Very happy to swallow all the unverified claims put out by the Israeli government and attack those who question them, including (surprisingly) Owen Jones. A feminist stance overriding geopolitical awareness and an understanding of atrocity propaganda. Happily endorsing a Times 'journalist' who has made zero effort to investigate or independently verify the lurid claims either:
Devastating criticism 👏 by @VictoriaPeckham of virtue signalling MeToo hypocrites who would minimise, ignore or sow doubt over grotesque evil of horrific violation of women by Hamas terrorists - just as female hostages still being held in we know not what condition.
Yesterday @HeidiBachram documented protestors in Brighton tearing down posters that were against Hamas rape. What is wrong with people?
In an ethics course, I explicate the evil of torture as akin to ultimate violations of bodily integrity such as rape (using ref. David Sussman 2004). The analogy works because rape itself is a form of torture, perpetrator forcibly using victim's body as a weapon against themselves - perpetuating a tormenting condition where victim might rather have taken their own life but is prevented from doing so.
As Janice Turner puts it:"One universal principle transcends all else: rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity." 👇🏽
Janice Turner @VictoriaPeckham Hamas made the ultimate revenge porn on October 7 so why the silence and doubt about their rape of Israeli women? My @thetimes column. thetimes.co.uk/article/whys-…
[quote from the article]
"I doubt this film would have changed my views on the conflict either. Like most people I’m aghast at Israel killing Palestinian civilians. I’ve visited the West Bank, seen how settlers grab Arab land, rain rubbish and dirty nappies down upon the market in Hebron. But none of this is relevant here. One universal principle transcends all else: rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity."
*****
A search of his twitter for 'hamas' brings up support for Caroline Lucas' both-sidesism in her support for a ceasefire and having a go at Corbyn for failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas:
'I used to have so much respect for you Jeremy. Why on earth do you find it so hard to condemn actions of Hamas with lack of equivocation required? Your inept interview this week spoke volumes of your blind spot.' - https://nitter.net/ShahrarAli/status/1724884874299883909#m
Criticism of Israel is weak, couched in terms of humanitarian concern and 'heartbreak' without naming the perpetrator and using the correct words, 'genocide', 'ethnic cleansing' etc.
Expected better, more fool me... What is it about Israel/Palestine that makes so many people lose their minds, or basic morality?
Nope, I've only seen allegations sourced from Israeli propaganda and/or zionist trolls on nitter. Fully expect the majority of them to evaporate upon closer examination. I'm reminded of this:
Why Is The #MeToo Crowd Silent On Hamas Rape? Janice Turner Posted on December 3, 2023 by Richard Landes
For those who can’t get past the paywall. (HT: Yisrael Medad and Jonathan Hoffman) Why Is The #MeToo Crowd Silent On Hamas Rape?
Janice Turner December 01 2023, 1.35pm
All that toil: live-streaming a girl’s last moments to her social media account, raping so hard you break pelvic bones. You strew evidence everywhere of open-legged girls with no underwear covered in semen. So much diligent raping, yet where is the recognition for your work?
Instead, only silence. Nothing from the feminists who at the height of #MeToo threw men to the Twitter hounds for a lecherous pass. Nada from the hashtag activists, open-letter actresses, influencers, podcasters, the period poverty posse, the menopause matriarchs. Zilch from the big-time feminist charities and human rights lawyers lavished with public funds. What does a rapist have to do to catch a break?
Finally, last Saturday UN Women tweeted it had met Israeli women’s groups and that “we remain alarmed by gender-based violence reports on 7 October”. “Alarmed” not horrified. “Reports” not crimes. “Gender-based”, that feeble euphemism. Four days later the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, noted “numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas”. Seriously, you’ve had seven weeks and that’s your best shot?
Even a screening of October 7 footage collated by the Israeli government, much of it filmed by Hamas, didn’t convince the Guardian columnist Owen Jones. In his little YouTube video he doesn’t deny bad stuff happened, he just has “questions”.
He notes a charred female corpse “has no underwear on and this has been offered as evidence of rape. But that is not what you would consider conclusive evidence … If there was rape and sexual violence committed we don’t see this on the footage.” Imagine the indignant Hamas rapists: “What do you mean ‘if’?”
Perhaps he wanted to watch a terrified girl bent over then passed around before being killed: a man hiding in bushes witnessed this but alas lacked a GoPro. Kibbutz residents failed to record the tortured screams of female border guards. First responders and morgue workers report splayed women shot in eyes and genitals, but they could be Zionist stooges.
Some relatives chose not to share footage, as the screening was told. But if Jones had seen even one such withheld clip — of a girl being gang-raped and murdered, then Hamas pissing on her corpse — maybe he’d still dispute details that chip away at the whole, parse dead women’s ripped knickers to propagate doubt.
Such a simpleton cheerleader cannot compute believing Jewish women since it would cast moral shadows on “his” side. This war can only be played as a team game of good v bad. The purpose of the screening, Jones believes, was to make media influencers like him pro-IDF, gung-ho for more bombing of Gaza — and he wasn’t falling for that.
I doubt this film would have changed my views on the conflict either. Like most people I’m aghast at Israel killing Palestinian civilians. I’ve visited the West Bank, seen how settlers grab Arab land, rain rubbish and dirty nappies down upon the market in Hebron. But none of this is relevant here. One universal principle transcends all else: rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity.
