Feminism as Stealth Misogyny

I have occasionally remarked how feminists sometimes fall silent in the face of flagrant misogyny. Remember the tag line-- Believe all women! Well, the feminist qualifier is-- not all the time. And certainly not if they are Jewish or Israeli. 

This exposes an inconvenient truth. Feminism is not and has never been about women. From the time of Friedrich Engels it has wanted to enlist women in the revolutionary cause, to overthrow capitalism so that more people can starve to death.

Among those who have not received feminist solicitude or even feminist outrage are the the Jewish women who were raped and mutilated by Hamas. About the atrocity, feminism has had nothing to say. If it does not advance the revolutionary cause, it did not happen.

Several sensible souls have called out feminists, in Great Britain and America. In Britain, on the Unherd website, Nicole Lampert offers this reflection:

After Hamas terrorists set about murdering, raping and abducting as many women as they could, one might have expected widespread condemnation from the West’s feminist groups. After all, Hamas had provided enough evidence of its crimes — within hours, they were posting footage of abducted young women in bloodied trousers being paraded around Gaza. 

Of course, Hamas was grossly misogynistic:

Even beforehand, its feminist credentials were hardly glowing: it mandates the hijab, has made it illegal to travel without a male guardian, and refused to ban physical or sexual abuse within the family.

Of course, Jews were capitalists and they were colonialists, so they deserved whatever they got-- assuming that it really happened:

The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars”, to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to “colonial feminism”.

Those feminist groups who accepted that it had happened, blamed it on the Jews. The Jews had it coming; the Jews deserved it; they do not belong to an oppressed group, so we do not really care about what happened to them.

In Lampert’s words:

Southall Black Sisters, another charity committed to ending violence against women, did at least mourn the loss of life on both sides, but blamed it on “the Israeli government’s declaration of war on Gaza”. Elsewhere, Women for Women UK, which specialises in helping “women survivors of war” and calls itself a “non-partisan organisation”, has decided to raise money only for Palestinian women. Even Women’s Place UK, once viewed as an outlier for its brave campaigning for women-only spaces, decided to call for an “immediate ceasefire” without mentioning sexual violence.

As for what happened when Hamas invaded, Lampert quotes an eyewitness. Those who are tempted to deny the evidence of everyone’s senses should read this testimony, by Nachman Dyksztejna, a Ukrainian-Israeli.

In Kibbutz Be’eri, I witnessed bodies of two women with their hands and legs tied to a bed. One of these bodies we found was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed. After brutally violating these women, Hamas detonated the house on them, so we found them beneath a pile of stones.

The mini shelters scattered from the Nova party site to road 34, shelters that had been broken into, were filled with piles of women. Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked. Piles and piles of women, dead bodies, lying this way. When you took a closer look at their heads, you saw a single shot straight to the brain of each.

For now the videotapes of the atrocities have been censored, because they are too horrific to expose. Of course, everyone who has seen them comes away with the same reaction, so we are confident that they are factually accurate. Besides, Hamas warriors were proud of what they did. 

Writing in the New York Sun, Caroline McCaughey echoes the same point. Where are the organizations that pretend to be defending women’s rights? It should not have been a close call.

In the weeks since the October 7 attacks, more evidence has come to light that Hamas intentionally used rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. Rape is a war crime and a violation of international human rights law. So where are the major international women’s rights organizations in condemning it?

As for the evidence, consider this:

One panelist at the Harvard event, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a human rights and international relations professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, detailed the evidence of gender-based war crimes committed by Hamas. She tells the Sun she only listed the sexual crimes her organization, the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, has independently verified through video evidence, eyewitness testimonies of survivors, reports from examinations of bodies at morgues, captured Hamas terrorist interviews, and first responders’ reports.

For example:

Footage released by Hamas shows a dead woman at the Nova music festival, her clothes stripped from the waist down, legs spread apart, and her body partly burned. Another photograph from the festival shows a dead woman stripped from the waist down, her underwear torn and hanging on one leg. Another video shows terrorists torturing a pregnant woman, cutting off her breasts and slashing open her stomach to remove the fetus — all while she is still alive, bound and gagged.

Of course, it was intentional. Hamas wanted to project strength, even if it was a coward’s pretense at strength:

In a video of an interrogation released by the Israeli Defense Forces, a Hamas terrorist says, “The plan was to go from home to home, from room to room, to throw grenades and kill everyone, including women and children. … Hamas ordered us to crush their heads and cut them off, [and] to cut their legs.”

In another interrogation video, a Hamas terrorist is asked what the plans are for the abducted women. “I’m telling you, to whore them, rape them, hurt them … interrogate them, whatever they feel like doing,” the terrorist responds.

“They made sure it will be the most brutal possible. Burning women alive. Burning women with their children. Murdering kids and families in shelter,” Ms. Elkayam-Levy tells the Sun. “The atrocities are well documented, well known. And the investigation is important, but it doesn’t need to confirm that there were war crimes and crimes against humanity that happened here. That is already obvious.”

If I did not know any better, I would imagine that feminism, whatever its original intentions to do right by women, has now morphed into stealth misogyny. It’s the price of ideology.

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