was established um at a a former high-end Retreat Center outside of Tel Aviv um where mostly people from the Nova Rave uh where there were uh attacks and where a couple of hundred people were were killed it was a place where people could do alternative medicine and yoga relaxation therapy I mean people who were highly traumatized and she goes there and her characterization was that she sensed what she called a conspiracy of Silence among the therapists because none of them were were telling her yes we're treating people who were raped or had um experienced sexual assault and and so when she went through all the official channels the places where you would reach out to see if you're if you're exploring if there's a pattern here what what then happened is she starts to uh look at who's been interviewed about alleged rapes during the October 7th attacks and end up then going and re-interviewing a handful of people who already had made assertions that they witnessed uh rapes and some of these people uh had told varying versions of their stories which in it of itself is not necessarily mean that they didn't witness something I mean these are people that were in the midst of an incredibly violent episode um but more Central to that is that some of the people that the New York Times relied on to assert that there was a systematic intentional campaign of rape weaponized by Hamas were people that have no forensic credentials no crime scene credentials uh these were people that um are not legally uh permitted in Israel to determine rape um that they relied on these individuals to make this claim uh that um that there was a systematic rape regime implemented and some of those people Amy um have well documented track records of promoting very incendiary narratives about atrocities that occurred on October 7th that were flagrantly false just two examples one of the the most prominent or ubiquitous figures that has emerged in Israel's narrative that Hamas committed systematic rape is an architect from New Jersey named Sher Mendes who is living in Israel now and is a a member of the Israeli Defense Force rabinal unit um and she was deployed to uh prepare women's bodies for burial um in in in the bases where Hamas attacked military facilities um and she's been quoted widely saying that they saw widespread evidence of of rapes rape and that she personally saw it she described um broken pelvises um not just among uh you know soldiers but among grandmothers and children um but Sher Mendes also uh was quoted by the daily maale as saying that a pregnant woman had a fetus cut out of her body and the the fetus was beheaded and then the mother was beheaded um this is entirely false U we've gone through through all of the official uh Records that Israel has put out on people who died that day there was no pregnant woman um killed that day that's been thoroughly debunked um she also relied on Yosi landow a senior official at zaka zaka has zaka has been it's an ultra Orthodox private rescue organization um it's been exposed by haret the newspaper in Israel as one of the leading promoters of false information um and also that they contaminated the crime scene by moving um evidence around that actual professionals could have done they also have promoted the beheaded baby stories Etc so the New York Times They can't find anyone uh who works in the rape crisis centers at the hospitals among therapists um that are are coming forward and saying yeah we we saw this or we have documentation of this so they go to people who already were known to have promoted false information and then they start relying on their testimony to paint this tapestry this notion that there was a systematic regime and in the New York Times article they do not ever disclose that their key Witnesses um have serious credibility problems um so this is at a minimum we are looking at a New York Times piece that uh failed to inform its readers about severe credibility issues uh among some of its Premier Witnesses quote unquote that it put forward I wanted to go to a part of a podcast interview that anat Schwarz did on January 3 third produced by Israel's Channel 12 it was conducted in Hebrew hin not talks about the difficulties and pressures and Reporting the story maybe the standard that we have to meet may not be realistic maybe it won't be this complete big story that is told from beginning to end and is complex and has details and nuances and characters and maybe we are aiming too high then there was the UN woman and the silence and there was a lot of preoccupation with so I said we're missing momentum maybe the UN isn't addressing sexual assault because no Outlet will come out with a declaration about what happened there and that it will no longer be interesting and at some point after one of the rewrites we said okay that's it and then I already informed all the people and the Israeli police who are waiting to see what was going on what was the New York Times not believing there were sexual assaults here and I'm also in this place I'm also an Israeli but I also work for the new New York Times so all the time I'm like in this place between the hammer and the Anvil that's a not short speaking on a podcast on January 3rd she said she felt between the hammer and the Anvil which Jeremy you choose as the title of your piece talk about the significance of that and again the relationship between anat Schwarz and the other reporter the young reporter um Adam Cella well another part of this uh this story is that the one of the the the main um victims that was featured in this is referred to as uh the woman in the black dress um gal abash is is her name and um in fact her family members um are are the individuals in the feature photo on the piece um and another uh thing that we've we've learned from um Israeli researchers who published this is that um when anat Schwarz and Adam Cella went to a woman that had taken photographs um of gal abdos that day uh they told this photographer um that it was her Duty under Israeli hbar to cooperate with the New York Times and let them have all of her photos and hbra um is the term for public diplomacy but what it really is is a is is the notion that Israel should engage in externally focused propaganda in order to win over International audiences primarily Western the United States and and powerful countries to Israel's point of view so she's using this term going and trying to encourage someone to to Cooper with the New York Times not because the New York