Gaza at war city destroyed by idf attacks, aerial rare view Image: ImageBank4u/shutterstock.com Threatening the messenger instead of addressing the message is one of history's less convincing tells. Nicholas Kristof publishes a deeply reported piece in the New York Times collecting horrific allegations of sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees , and Israel's response appears to be skipping past the whole "investigate the accusations" phase and going directly to threatening the newspaper. Very normal, very confidence-in-the-facts behavior. "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," Israel's ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media  post  on Thursday.…