Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Good.

(I’m reserving that space until the funny dog rape memes come out. They have to be on the way.)

Israeli officials not only released a bombshell report this week extensively documenting Hamas violence on and after the October 7 terrorist ambush, but they are also suing The New York Times for libel as a response to its publishing Nick Kristof’s outrageous claim that Israel was torturing Palestinian prisoners by, among other methods, having them sexually assaulted by trained dogs. The Times also released the libelous accusation on the day before a new, thoroughly sourced report on Hamas violence, “Silenced No More,” was scheduled for release. The Times, almost alone among news outlets, refused to publish that because it reflected poorly on Hamas. It preferred to assert that Jews are training Lassie and Rin Tin Tin to get off on anal rape.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced May 14, “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”

The news media has been abusing its privilege under New York Times v. Sullivan with increasing boldness in recent years, and many have suggested (including me) that the standards for punishable slander and libel need to be re-thought in light of a profession no longer committed to honesty and independent public service. To be fair, it is jolly decent of the Times to eliminate any question that the paper is nothing less than a Democratic talking point propaganda organ. Democrats hate Israel and Jews now, or perhaps you haven’t noticed. The Times has, as I wrote here (#6), even doubled-down on Kristof’s evidence-free claims.

As CNN token conservative Scott Jennings wrote on “X”: “Dying on dog rape hill. What a choice.”

Comment of the Day: “What Exactly Are California’s ‘Values’? Can Anybody Explain?

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Sarah B, not to be confused with the other eminent commenter here with a similar handle, put together a two-part comment that provides an overview of the growing problem of sexual predator teachers. Ethics Alarms has done a lot on this topic, but not lately, perhaps because there are so many other things wrong with our education system. This may have been the most recent; I should have had a tag for “predator teachers.”

I should shut up now: it’s a long piece, and worth reading, Here is Sarah B’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Exactly Are California’s “Values”? Can Anybody Explain?”

***

As much as I hate to defend California, this is hardly unique.  Wyoming has similar policies and we are about as red as they come.  A previous principal in my town harassed/seduced teachers and students who reached the age of 18.  Because all of his predations were of adults (even if only technically), he remained at his job for nearly a dozen years before enough complaints and the loss of too many teachers forced the school board to finally let him go.  Just this last couple of years, a special education teacher was arrested after sexually abusing lots of kids just a few towns over from us.  He had been skirting the edges of the law for years, but finally crossed enough lines that he could be arrested and fired, after abusing at least a handful of kids.

The other stories I know of are teachers who abuse students in other ways, not sexually, but I personally do not see much of a difference between a teacher who sexually harasses students and a teacher who beats students up, since children should be safe and unharmed in the school system if it were any good.  Therefore, I’m picking on a favorite story of mine involving my cousin, since I know many of the particulars that I might otherwise not know in detail.  He worked in one town and was fired for wrestling his students and put a few too many in headlocks.  After being fired for this, he was transferred to another town, where he rug-burnt a few handfuls of his students.  He got fired again, and was hired as the youth pastor at the local Baptist church.  He wrestled a few more kids harshly and is currently not allowed to be the only adult present when the youth group meets. 

Frankly, if one looks at the data, 38% of all students in 7th-12th grade receive sexual harassment/abuse in the public school system from adults, according to some studies in 2017.  I caution that these studies have broad definitions of sexual abuse/harassment, including things ranging from rape to cat-calling to inappropriate jokes and sexual comments.  Of course, the more minor offenses of inappropriate comments and commentary are far more common than the more serious ones.  Grooming behavior is reported separately, but is very common.  The adults also range from teachers to coaches, bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors, and everything in between.  However, 63% of the behavior nationwide comes from teachers.

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Ethics Dunce: D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

As I often say (or think) in such situations, “Yikes!”

I’m going to send you to a thorough exposé over at Signal, a conservative website, which means its thorough coverage of this example of irresponsible conduct in a position of trust as well as a stunning “bias makes you stupid” display will be brushed off by some as just a partisan attack. I’m certain some ideological hostility helped prompt the piece, but it is accurate, which means that Signal has flagged a genuine ethics problem. Good for Signal.

D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler has posted dozens of inflammatory, openly partisan, politically-motivated comments on social media for years,. He has mocked, insulted and attacked conservative Supreme Court Justices (but never the liberal minority). He has reposted with favor attacks on Donald Trump and Elon Musk (for his conservative views.) It appears someone finally told him, “Hey, moron, what are you doing?” and he’s taken down the worst of the tweets. The internet is forever, though. And Metzler has moved to BlueSky, the Twitter/”X” alternative for progressives who can’t tolerate people and opinions that don’t toe the woke line. I regard that as signature significance for Trump Derangement and partisan indoctrination.

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List Incompetence: “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I think this is my third post on “list ethics.” My first was in 2011, reviewing a sloppy, careless list called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History.” The second was in 2020, about a list called “The 25 Greatest Actors Of The 21st Century (So Far).” The list I’m writing about this time is even worse than those two; in fact, it’s unforgivable.

