Feminists Fall Silent

I have certainly not been derelict in reporting on the conspicuous and appalling failure of serious feminists to denounce and repudiate the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on October 7. Women have been raped, maimed and mutilated, and feminists have nothing to say.

Some might have imagined that the story would die out. Others have been trying to bury it by raving about civilian casualties in Gaza. And yet, the feminist failure continues to appall people, even to the point where financial journalist Charles Gasparino reports it in the New York Post:

Why aren’t more leading Democrats telling the world that rape is never OK, even when it’s committed by thugs its progressive wing deems oppressed? And where are people like Michelle Obama, Gloria Steinem and other leading feminists, strongly decrying one of the most heinous crimes against women in modern history?

Not a word from Michelle Obama or Gloria Steinem. What does that tell you? Perhaps it shows that movement feminism is stealth misogyny.

Gasparino explains that the left cannot muster any outrage about what happened to Jewish women because it is in thrall to an ideology that treats Jews as colonialist oppressors.

Perhaps more appallingly, the left considers that it is perfectly acceptable to commit what are universally recognized as war crimes when the victims are Jewish women. Remove the mask and strip off the rationalizations and you find anti-Semitism:

Jewish women, unfortunately, come out as losers in this woke ideological matrix. In this telling, Israel is a colonialist power ruling over oppressed people of color, aka the Palestinians.

Jewish women are part of that alleged oppressor class, thus they become less human even when they are raped and slaughtered because it’s being committed by men subjugated to the sins of their colonialism. Israel’s reaction, a ground offensive against Hamas, is the real genocide, they rage.

When your moral sense is warped by your ideological commitments, you cannot stand up and defend women. As I have said, one important aspect of the story is the silence of the feminists.

And, of course, as long as Hamas and its supporters insist that nothing untoward was done to Israeli women, we need to emphasize the horror. Even Secretary of State Antony Blindken declared yesterday that the pictures were beyond appalling.

The news does not come from the right wing media. Consider this article, from The New Yorker. It offers an interview with Hadas Ziv, director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and who lives in Tel Aviv. 

Doubtless, she is not a Netanyahu supporter. Any more than The New Yorker can be accused of toeing the conservative party line.

Dr. Ziv does not treat trauma victims. But, she has worked to collect the testimonies of those victims, either first or second hand.

She tells the New Yorker:

What I can say with a really high degree of certainty is that it wasn’t a few cases. It wasn’t here and there, or only on one occasion. There were many cases of different gender-based and sexual violence, and they were in the kibbutzim and in the Nova music festival: the most extreme gang rapes, mutilation of body parts, putting objects into women’s bodies, and having women paraded like trophies when they were taken into Gaza.

How bad was it?

First of all, some of the bodies that reached the national forensic institute were beyond identification. They were completely burnt. The rescue teams were traumatized. Because it was the first time that we saw sexual violence in conflict—this is something we haven’t seen before—they did not come prepared to collect the testimony and collect the evidence that is needed. Much of the material has not been released yet. It’s in the hands of the police.

Clearly, Hamas committed crimes against humanity. No one should have been surprised. Some people, who should know better, refuse to accept that it happened. Other people appallingly believe that the Israelis deserved what they got. 

Of course, as Sheryl Sandberg said last week-- there is no excuse and no justification for what Hamas did.

Dr. Ziv testified:

It’s for the legal teams to investigate whether it was systematic and to define whether the scale is large enough to define it as a crime against humanity. We ask for people to investigate. When I looked at the videos, and I spoke to a doctor to confirm, for example, that doctors saw mutilation. I consulted and heard from a doctor, and he spoke to his colleagues and they saw torn vaginas.

Please subscribe to my Substack.