Times is is is you know the most important news organization in the world but because it's their Duty under Israeli hbra so when she talks about being you know caught between the hammer and the Anvil um she what she's saying is she's caught between her duty to be honest and a journalist and her duty to serve the agenda of the um of the Israeli State um and her partner in this Adam Cella is the nephew of anat schwarz's um partner um and they're not married in fact Amy the New York Times uh they requested a correction from us because we had initially said that it was her nephew um which I think in the context of America and other countries you would say if you're somebody's longtime life partner you would say oh yeah this is my nephew okay they're not blood relatives and they emphasize that she's not married fine we corrected that my question is where are the corrections in the New York Times piece the New York Times has Grave grave mischaracterizations sins of omission Reliance on people who have no uh forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here and to publish this article at a moment when Israel was intensifying after that brief pause where captives were exchanged intensifying its genocidal attack uh against the people of Gaza this this played a very very significant role and the more we learn about this the more we discover that the reporting tactics that the New York Times used um are certainly not up to the standards that the newspaper claims to be promoting they will not issue any corrections on what has already been documented to be very problematic sins of commission and Omission in this piece we're going to break and then come back to this conversation we're talking to Jeremy skahill senior reporter at The Intercept next up he'll be joined by Ryan Grim who is the Washington bureau chief of the intercept and we want to talk to Ryan about what's happening in the New York Times now in response to this story um and the leak investigation that's going on and why a podcast based on their story their own podcast the daily uh didn't air stay with us this is democracy Now democracynow.org the Warren peace report I'm Amy Goodman we're speaking with intercept reporters Jeremy skahill and Ryan Grim about their expose uh into the New York Times article that was published at the end of December they published another one in January we asked the New York Times for a response uh to your article and the international editor Phil pen responded quote Miss Schwarz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process she made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work we remained confident in the accuracy of our reporting and standby the team's investigation but as we've said her likes of offensive and opinionated social media posts predating her work with us are unacceptable end quote um Ryan if you can respond to this talk about what's going on internally in the times and um also talk about this leak investigation that's going on within the paper of record I by her own admission in that podcast interview she had significant violence because there are two ways to think about what happened on October 7th the first way is that it was a day of extraordinary Mayhem and violence the Israeli defenses melted away not only did you have you know several thousand Hamas Fighters stream across the fence but you also had hundreds of civilians some Associates with gangs come across and in that context the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands kind of war and violence that's one way to think about October 7th the other way to think about it is that Hamas intentionally and systematically designed a a a a kind of uh strategy of weaponizing rape and sexual violence that was what an not Schwarz and the New York Times kind of believed going into the investigation and often times as journalists we have something that we think we're going to be able to prove we report it out and then we can't quite get it like it just it we just don't land the story but what the times did is they wrote is they is they wrote the story anyway but that gets you then to the Daily episode so this article comes out at the very end of December as the New York Times always does it's its Landmark pieces get turned into episodes of their flagship podcast the daily but immediately after the story came out it started coming under criticism because as Jeremy pointed out a lot of the named subjects of the story have enormous credibility problems and so that's this starts getting pointed out inside the times the producers of the daily have their own kind of uh factchecking process where they go over the stories and the original script that was you know produced for that first episode had to be discarded because the producers there couldn't stand behind it so they redrafted a second script which had a lot of caveats and was closer to the first version that I laid out uh just now which is which is an an interesting podcast episode and is something worth exploring but if they had aired that it would have raised questions about why they were walking away from the certainty of the original piece so we reported on uh the kind of minations inside uh the New York Times about this the controversy uh the disputes that were going on and since then uh as vny fa reported uh the New York Times has rather than reviewing the kind of Journalism that that went into this uh they are kind they are La launching a leak investigation to try to figure out who's talking to us in February one of the reporters behind the New York Times investigation the Pulitzer prizewinning reporter Jeffrey gettelman spoke at a conference on conflict related sexual violence hosted by Columbia University he talked about the pece I did some stories about hostages and pretty soon I mean maybe I don't know within the first few days of of this attack we were hearing reports of rape and mutilations of of women we heard it right away and I don't maybe people in this room remember those videos of the female soldiers being taken away in the body of that that one woman shaie lock in the back of a pickup truck half naked right away it just it just there was obviously crimes against women uh that happened so because uh sadly I have some experience doing this I began looking to see what we could find out and I worked with two other colleagues and we interviewed almost 200 people over the course of two months and what we found I don't want to even use the word evidence