I get it: lists are clickbait and exist so people can argue over them. They almost always have a gimmick: if you make a list of the greatest rock and pop groups of all time, you can’t have The Beatles as #1, because any idiot could decide that. You pick “The Zombies” or “Heart.” Bill James, the baseball stats pioneer, wrote a book ranking the greatest baseball players at each position. Everyone knows that Ted Williams gets #1 in left field, but Bill picked Stan Musial. It’s cynical and dishonest, but lists are arbitrary and meaningless anyway.

I read lots of them and my eyes hurt from rolling. I only get seriously critical when a list covers something I know a lot about. Baseball history and acting history are in that category, and so is popular music history. What I wrote about the baseball list in 2011 applies with even greater force to “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time” compiled by Consequence, a website I never heard of and based on this effort, will never visit again. I wrote (I’m substituting the topic of the list at issue today):

“If you are going to write about history, there is a duty to perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched.. Anyone who looked at the list and assumed that these are [the best vocalists of all time] would be seriously misinformed.”

The list is introduced by this description of its methodology, and its flaw becomes clear. “To generate our list of the top 100 vocalists of all time,” it says, “we polled over 50 musicians, including Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of ’26er Steve Stevens, rising stars like Samia, Blondshell, and Kneecap, and established icons Randy Blythe, Mike Patton, and Linda Perry, plus many more. After we assembled the surveys into the spine of the list, our staff chimed in with more picks, mostly historical, to round things out. The final ranking is a curated perspective on the hundreds of names that were nominated.”

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Clean-up On Aisle Ethics, 5/13/2026

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ironically, I am doing one of these collection posts not because I received TWO emails from the assembled today telling me that I write too many posts, but because of the reason I write as many as I do. I don’t have the time (or the resources) to accomplish my mission as it is, which is to focus ethical analysis on the ethics issues all around us that should be thought of in that context, but seldom are. Why aren’t they? The answer is that they are seldom analyzed in an ethics context because most of our journalists, pundits, educators, politicians, lawyers, and “experts” don’t think about ethics very often, and neither do most of our friends, relatives and colleagues.

Today I felt bombarded with ethics stories and questions, and suffered ethics brain lock that stopped me from doing some important paying consulting work and meeting looming deadlines. Tomorrow I have a Zoom ethics seminar to teach (I hate Zoom) for two hours smack dab in the middle of the day. I’d love to write full posts on all of these, but I can’t. So here are some short versions…

1. There is a long, excellent Comment of the Day by Sarah B that I intended to get up today. Tomorrow, Sarah. I promise.

2. The Murdough Murders. South Carolina’s high court today overturned the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred, thieving lawyer a manipulated jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in one of those “sensational” trials. The State Supreme Court found that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions had to be thrown out.

Ethics Alarms figured out that the trial and the verdict was a farce and said so in 2024, here.

The State says it will retry Murdaugh, which will cost the state millions and achieve nothing even if he is convicted of murder again, and he shouldn’t be. He is already serving a prison term (for financial crimes) that will amount to a life sentence. The State’s claimed motives for the two killings are bats, automatic reasonable doubt with a thinking jury.

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Ethics Dunces: The San Francisco Giants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable.

But then, it is San Francisco, after all.

For some reason, the San Francisco Giants first year manager, Tony Vitello, couldn’t figure out that his outfielders’ post-victory celebratory ritual was inappropriate in a public venue, on TV, while playing America’s Pastime in front of family audiences.

The Commissioner’s office finally told them to cut it out. Why it took until May, I have no idea.

I would have fined the manager, the players and the team. A lot.

Morons.

Ethics Alarms Encore: “Aesop’s Unethical and Misleading Fable: The North Wind and the Sun”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

north-wind-and-the-sun-story-oil-painting

[ Like the hillbilly who pledged to take a bath every week whether he needed it or not, this is a post from 2011 that I vow to re-post every ten years whether I need to or not. It is the mystery post of Ethics Alarms: a throw-away essay on a slow ethics day that is one of a handful that accumulates new views regularly. (Another post in this category is here, but that is a bit more understandable.) I was moved to do another re-post because an episode of “Mad Men,” which I am finally watching (and glad, because it is an excellent ethics series) had a character using Aesop’s Worst Fable Ever to explain advertising philosophy.  I wrote the original post talking with my late wife  how Aesop’s Fables were joining Mother Goose stories,  Edward Lear limericks and American folk songs in the Discarded Bin of our culture. I then stumbled upon a fable I had never read or heard about.  To my surprise the post attracted intense criticism from fans of the story; I even had to ban a commenter who got hysterical about it. Apparently there are a lot of Sun-worshipers out there. Anyway, here it is again.]

Today, by happenstance, I heard an Aesop’s Fable that I had never encountered before recited on the radio. Like all Aesop’s Fables, at least in its modern re-telling, this one had a moral attached , and is also a statement of ethical values. Unlike most of the fables, however, it doesn’t make its case. It is, in fact, an intellectually dishonest, indeed an unethical, fable.

