The Australian Sky News host Sharri Markson has done a terrific job reporting from Israel this past week. Of course this was mainly done as an acknowledgment and a reminder of the horrific atrocities that happened on October 7, 2023 by Hamas, and are still happening by the terror organisation. We must never forget.
In her programs from Israel she had a number of moving interviews with victims of all this, including those who survived the day and were able to speak about it, and some who were finally released as hostages. We heard such tragic and shocking stories, especially as to what the women had to endure at the hands of their Islamist captors.
Sharri and others asked some obvious questions that still deserve answers: Where are all the Western feminists when you need them? Why have hardly any of them been speaking out for the Israeli – and other – females being treated so diabolically by Hamas? Why the silence? Why the selective outrage?
Yes, some voices over the past twelve months have been heard on this, but far too few. For example, late last year Candice Holdsworth asked, “Why can’t ‘intersectional feminists’ condemn Hamas’s misogyny?” She said in part:
It is surely possible to express opposition to Israel’s military action in Gaza without whitewashing Hamas’s crimes. But in recent weeks it has been disturbing to learn just how many people are willing to deny Hamas’s atrocities, or to view its sadistic violence as a legitimate form of ‘resistance’.
When self-declared feminists join in with this apologism, they make clear that they do not see all women as worthy of the same moral consideration. The woke belief in an ‘intersectional’ hierarchy of oppression, which paints Palestinians as eternal victims and Jews as oppressors, seems to have blinded them to the brutal violence that so many Israeli women were subjected to six weeks ago. Their rigid ideology will not let them see Hamas’s mass rape of women for the atrocity that it is.
And a half year ago Nils A. Haug wrote about this as well:
The reality is that for all advocates for women’s welfare, especially in the area of sexual violence, the crucial concern at this time should be the terror perpetrated on defenceless females of all ages through acts of sexual depravity, torture, and death by Hamas in Israel on October 7.
The moral obligation of lovers of peace, and those who hold to the sanctity of human life, is to speak out against injustice. This is particularly so in crimes of violence against the defenceless. It is therefore fitting to expect women’s rights groups to speak out on behalf of traumatized females of all ethnic and religious categories.
This approach was ratified in by Nobel Peace Prize winner Eli Wiesel in his 1986 acceptance speech: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Archbishop Charles Chaput remarked that “tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil.”
By and large, citizens of many nations are outraged at the lack of widespread condemnation of atrocities purposefully inflicted on vulnerable females of all ages, from toddlers to seniors, by Hamas terror squads on October 7. Particularly shocking is the paucity of denunciation by post-modern Western feminists. To his credit, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately issued a statement to the effect that Hamas violence against Israeli women was “beyond anything that I’ve seen.” In an oblique allusion to Wiesel’s principle, Blinken questioned “why countries, leaders, international organizations were so slow to focus on this.” Blinken, however, overlooks the inference that the Biden Administration’s promotion of leftist, neo-Marxist, identity construals, particularly that of radical feminism, could be a pertinent factor. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20522/feminists-hamas-sexual-violence
Now, a full year on from the terrible events of October 7, a number of books have appeared on this massacre and the events that followed it. I will discuss some of these volumes in the coming days and weeks. Here I note just one volume: After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation by Brendan O’Neill (Spiked, 2024).
After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisationby O'Neill, Brendan (Author)
Chapter 3 of his 170-page book is devoted to this issue. He reminds us that the MeToo movement and the “Believe women” mantra took off in earnest in 2017 after sexual-abuse allegations against fil-maker Harvey Weinstein came to light. But believing ALL women seems to have come to an abrupt halt after Oct. 7.
Because these were ISRAELI women speaking about the sexual violence that they were going through, most Western feminists remained silent. Their obsessive hatred of Israel meant that “believe some women” was now the default position.
O’Neill says that a few women’s groups did speak out, but for the most part these victims were simply not believed:
An entirely new standard of proof, previously unknown in the annals of history, was imposed on those who said there had been sexual violence on 7 October: provide pictorial evidence or we won’t believe you. After watching Bearing Witness, the 43-minute film compiled by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) showing Hamas’s own GoPro footage of its crimes on 7 October Owen Jones said: ‘If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera.’ Since when did we need to see footage of a rape, of rape snuff movie, essentially, before accepting that a rape had occurred?
He continues:
[C]ynicism reigned among the activist class. Vastly more evidence was found for the violation of Israeli women on 7 October then we had ever seen for the MeToo cases that became the cause celebre of influencers in recent years. And yet the righteous of the West believe the latter and disbelieved the former.
Of course Hamas inflicted inhuman treatment on women during its pogrom. The idea that this anti-Semitic terror group would butcher Jewish children in their bedrooms, show hand grenades into bomb shelters with families inside and take an 85-year-old grandmother hostage, but draw the line at sexually assaulting young women, is preposterous. It’s that idea that is fantastical….
It wasn’t the Israelis who tried to raise awareness about sexual violence on 7 October who were engaged in ‘war propaganda’ – it was those who pushed this perfidious claim that Hamas committed no act of gender-based inhumanity during his pogrom….
This is indeed where we have ended up, in seven short years, between the MeToo moment and the post-pogrom moment – in a situation where progressives’ new slogan, never said out loud, of course, is essentially this: ‘Believe fascists.’ Believe the fascists who inflicted the pogrom on the Jewish State and disbelieve their victims. Believe the killers of women, not women. How has this happened? How did the West’s self-styled anti-fascists end up doing PR for fascists? How did the believers of women become excuse-makers for rapists? Why does MeToo not include Jews?
To my mind, this is a story of dehumanization. The holding of the women of the Jewish nation to a different moral standard to women everywhere else is clearly a species of bigotry.
And again:
Ironically, it has the feel of a neo-colonial crusade, where one foreign nation is singled out for inequitable treatment presumably on the basis that it is morally inferior in some fashion. This one people is to be denied the resources – in this case the moral resources of the benefit of the doubt and belief in women’s stories – that other peoples are afforded. The activist class’s disbelief of Israeli women is more than just a breach of the principles of MeToo – it is an imperious indication that the Jewish nation is a lesser nation, and untrustworthy nation, a nation that lies. It marks Israel out as uniquely deceitful among the family of nations….
It isn’t only the women of Israel who have been disbelieved since 7 October – so also has the entire nation. October denialism goes beyond rape denialism. There is a more sweeping atrocity denialism, too. There is pogrom denialism full stop….
His entire book is well-worth reading, and I will feature more of it in the days ahead. But this issue of ignoring Israeli women and the deplorable sexual violence they are experiencing simply because there happen to be Jewish really beggars belief and tells us all we need to know about so much of modern feminism and the MeToo movement.