because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you're trying to to prove an allegation or prove a case in court that's that's not my role um we all have our roles and and my role is to is to document so I wanted to get a response to um what he is saying there um uh he's talking by the way to Cheryl Sandberg the former COO of meta Facebook Jeremy skill if you can talk about what he sees his role as a reporter I mean this is this is an astonishing comment from Jeffrey Gelman I mean what is he talking about that it's not the job of journalists to um uncover evidence if you're going to uh have a headline um that by by the way let me just say this the screams without words uh uh headline comes from a source named RZ Cohen who was at the Nova music festival and he claims to have witnessed um a a rape of a woman uh that he said was and he's a special forces Israeli special forces veteran and he has been very adamant that the people who he saw committing this crime were not Hamas that they were um uh Ordinary People um and he has said that in numerous interviews um but to have that and and he's the one who said it was like screams without words um they're using a headline from a person whose testimony undermines the thesis of their Blockbuster story so just just to put that on the table but for ghettman to say that it's not the job of journalists to produce evidence when you're going to say in the middle of a war where civilians are being starved and killed in in a in a in a in a operation that is under review now by the international court of justice for genocide if you're going to then make an allegation that Hamas implemented a systematic rape campaign and you say it's not your job to produce evidence then what is the job of a journalist in a situation like this because honestly if you really read their piece carefully much of it is in uendo um much of it is based on sources who have either credibility issues or lack professional credentials uh to weigh in on these matters this is a grave grave situation this is one of the most important pieces of Journalism that has been produced during this war and one of the most consequential and for the lead reporter who himself has won the Pulitzer and is an experienced War correspondent to say that it's not the job of a New York Times to present evidence in an article asserting that Hamas systematically raped women um it's astonishing it's astonishing and also the prestigious George pul award for foreign reporting this year was awarded to the staff of the New York New York Times a citation reading in part quote for unsurpassed coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas times reporters use firsthand accounts to demonstrate how brutal and well planned the Hamas attack was end quote and this article in question that we're talking about screams without words was apparently part of the package submitted by the New York Times that won the award Ryan Grim if you can talk about that and the desent within the times itself I before I answer that I did want to add one thing to what uh Jeremy was saying it it is remarkable that Cheryl Sandberg was on that panel with Jeffrey Gelman because on on December 4th and Jeremy talked about how this campaign was rolled out on December 4th Cheryl Sandberg and the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations hosted an event at the UN that that launched the campaign against these feminist organiz organizations for not standing up and and condemning you know hamas's systematic use of rape the next day uh it was it was BB Netanyahu and then and then Biden who piled on that campaign that same day on December 4th sh Sandberg uh penned an OP ED in CNN she also gave interviews or was quoted in the New York Times on that same day in an article uh by Jeffrey Gelman and not Schwarz and and Adam C so they were they were all working together on December 4th to launch this campaign the December Fourth Article in the New York Times was head had a much softer headline it said you know what do we know about the use of sexual violence or about sexual violence uh on October 7th and people can go back and read that story they reported at the time that uh Israel had enormous amounts of forensic evidence uh that they were going through that would establish all of the claims that they were making on uh December 8th or 9th they very quietly corrected that story to say correction uh Israel does not have forensic evidence to back up these claims it is relying on eyewitness test testimony not Schwarz had previously reported in the times that they had quote tens of thousands of eyewitnesses that they were going to bring forward to make these claims so they they they front-loaded this campaign with these major claims that there was forensic evidence and and thousands of witnesses then then their final article comes out you know at at the end of the month and to a casual reader you would come away from reading it saying well they proved it they they made their case uh these these you know this barbaric terrorist organization did use rape systematically against Israeli women and that was used to justify the continuation of of the war on Gaza but then as you said when when the daily tried to look closer at the article they realized they couldn't actually stand up the claims that were be being made in it and so inside the times you have this extremely intense debate going on and and I think leaders at the time have been surprised they're used to external criticism but the amount of internal criticism they're getting has them on the back foot and finally Jeremy we just have 30 seconds but even the use of the term terrorist within the New York Times and the stepping back of uh one of the leading um you know editorial directors yeah I mean there there's there's a lot of uh um there there's a lot of concern right now um particularly among reporters um you know who do work on an international level um that there has been a politicization of uh of this war internally within The Newsroom that is impacting the coverage and um I think I think it's pretty clear you can see that in some of the journalism and and now the New York Times um The New York Times has has ended up walking back the major claim that they made and now they're saying hedge wordss it may have have occurred that's one of the most significant things we uncovered here Jeremy skill and Ryan Grim they are the co-authors of the piece between the hammer and the Anvil

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024