It is called “The North Wind and the Sun,” and in most sources reads like this:

“The North Wind and the Sun disputed as to which was the most powerful, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first strip a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind first tried his power and blew with all his might, but the keener his blasts, the closer the Traveler wrapped his cloak around him, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do. The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth. The Traveler no sooner felt his genial rays than he took off one garment after another, and at last, fairly overcome with heat, undressed and bathed in a stream that lay in his path.”

The moral of the fable is variously stated as “Persuasion is better than Force” , or “Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.”

The fable proves neither. In reality, it is a vivid example of dishonest argument, using euphemisms and false characterizations to “prove” a proposition that an advocate is biased toward from the outset. Continue reading →

Ethics Quotes of the Week: David Harsanyi and Seth Mandel on Nicholas Kristof’s Anti-Israel Libel

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“The only question now is whether Kristof is a dupe for Hamas apologists who can’t be trusted to apply basic journalistic standards to his writing or a willing participant who doesn’t care about them. Either way, he doesn’t deserve to be a journalist”

David Harsanyi in “Nick Kristof’s grotesque journalistic malpractice”

“We want to believe that Nick Kristof and all the people who defended and shared his article are just like us—believers in honesty, men and women of integrity, a community of truth-seekers with a baseline sense of human decency. We want to believe this in part because of that very sense of human decency. But we are making a massive error. Kristof’s named sources not only provided no evidence for his lurid bestiality fantasies but themselves were also people with massive credibility deficits…And there’s another reason we want to believe that Israel’s critics are morally intact. Plenty of them are. Those are probably the ones we don’t hear from. Unfortunately, the ones we keep hearing from don’t believe this conflict has anything to do with where Palestinians live but rather that Israelis live at all.”

Seth Mandel in “The End of Our Illusions.”

I don’t cite these two pieces as an appeal to authority. I reached the same conclusions in my post here before I read either of them. They do, however, reinforce my conclusion that Kristof, the Times staff that published his swill, and anyone you know who cites it, defends it or believes it are not to be trusted or respected. They are bent, or they are stupid and ignorant. There is no less damning conclusion.

What Exactly Are California’s “Values”? Can Anybody Explain?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ProPublica, an almost entirely pro-progressive, anti-conservative “independent public interest watchdog” organization, shockingly goes after our most progressive state (it’s a close competition), revealing that California allows teachers who have been caught sexually harassing students to keep teaching anyway.

What?? Indeed this seems to be the case. The investigative reporting website states in part, after relating the tale of a teacher named Agan who after an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach” based on multiple complaints by students, hired by two other schools prompting sexual harassment accusation by students a

“A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools.” Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation. The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime.  “The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement.” 

Yikes. What’s going on here? That key question in ethics inquiries seems to be this: California’s kinder, gentler, incompetent approach to enforcing even minimal personal responsibility appears to have resulted in a bizarre calculation that puts children at risk. See, Agan, and many other teachers, haven’t criminally assaulted students or at at least can’t be proved to have done so beyond a reasonable doubt. So as long as the unprofessional, emotionally damaging, conflict-ridden sexual harassing conduct doesn’t rise to the level of a felony, California appears to be satisfied to let bygones be bygones, and a male teacher who leers and drools over and even touches female students get second and third chances to change their ways.

I assume that the teachers unions have a great deal to do with this disconnect that and the fact that the now fairly dead-in-the-water #MeToo movement disgraced itself by turning into a willing DEI weapon. Like so much that goes on in California while alleged adults stand mute and passively by, I don’t get this at all. What does California care about, besides catering to illegal immigrants and environmental virtue-signaling? What value system does a state embrace when it shrugs off sexual misconduct by its teachers?

When Will Indefensible Stunt Casting Stop Me From Seeing a Movie? This is When…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

That’s Ellen, now Eliot, Page above, the talented actress who decided to be surgically altered into male form, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the 5’1″ delicate and frail trans performer was cast in director Christopher Nolan’s big budget version of Homer’s “Odyssey” as Achilles, one of the greatest of Greek mythology heroes, a badass so feared that his absence from the battlefield prolonged the Trojan War.

I have no idea why such a deliberately political and silly casting choice would be made (or allowed) but I don’t care. I only watched the movie where Bill Murray was cast as FDR because I wanted to see if he could pull it off (no, not even close), but casting Page as Achilles insults the audience’s intelligence. Now, there was a Greek hero in the Illiad whom Page might have played: Ajax the Lesser, a diminutive warrior with a Napoleon complex. But if Achilles is barely over five feet, then Ajax the Lesser would have to be a midget.

No, I’m not so much bothered by Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy. It is also stunt casting but she is exotic and gorgeous, and one could imagine the African’s unique beauty launching a thousand ships.

I love the Illiad and the Odyssey, and I’m open to new interpretations as long as they don’t defile the stories or make them ridiculous. I draw the line, however, at this.

I sure would have liked to have Curmie’s take here, but he’s off in a No Kings rally somewhere…