FAKE FEMINISTS EXPLOIT RAPE

Activists worldwide deny the use of sexualized violence against Israeli and Palestinian women — unless it can be used as a tool to attack Israel.

#BelieveWomen* (Conditions apply)

NOTE: This article addresses sexualized violence and other atrocities.

The response by “pro-Palestinian” activists worldwide to the rape of Israeli women on October 7 and after has been a symptom of a massive moral disorder.

Rape denialism, which has spread from social media whackjobs to erstwhile legitimate voices, is a symptom of a possibly unprecedented socio-psychological crisis among “pro-Palestinian” activists. Spreading virally across the larger left, this social sickness threatens everything the progressive movement claims to stand for about believing victims of sexualized violence, zero tolerance for these crimes, and the very concept of intersectionality.

Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic US congressman who deservedly lost his party’s nomination primary last month, went out of his way to describe the rape of Israeli women as “propaganda.” He eventually recanted when it threatened his career but thankfully he has been extricated from political life (albeit not mostly or much because of this incident).

What happened to #BelieveWomen?

More than this, though, what would motivate an elected official — or any decent human — to go out on a limb on this atrocious topic? What moral or strategic reasons could there possibly be to question or qualify rape as a weapon of terror?

Consider: Even if there were not plentiful and graphic evidence of rape (there is, and has been since the earliest hours of October 7) why would anyone assume that Palestinians, alone among almost all the peoples of the world, would exclude that atrocious instrument of war?

We knew — and almost no one denied — that Palestinian terrorists had employed humankind’s most unspeakable acts of violence against babies, grandparents and anyone they could lay their hands on. Why — in what fantastical universe — would someone assume, and then go out of their way to publicly assert, that this most tragically common of war crimes had not occurred in this instance?

Bowman was just one example of the phenomenon of Palestinian rape denialism. For some reason, the world accepts (even celebrates, as in this one example from my hometown) Palestinian violence, but many absolutely draw the line at sexualized violence.

On social media, people say whatever they want and there are rarely consequences. But surely, someone like Bowman would have known this freakishly specific denialism around so fraught a topic would come back to bite him.

What possible benefit could there be to making this assertion? Where is the logic?

Sure, he and so many others seemed to be saying, Palestinian terrorists have abducted, lynched, stabbed and murdered entire families huddled together. They use child combatants, employ human shields, and construct military infrastructure in mosques, schools, kindergartens and civilian neighborhoods.

But rape? How dare you! Who could even fathom such atrocities?

As an article in Ms. magazine notes:

The same denial that usually accompanies individual claims of sexual violence … was inflicted collectively on the victims of the attack — and not by the usual suspects, but by the very institutions erected to eradicate conflict-related sexual violence.

Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israeli academic and activist who has taken on a sort of solo mission to investigate and raise awareness about both the crimes and their denial, experienced a perverse unwillingness among those whose careers and lives have been devoted to combatting gender-based violence to not get involved in this instance.

[M]ultiple feminist scholars turned down requests for interviews with Elkayam-Levy and her traveling companions because they did not want to view the collected materials or they did not want to talk publicly due to the deep polarization over the status of the Palestinian territories and Israel’s response to the attack.

In other words, we’ll give sexual-based atrocities a pass cuz Palestine.

This is the practical application of an academic trend that has developed in recent years. Even though Palestine is one of the worst places on the planet to be a woman, female Palestinians are weaponized in a global campaign that ignores their actual needs and exploits their situation for political gain.

In one of far too many examples, the document “Palestine is a feminist issue” takes from Palestinian women their experiences with oppression and violence but, rather than giving them any substantive aid, uses them instead as a battering ram in a concerted campaign to demonize Israel.

Intersectional feminism is a framework that holds that women’s overlapping, or intersecting, identities impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination. Intersectionality rejects the idea that a woman’s experience can be reduced to only her gender, and insists that we look at the multiple factors shaping her life: race, class, ethnicity, disability, citizenship status, sexual orientation, and others, as well as how systems of oppression are connected. This framework has been developed and pushed by Black women whose particular oppression is often erased due to the lack of intersectional analysis.

When we look at the world through an intersectional feminist lens, it becomes clear that Palestine is a feminist issue.

But, you see, that is not what’s happening here. This is not about the multiple identities of a person being considered in the context of her experiences. This is not a rejection of “the idea that a woman’s experience can be reduced to only her gender.” It’s the opposite. It is an eclipsing of her gendered experience in service of a nationalist movement that is inherently violent and misogynistic.

Domestic violence in Palestine is an almost completely ignored crisis. Fully one-third of Palestinian women experience violence at the hands of their husbands every year — but instead of addressing or seeking to ameliorate this horrific figure, it is exploited for political purposes.

A few years back, Dubravka Simonovic, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women, said Palestinian men beat their wives and daughters because of Israel. In what other scenario would feminists excuse male violence against women as justified because “If x wouldn’t provoke me, I wouldn’t have to beat you!” In this, as in so much else x = Zionists. And that eclipses everything else we claim to stand for.

No need to educate Palestinian men that women are not for hitting nor to punish the perpetrators. If only the occupation ended, women in Palestine would live in paradise. Domestic violence is rampant — and more than half of Palestinian women and close to two-thirds of Palestinian men think women should take it for the sake of keeping the family together — but overseas activists insist Zionism is their only problem.

Activists ignore or outright deny sexualized violence — against Palestinian and Israeli women — because it doesn’t advance their political agenda.

The Palestinian movement, including the larger left worldwide, is not recognizing or practicing intersectionality when it comes to Palestinian women. Quite the opposite. Palestinian women’s identities as women are being debased and abused. Their very experiences with sexualized violence is not challenged but celebrated as just another tool in the kit to attack Israel.

The mania to deny sexualized violence against Israeli women goes even further. This is not so much political exploitation as something even more macabre, a mental disorder on a huge scale.

What this says about the Palestinian movement, the feminist movement, and the forced polygamous marriage of these two with the global left is that Palestinianism trumps everything else. The hatred of Israel justifies the world’s ignoring of violence against both Palestinian and Israeli women.

When Linda Sarsour says you can’t be a Zionist and a feminist, it is a tactic far closer to Goebbels — “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” — than to Steinem, Friedan or anyone else in the legitimate feminist movement.

Fake feminists appropriate the language of feminism for a paternalistic nationalist agenda, demonstrating no concern for Palestinian women. Less than no concern, in fact, because not only do they not help them, they exploit women and their experiences with violence for their political agenda. It is appalling.

Have you noticed I always put “pro-Palestinian” in scoffquotes? This is why.

Palestinianism poisons everything it touches. Never has this been clearer than in the excusing, exploitation and celebration of rape and violence against women in service of the Palestinian cause — a cause that has been almost unanimously and uncritically embraced by the larger left worldwide.

This needs to end. Palestinianism threatens to undermine everything we on the left cherish — core concepts of believing women and opposing sexualized violence being among the most obvious.

For the sake of women — and to save ourselves — the left needs a cordon sanitaire to protect our values from those of the Palestinian movement.