WEAPONIZING THE WEAPONIZATION OF RAPE

Believe women? Nope. An organized campaign is afoot to undermine the realities of targeted violence against women on October 7.

What the kids are up to these days.

WARNING: This is a continuing discussion of the topic of extreme sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women on October 7, based on Screams Before Silence the documentary discussed in my last post over on Substack (Read it here). I have deliberately not included in this post all of the explicit violence I thought was necessary to confront in Saturday’s essay. Nevertheless, there is more than an average reader should inadvertently stumble on and it is necessarily deeply disturbing content.

In my last post, I discussed the film Screams Before Silence, a documentary exploring the unimaginable inhumanity perpetrated by Hamas operatives and “ordinary” Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7. Specifically, the sexual violence perpetrated against women. I am deeply conflicted about sharing this information. The facts are searing. But the world needs to know what happened.

The inhumanity facing Israelis, the capability of Hamas fighters (and, far more disturbing, “ordinary” Palestinians) to perpetrate the sorts of atrocities they did on October 7 is not incidental to, or a byproduct of, the conflict. This inhumanity is at the heart of the conflict.

We say we all want peace. But as I blabber on about constantly: Only the Palestinians can make peace because only the Palestinians are making war.

But the potential for peace in this case is not like, say, the potential for peace in Ukraine. A ceasefire tomorrow would not erase the dehumanization and ruthless hatred that inspired the atrocious acts of October 7 (and 75 years of other barbaric behaviors) against Israelis.

For three-quarters of a century, Palestinians (and much of the broader Arab world’s populations) have been suckled on debasing, genocidal hatred of Jews. Israel could dismantle all its settlements, permit a “right of return” and agree to every one of the Palestinian leaders’ demands tomorrow and that would not resolve the conflict. Because the conflict is not based on any of the red herrings the world accepts as the “legitimate” grievances of the Palestinians. It is based on the kind of ferocious Jew-hatred and woman-hatred we saw on October 7.

The idea that Israelis can have a ceasefire with a society that produces perpetrators like these is a fundamental misunderstanding.

A compulsory clarification: I’m not saying all Palestinians are culpable for these atrocities. I am saying that they are all part of a society that produced individuals who are capable of perpetrating these atrocities. This is neither a controversial thing to say, nor is it racist: The Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7 did these things not because of their inherent identity — to suggests so would be racist. They did them because they have been trained to do so, to hate Jews with such dehumanizing frenzy that, when presented with the opportunity, they could do things to Jewish bodies that defy the normal human imagination. It is simple rote learning. Palestinian society has debased Jewish humanity to such a degree, and inculcated in ordinary Palestinians such murderous hatred that, given access to weapons and Jews, they were capable of acts that only an infinitesimal few human beings at the worst moments in history have been capable of.

But the topic of this post is an inhumanity much, much closer to home.

At the University of British Columbia — a short drive from my home and where I used to go to work — disturbing stickers have been plastered on campus. This is not unusual. Campuses around North America are stuck with inescapable hate messages these days. These ones are different.

“How Zionists spread sexual violence hoaxes,” reads the eye-grabber. It then calls into question specific allegations of the sexual violence that took place October 7, and concludes: “This is how the zionist [sic] propaganda machine manufactures consent for genocide.”

If you are a glutton for abuse, there is a QR code that leads to The Intercept, the “news” site co-founded by Glenn Greenwald. The first thing you see is a popup reading: “Skip the propaganda. Sign up to read independent journalism,” which would be hil-AR-ious if it were written with the irony The Onion geniuses had in adopting the tagline “America’s Finest News Source.”

The Intercept devotes 7,000 words to undermining the legitimacy of the narrative of sexual abuse on October 7. It is an analysis of the New York Times’ research, editing and fact-checking process that led to the groundbreaking analysis of how sexual abuse was weaponized by Hamas.

But buried in the avalanche of words (I know — I should talk!) is this gem of a paragraph:

“The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a ‘second wave,’ contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details ‘establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7’ — a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.”

In the wake of sexual atrocities so barbarous the sensible human mind can hardly assimilate them, the approach by this “news” site and by overseas “pro-Palestinians” who printed and distributed those stickers, it seems, is to nitpick. They claim, like Donald Trump, that the New York Times is fake news. They argue that, sure, Hamas and the “ordinary” Palestinians who followed them into Israel that day engaged in sexual violence but, heck, that always happens. They even go so far as to argue — I really don’t get the strategy here — that “ordinary” Palestinians may have defiled female bodies and mutilated their genitals, but that is not something our saintly Hamas operatives would do.

Their case, such as it is, rests on the idea that there is some sort of fundamental moral difference between “random” acts of unimaginable defilement of women’s bodies and a deliberate, premeditated plan to do just that.

So, two things …

First, the evidence is unequivocal. As Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the UN Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, said in the documentary (and as I quoted in my last post), these acts were not random. They were planned.

“It depicts a pattern that could not have been unless it was premeditated and preconceived by Hamas themselves,” she says.

Second, though, and more to the point: What do overseas “pro-Palestinian” activists think they gain by making this distinction?

Honestly, I find their scenario even more dehumanizing and terrifying.

Imagine that the crimes perpetrated against women that day, and especially the deliberate, explicit torture of their genitals, were not the innovation of a few deeply disturbed Hamas leaders who ordered the invaders to behave in this way.

Imagine this instead: That scores of “ordinary” Palestinian men independently conceived of these atrocities all on their own — that, one by one, in different locations, at different times throughout the day, countless men came up with the idea of impaling the genitals of Israeli women with nails, iron rods, wooden sticks and metal objects.

This is the scenario the “pro-Palestinians” want us to believe.

And that, if you ask me, is far more horrifying.

On a different scale, but horrifying in entirely different ways because it is done by people in my neighborhood, and probably by university students who we hope are the brightest minds of our generations, is the systematized debasing and dismissal of sexual violence against Jewish women.

Believe women? Nope. Not on our local campuses today. Not if weaponizing the weaponization of rape can help the Palestinian cause.

At what point does the world wake up to the real problem here?