Thats-heresy - Unbetitelt
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Anyway back to the scheduled program: a massive congratulations to all of you who have denied rape by Hamas. You have set the clock back on women’s rights against sexual violence even further than it was before. You’re a bunch of fakes. Here’s a note about rape denial. Perpetrators who are successful in discrediting their victims do so because they have dehumanized their victims, and this dehumanization becomes echoed by a world that sides with the perpetrator. That is what Hamas has achieved. The total dehumanization of its victims. Posters ripped down. Rapes denied.
Trauma specialist Judith Herman writes:
"When the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing.… The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain."
History shows us that we need movements around women in order to protect our rights and our bodies. What is happening currently with the denial of sexual violence against women in Israel sets all women back. And it does so by design. Women who are victims of the October 7 attacks are far less likely to come forward and testify knowing how the world has taken enormous pleasure in the suffering of Jewish women, and in the sordid details. Efforts to seek justice often require further traumatization, too. Perpetrators of trauma know this.
The more evidence against the perpetrator, the more extreme lengths the perpetrator has to go to deny the truth, and instead to focus on humiliating the victims, for there is great social currency in this. As we have seen even before this war, rape has become a subject of sickening entertainment on apps like TikTok. Hamas know this too. Hamas know that the more Israel issues evidence, the more those who take glee in the rapes will post their depraved responses. Does that mean we should stop releasing evidence? Absolutely not.
The element of joy found in extreme prejudice is a crucial element of both antisemitism and misogyny. When the two are combined, the effect is nuclear. By the way, this is all fairly textbook stuff. What's shocking is that it should be familiar to and recognized by every feminist. And it's not, because the movement protects all women, except Jews. Jews are imperfect victims. Israel is an imperfect victim. Israel doesn’t just roll over and die when she’s attacked. So Israel’s a little hard to get behind.
The world denies the sexual violence by Hamas because it sides with Hamas, and if it were to accept these acts there is no possible way the world could remain a bystander. All arrows point in the direction of Israel as the victim. Hamas is the perpetrator of unspeakable acts.
There is no justification for Hamas's continued existence, or any group of people who support Hamas. Whereas Israel has a right to exist free from such crimes against humanity, and Israel is perfectly within its rights to wage this war. Rape denial is part of the brainwashing. The only way to continue to ignore Israel's victimization is to discredit the individuals targeted by Hamas on October 7 and since. And failing that, mocking and humiliating the victims and/or anyone who speaks out in their defense, or dehumanizing us with libelous claims (racist! TERF! ZIONIST! — OK that one’s true). They can single us out as "Zionists" and warp the definition of Zionism to suit their needs, but it doesn't absolve them. Those who participate in such antisemitic rhetoric are no longer mere bystanders, but active assailants to the perpetrators, ie Hamas.
桜が満開
ajewishresistance
History repeating.
Know Thine enemy
I am not a Jew and I’m not a citizen of Israel. I haven’t even visited Israel. I don’t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem and I don’t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I’ve read about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon; the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans; I know about the British, the Balfour declaration, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and the Intifada. I might not have any personal stake in the Holy Land, but humanity certainly does - and I’m a human being.
The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in sovereign Israel were human beings too.
Those who did it to them are not.
Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival; or watching a child, perhaps 5 years old, being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew while children of a similar age laugh and mock him? We don’t know that child’s fate and for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It’s depraved. To even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed retort about territory or Gaza being an “open-air prison” reeks of moral bankruptcy.
If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, oppression and poverty but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children; then I don’t have to listen to your reasons. When the video footage, photographs and stories of Saturday’s carnage come not from "Israeli propaganda” but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to read anything else into it but that you want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.
So, if you swarmed the Israeli Embassy in London, waving Palestinian flags and calling for genocide; if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against “apartheid Israel”; if you sang along to “gas the Jews” chants at the Sydney Opera House or hung a “one settler, one bullet” Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you’re telling me who you are. Well, I see you - and you’re my enemy.
I’m one of those people who believe civilisation is a real thing, and I’ve resisted the poison of moral relativists in the humanities departments of universities across the west who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Upon even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions, you will find every sign of pedestrian intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, combined with a fetishisation of victimhood and always concomitant humourlessness. They too, are my enemies.
It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests. You couldn’t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave.
Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine the insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, between Europe never reckoning with what happened in the holocaust and their growing Muslim populations, and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human-rights abusers in the Middle East.
For now, it’s no big mystery that this has nothing to do with the existence of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred - that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. It has been there for thousands of years and every time we think it has healed, some monstrous collective claws it open again.
Hamas aren’t hiding the ball. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh, safely skulking in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved.
I’m afraid there are only two sides in a war - your allies and your enemies. On September 11th, 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.
Gareth
Gareth Cliff
This is one of my favourite books. <3
Philippe Caza - “Le Congres de Futurologie”
