Misogyny as a Weapon of War

I do not know whether Peggy Noonan was thinking of the old Roman fable about the rape of the Sabine women when she entitled her column, “The Rape of the Israeli Women,” but you never know.

As it happens, the analogy does not really hold. Romans abducted Sabine women because their state was lacking in women. They were forcing women to become wives, lest their blood lines die out.

One recalls the other famous mythic abduction, that of Persephone, daughter of the earth goddess Demeter, by Hades, the king of the underworld and the brother of Zeus.

As you doubtless know, once Persephone was abducted, her mother was so distraught that she mounted a siege and allowed all of the earth’s vegetation to die. Eventually, Zeus relented and allowed Persephone to spend a goodly portion of the year with her mother on earth.

Anyway, Noonan used her column to describe the horrors that Hamas inflicted on innocent Israelis. Just as General Eisenhower forced people to visit the concentration camps after the European war was over, lest they succumb to the propaganda claiming that it never happened, Noonan feared that people would become seduced by Hamas propaganda, and imagine that nothing very untoward happened.

In terms of raw mindless brutality Hamas outdid them all. Its cowardly warriors attacked women and children for two ostensible reasons. First, it wanted to show that Israeli men were weak. So weak that they could not defend their women and children. Second, they raped and mutilated women as an instrument of genocide, of rendering the women incapable of procreation.

By now, many people have seen the videos. In truth, Hamas sadists made the videos themselves. Since they discovered that the world was not cheering them on, they are now trying to obfuscate, to say that they did not do what they did. Amazingly, they have discovered no small number of dupes who have bought their propaganda.

Noonan described the massacre:

Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain. But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!

It was systematic and deliberate, Noonan explained. Sexual crimes were planned and executed:

A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”

Obviously, the cowardly Hamas warriors could not stand up and fight against the Israeli military. They could not compete in the marketplace either. So they chose to humiliate the Israelis:

Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals. The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Naturally, you might look at Israeli sources with skepticism. Yet, the BBC, not a pro-Israeli organization, reported:

A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”

Whereas rape is often motivated by the wish to force procreation, in these cases the goal was to render procreation impossible:

Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”

And also,

Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

Lest we forget what happened, Noonan also quotes an account from The New York Times:

In the New York Times, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”

As you know, and as I reported, women’s groups have been eerily silent about it all. They now resemble the three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

Noonan has her theory about the appalling silence of the feminists. And not just the feminists. Other members of what is called the progressive left have also been silent.

Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.

Actually, it would be more correct to say that they are for the Revolution. It would be a good thing if people began to understand that feminism is not for women. It is for women who think like feminists. Driven by ideology, feminists promote groupthink. Any woman who deviates from the party line will immediately be expelled from the movement, and from feminist solicitude.