Feminist leaders, Democrats are radio silent on the rape, torture of Jewish women
It’s been my experience that most professional women, including those who work on Wall Street, consider themselves feminists and staunch Democrats for several reasons. Abortion is one; the party’s long-standing commitment to gender equality is also high on the list.
Times may be changing, I suspect. Last week I did a series of interviews with women who work in finance and run businesses about our increasingly bizarre political climate. Here’s what was top of mind. They can’t understand the relative silence or muted forms of condemnation displayed by those they had long admired — major leaders of the feminist movement and far too many top Democrats — on something so obviously heinous and toxic that it deserves immediate and emphatic denunciation: the rape, torture and murder of Jewish women.
These possibly soon-to-be lapsing feminists say the silence is so deafening among people they once considered comrades in arms that while they may not be ready to pull the lever for Donald Trump 2024, they’re getting suddenly close.
The true brutality of the Oct. 7 massacre of Jewish women, men and children by Hamas goons has been largely muted in the mainstream media. If you want to be disgusted and horrified by the reality of the slaughter — including the rapes of the living and dead — it’s easy to find on social media.
I’ve been talking with professional women who went there. They have simple and obvious questions: 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?
Steinem declined to comment and Obama didn’t return emails for comment; and while a simple Google search will show that they have made a few statements about Oct. 7, it’s also reasonable to conclude they are pulling their punches.
“It’s so disgusting,” said one woman CEO of a midsized real estate brokerage firm.
“I can’t believe my party and people I admired tolerate swastikas,” another said. “Why are they so worried about Israel’s response?”
Deemed less human
Here’s why, and try not to gag. Polls show that many Dem voters led by younger far-lefty voters you see cheering the brutality on college campuses are against Israel’s all-out war to destroy Hamas. Plus, when your ruling ethos is identity politics — and you can apply that both to the modern Democratic Party and modern feminism — there will be winners and losers.
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.
It’s all a lie, of course. Hamas was essentially put in power because of Palestinian home rule in Gaza. Israel never attacks; it responds to attacks, conducting a bloody war to eliminate this barbaric foe, much like the US waged against Germany and Japan.
Recall: Innocents died in World War II, but does that mean we shouldn’t have ended regimes that introduced to the world to the mass and systematic killing of the Nazi death camps or during the rape of Nanking?
Common decency would place Hamas in that class of evil. Crass political calculations by the left (brilliantly exposed by CNN’s Dana Bash during her interview with progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal) and key members of the feminist movement, excuses evil as a political expediency.
Some feminists and right-thinking Dems in government and business are waking up to the warped wokeness.
See the current attacks against the leadership of Harvard for not condemning antisemitism by hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a graduate who has thrown enough money at the school that an economics chair bears his name.
Marc Rowan of Apollo Management, who helped raise $1 billion for his alma mater, UPenn, has similarly ratcheted up pressure to dump the school’s leadership. Late Saturday, Rowan and the school’s other deep-pocketed donors got their wish when UPenn president Liz Magill handed in her resignation — following her bizarre noncommittal statements against Jew hatred during last week’s congressional hearings. Also gone, Scott Bok, the head of the school’s Board of Trustees. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, may not be far behind.
Inside the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been silent about the dangerous rise in antisemitism even as it comes from within her party. Neither has Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who gave an eloquent speech on the Senate floor decrying the attacks against Israel as “crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations in this country.”
Yet “It’s not enough” is the refrain I get when I bring up those examples to the women I interviewed for this column. They see the political conversation dominated by the far left and its Jew haters and not enough pushback from their fellow feminists.
“I don’t know what to do,” my CEO says. Here’s some advice: Next time you see Chuck Schumer or Michelle Obama at a fundraiser, tell them unless the party unites against mass rape and murder of all women, including Jews, you’ll vote for Donald Trump. I bet that will get their attention.
