New denial of rape

On October 7, Hamas invaded Israel and filmed itself carrying out dozens of human rights atrocities. Some photographs were later taken by the Israeli military and shown to hundreds of journalists, including me. “Pure and violent sadism,” as an Atlantic writer described it graeme woodThere is no bottom.

However, Hamas denies that its men have sexually assaulted Israelis and calls the allegations “lies and slander against Palestinians and their resistance.” And Hamas’s fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West, most of them self-proclaimed progressives, repeat such denials in the face of powerful and thoroughly researched evidence of widespread violations, as documented in a recent report. United Nations Published on Monday.

The interesting question is why? Why refuse to believe that Hamas, which has killed children in their beds, taken elderly women hostage and burned families in their homes, would be capable of doing this?

I’ll get to that in a bit, but first it’s worth looking at what form this denialism takes. One approach is to accept, as a recent article stated, that “the sexual assault may have occurred on October 7”, but no one has actually proven that it was part of an organized pattern. The second is to raise questions about various details of the stories so as to suggest that if there is even a single error, or a witness whose testimony is completely inconsistent, then the entire account must also be false and dishonest. The third way is to treat anything said by an Israeli as inherently suspect.

And finally, the fact that there are hardly any witnesses to the attacks. Where are the women who were allegedly raped? Why don’t they talk?

The answer to that last question is the most serious: overwhelmingly, women who could speak died, for the simple reason that any Israeli who got close enough to a terrorist to be raped was close enough to be killed. Regarding the credibility of Israeli witnesses, Who should anyone investigating this – other than first responders who encountered the victims directly – be interviewed and subpoenaed? In Iran’s misogynistic courts, a woman’s legal testimony is worth half that of a man. In Israel-hating corners of the left, Israeli witnesses appear to have even less value.

But it is the first two types of denial that are in some ways the most shocking, because they are also the most hypocritical.

Were these not the progressives who insisted during the Brett Kavanaugh saga that occasional discrepancies in the memory of traumatic events are perfectly normal? And since when have progressives insisted that the burden of proof to prove a pattern of sexual harassment falls on the victims, most of whose voices, in this case, have been forever silenced?

How quickly the far left goes from “believing women” to “believing Hamas” when the identity of the victim changes. Yes, God forbid, a gang proud boys descend upon Los Angeles to commit the kind of atrocities that Hamas has inflicted on Israeli communities, I’m pretty sure no one on the left would spend any energy trying to find fault with them. Leave aside the question of whether rape took place and how and when it happened.

It is in this ideological environment that we receive the report of the United Nations. In some ways this is a milestone, if only because the UN has never been sympathetic to the Jewish state and has also been extremely slow to notice early evidence of sexual abuse. For anyone who keeps a reasonably open mind but is still skeptical, the report details, among other details, “at least two incidents of rape of female corpses,” “bodies found naked and/or bound. were found, and in one case gagged, and” clearly stated. And there is substantial information that incidents of sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, occurred against some women and children while they were held hostage.

This should be more than enough. This won’t happen. A large and growing corner of the West refuses to believe that Israel’s war in Gaza is a response to evil, or that Israel can suffer in any way. This disrupts the narrative of the war in Gaza as a matter of the strong versus the weak, colonizer Israeli settlers versus righteous, indigenous victims.

Honest critics of Israel’s policies can raise serious objections while clearly acknowledging the terrible conditions that give rise to those policies. Instead what we are seeing are dishonest critics who are dishonestly questioning the circumstances that point to Israel’s existence.

Serious people should know what the old version of anti-Semitism denialism was: a constant stream of factual niceties, logical contortions, and sleight of hand rhetoric aimed at obscuring and denying the greatest crime in history. They must also understand this: that by denying past atrocities they have paved the way for the next atrocities. Those who deny rape today are no better than their ancestors.

© The New York Times 2024