Footage released from an interrogation of a captured Hamas terrorist. He tells the interrogator that included in his directives were instructions to rape girls and women. X.
On Oct. 7, Hamas unleashed a savage assault. They were equal-opportunity killers, kidnappers, and abusers. Their bloody hysteria whacked everyone in their path — babies, the elderly, Israeli Arabs, Thai workers, Bedouins, special needs children, and, not surprisingly, Israeli Jews.
They especially delight in targeting women — raping them, slaughtering them, cutting babies out of pregnant women’s wombs, torturing mothers and grandmothers in front of their families — and, I fear, sexually enslaving some of the hostages.
The world witnessed these travesties because the barbarians gleefully filmed them and then encouraged Palestinians and pro-Palestinian progressives to spread them across social media.
It showed brutal gender- and sexual-based violence, including rape and femicide. One video shows a woman who appears to have been beaten and bleeding into her shorts, forced out of a Jeep in Gaza. Another video shows a woman stripped down to her underwear and lying face down in a truck; her legs twisted at unnatural angles. Hamas gunmen sit on her body, and bystanders spit on it.
These videos and many, many more taken by the terrorists themselves were secondary assaults on the victims’ self-worth. It made this orgy of misogyny one of the bloodiest and most publicized attacks on women in history.
The feminist blindness to these crimes is particularly outrageous given gender studies’ stated commitment to eradicating rape culture, with its silence, its skepticism, its victim-shaming, and its victim-blaming.
But this violation also points to a deeper, endemic scandal the feminist movement has silenced, namely, many radical feminists’ innate aversion to Jewish women and Jewish issues.
Even though many Jews launched the women’s movement, feminism has long had a Jewish problem. From Betty Friedan to Bella Abzug, Jewish women were among the most visible forces in American feminism — even as feminists often rendered invisible their particular challenges as Jewish women facing sexism and antisemitism.
So to feminists who hate Israel, the women that Hamas targeted were not women but merely Jews — or subhumans — not worthy of solidarity.
Oh, but we could call this heartlessness toward Jews — and silence about Palestinian patriarchy and honor killings — “blocked at the intersectionalism.”
Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It recognizes that certain individuals face multiple and intersecting forms of structural discrimination. We all deserve to have our voices heard, our faces and experiences reflected in culture and media, and our unique needs addressed through relevant policies.
But you don’t get up one day and get to say, ‘I’m kind of forced to rape and murder because I’ve been blocked.’
As a form of intellectual activism, the approach by which we challenge exclusionary practices and encourage feminist dialogues is part of the intersectional practice of feminists — when we enact our refusal to be made invisible or irrelevant.
But after three weeks of hearing how this sadistic saturnalia-wild revelry- is now being told the worst abuses never happened.
Once again, the hypocrisy is stunning.
Feminists teach that denying sexual assault intensifies the trauma, erasing the victim’s personhood yet again. Nevertheless, some feminists are questioning the stories — perhaps because they don’t want to confront their blind support for the Palestinian cause.
They want to deny the vile photos and videos, the reports from the media, IDF officials, pathologists, and volunteers at the overworked morgues, or testimonies from captured Hamas criminals describing “having sex with dead bodies, meaning the body of a dead young woman,” because the goal was “to dirty them, to rape them.”
Do you really call yourselves feminists?