When the Red Army raged through Germany during the Second World War some of the two million women raped by Russian soldiers would have been Nazi wives or female party members, yet that did not diminish the atrocity. The international community, especially feminists, should condemn rape of Israeli women as freely as the violation of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, Yazidis by Isis, Rohingya by Burmese troops. To regard the 1949 Geneva Convention as a conditional document is both abhorrent and shortsighted: the enemy could come for your women next.
In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse.
The Israelis have vowed to investigate, now backed by the UN, yet evidence has been lost in the chaos of the attacks and masked fighters have fled into tunnels. In the absence of justice, all we can do is believe Jewish women. Or if misogynists and antisemites struggle with that, they could at least believe Hamas rapists who are so proud of their crimes.
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Can't find if Jones responded. He seems to have blocked the author on twitter previously. He's catching flack from others in the msm for repeating Hamas talking points etc. One article in the JC by one Hadley Freeman mentioned denial of rape to which Jones responds with:
'I haven't missed those details? In my tweet, which the author doesn't quote, I said: "All allegations of rape and sexual assault must be investigated, including those alleged against Hamas during 7th October atrocity".
[quote text: 'When Jones was later asked why he is so sceptical about the multiple reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women – indeed, reports that they were specifically instructed to rape Jewish girls and women – he replied with a quote from a Washington Post article: “It’s unclear whether authorities have accounts directly from rape survivors.” That quote does indeed exist in that article, but it also makes clear that this is because Hamas almost certainly killed all the women they raped yet accidentally left many witnesses, including one who said a Hamas terrorist killed a woman while still raping her and a morgue worker who described female bodies so brutally assaulted they had shattered pelvises. But I guess he missed those details.' - https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/owen-jones-isnt-a-journalist-hes-a-propagandist-cxz8vm93 ]
You can see my tweet in context. I was responding to a claim that I was disbelieving "a woman when she says she's been raped" That's not the allegations. There are serious, grave claims Israeli women were raped and then murdered. These must be taken seriously and investigated' - https://nitter.net/OwenJones84/status/1732078690861756827#m
*****
(Since when did the annoying americanism of ending every sentence with a question-style inflection start appearing in text form?) I won't shed tears for Jones, who doesn't appear to have explained why we should be skeptical of claims emanating from Israeli propaganda organs, but this appears to be another weaponisation of #metoo feminism to shut down anti-war, anti-imperialist voices, and he's right to ask for evidence and insist on investigation & due process in this instance.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Jones evaluates evidence provided to him by... the IDF
This being the video that Hadley Freeman objected to. Auto-transcript available if you expand the video description box - for those like me who can't stand to watch this guy speak. Opening bit:
'last week I went to a screening of the 7th of October atrocities committed by Hamas now for context I went at the request of a Israeli British friend who I've known for a long time it was an IDF screening in Westminster with a small selected crowd including Steven fry various LBC presenters like Rachel Johnson and Nick Ferrari and journalists from media organizations like the sun now I thought carefully about attending like most people I have a serious aversion to watching people suffering horrible violence and there is something innately unpleasant about intruding on people's last terrified moments I've already watched ample footage of crimes committed by Hamas but I am covering this crisis extensively and I believed good journalistic practice meant I should attend I did so with my friend Michael Walker who you will know from Novara media even though I obviously dreaded doing so'Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Enough of your cynicism, oik. They were top-notch journalists, one and all.
"I went at the request of an Israeli British friend who I've known for a long time it was an IDF screening in Westminster with a small selected crowd including Steven Fry, various LBC presenters like Rachel Johnson and Nick Ferrari and journalists from media organizations like the Sun now I thought carefully about attending like most people I have a serious aversion to watching people suffering horrible violence and there is something innately unpleasant about intruding on people's last terrified moments I've already watched ample footage of crimes committed by Hamas but I am covering this crisis extensively and I believed good journalistic practice meant I should attend I did so with my friend Michael Walker who you will know from Novara media even though I obviously dreaded doing so."
It's so easy for people, especially in groups, to get caught up in rabid, wartime hysteria, or propaganda designed to demonize the Others, the barbaric enemy.
This is because the entire point of wartime propagnada is to bypass our critical faculties, our rational brains and go straight for the heart and our vulnerable emotions, which are super sensitive in times of violence and war.
For thousands of years 'Rape' has been the ultimat hot button in warfare, because it symbolizes a special type of violation, an attack on the very bloodline of the group, tribe, nation; making it a kind of violence and story that's particularly potent and powerful.
Of course, and this is normal too, if one questions the narrative or asks for independent evidence, one is calling into question the veracity of the story itself, meaning one suspects they might be guilty of exploiting rape for base propaganda objectives, and of course, we would never do such a thing. It would mean our moral superiority and the righteousness of our cause would collapse like a house of cards.
Re: Are Angelina Jolie and Wee Willie Hague on the case? (nm)
Of course one of the dangers of this 'rape' propaganda, the way the stories are exploited for the war effort and to sway world public opinion; is that the evil enemy... Hamas in this case; isn't allowed the right to defend themselves and give their version of events, at all. They are beyond the pale, outlaws, monsters, without the right to defend themselves, straight off to the gallows with them!
This reminds one the lynch mob mentality in the Deep South years ago, when Black men were hung, burnt alive after castration, without a trial, if they were accused of raping a white woman, or the wicthcraft allegations aimed at other hapless women.
Jolie has accused global leaders of complicity in the deliberate bombing of a trapped population
'In a statement posted on Instagram, Jolie condemned what she described as “the deliberate bombing of a trapped population” in the densely populated Palestinian enclave, fearing it was "becoming a mass grave." She accused global leaders of "complicity in these crimes" for their silence and demanded a humanitarian ceasefire"...