Remember when rape was a sickening crime, and not a form of resistance?
Remember when #MeToo was a universal movement against sexual violence that brooked no excuses or exceptions?
Those landmark advances came after long struggles, and now they are being riddled with exclusions and in danger of being gutted.
All because the latest victims are Israelis.
Or, as an Instagram meme put it, “Me Too Unless You’re a Jew.”
Form of antisemitism
Antisemitism takes many forms, and we must add to the list the refusal to accept as fact the horrific scope of rape and sexual mutilation carried out by Muslim terrorists on Oct. 7.
The claim by Hamas that there were no sexual atrocities has given license for despicable apologists in America and abroad to insist such crimes never happened.
Or if they did, well, there were only a few.
Besides, the Israelis had it coming.
A new report from the United Nations, though belated and imperfect, puts the lie to the denial and excuses.
The report confirms that members of Hamas, other terror groups and Gazan civilians were guilty of committing many heinous sexual crimes that day.
Notwithstanding the authors’ dry language and excuses about not having enough time to be more thorough, the findings leave zero doubt that scores, perhaps hundreds, of instances of rape and mutilation took place in Israeli communities near the border.
The investigators also found “clear and convincing” evidence that some Israeli hostages were raped in Gaza and believe some hostages still in captivity could be suffering the same fate.
It is impossible to read the report and not feel sickened by the savage brutality it recounts.
Examples include matter-of-fact sweeping summaries of the day, such as this passage: “People were shot, often at close range; burnt alive in their homes as they tried to hide in their safe rooms; gunned down or killed by grenades in bomb shelters where they sought refuge; and hunted down on the Nova music festival site.”
And this one: “Other violations included sexual violence, abduction of hostages and corpses, the public display of captives, both dead and alive, the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation, and the looting and destruction of civilian property.”
It found “reasonable grounds to believe” sexual violence occurred “in multiple locations . . . including rape and gang rape.”
It also said “several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered — mostly women — with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.”
At the Nova festival, the report cited evidence that “multiple incidents of sexual violence took place with victims being subjected to rape and/or gang rape and then killed or killed while being raped.”
It cited “credible sources” describing “5 murdered individuals, mostly women, whose bodies were naked from their waist down — and some totally naked — tied with their hands behind their backs.”
Probers also reported finding “a pattern of bound naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down, in some cases tied to structures including trees and poles.”
UN bias persists
The UN has a long, troubled relationship with Israel, including the 1975 General Assembly resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
The slur was revoked in 1991, but bias persists, with the global elites repeatedly holding the lone Jewish state to standards it doesn’t apply to murderous despots.
One striking example: More than 2 million Arabs are Israeli citizens, yet UN members routinely accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide.
The antisemitism is especially strong among the relief agencies who ran the civil government in Gaza under Hamas.
UN schools indoctrinate children to become martyrs by killing Jews, and Israel showed that some workers took part in the Oct. 7 invasion.
Yet, oddly, the pattern of hostility bolsters the credibility of this report. After all, if Israel’s top critic confirms the charge that sexual violence was rampant, the evidence must be overwhelming.
Although the Israeli government is furious that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has not acted on the findings, the report is a permanent, defining statement about what happened that awful day.
It’s also important to note that the evidence includes voluminous photos and videos, some of which are the products of the body and helmet cameras the terrorists wore to record their savagery.
That, too, brings a finality that can’t credibly be denied or ignored.
Even the report’s drawbacks, such as investigators turning down captured terrorists’ confessions because they couldn’t prove there was no duress, do not undercut the findings.
Still, the insane compulsion among many Americans to deny the obvious, or blame the victims, lives on.
Consider that the newsroom of The New York Times remains in an upheaval because some employees are disputing the paper’s December report on the same subject.
Under the headline, “ ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” the article drew on some of the same material as the UN and reached similar conclusions.
But radical progressives, many of them members of the newspaper’s union, assailed the story and questioned its accuracy.
When the Times pulled a plan to feature it on a podcast, the pullback was leaked to the echo chambers in other far-left outlets.
Radicals at NY Times
Times management said the initial story was solid, then began a leak investigation — which also leaked.
The radicals upped the ante by accusing management of targeting employees of Arab and Middle Eastern ethnicity, which the editors denied.
Frankly, there is some satisfaction in seeing the Times getting a dose of its own tendency to racialize everything.
Perhaps it will think twice before jumping to that conclusion about other people and institutions.
But the larger point is that the Times reported on a key element of the Oct. 7 depravity, and the essence of the radicals’ criticism is that the sexual violence, if there was any, was insignificant.
That’s absurd, and now the UN report effectively confirms much of what the Times found.
Case closed.
Of course, the deniers will keep denying for the same reason Hamas will never make peace with Israel.
They hate Jews, and everything else is detail.
‘GOP has left me’
Reader George Coleman is getting off the GOP bus.
He writes: “I am a 67 year old Reagan Republican who is into winning. My father was a lifelong Democrat who voted for Ronald Reagan because his party had left him.”
“I agree with 90% of what Trump proposes and voted for him twice. I agree the NYS judgment against him is a joke. The Dems fight dirty, Russia hoax and all. But I cannot support anyone who is an election denier, so the party has left me. I will not vote for either Biden or Trump.”
Dogged agents
Reader Paul Zipstein has a theory on the report that President Biden’s dog bit Secret Service agents 24 times.
He writes: “Is it possible the agents are decent people and can’t stand Biden anymore than I can, and the dog picked up on their hostility?”
