Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 06, 2024




Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.


On February 14, Rashida Tlaib refused to support a resolution denouncing Hamas for raping and sexually violating and mutilating Jewish men, women, and children. The only member of the House of Representatives who voted present instead of voting for the resolution, Tlaib said she condemns all sexual violence, but claimed that H. Res. 966, Condemning rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas in its war against Israel, “completely ignores and erases any sexual violence and abuse committed by the Israeli forces against Palestinians, especially children.”

This, of course, is a lie. On many levels. For one thing, the resolution is broad and inclusive, condemning all rape and sexual violence as weapons of war (emphasis added):

That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns all rape and forms of sexual violence as weapons of war, including those acts committed by Hamas terrorists on and since October 7th;

(2) calls on all nations to criminalize rape and sexual assault, and hold accountable all perpetrators of sexual violence, including state and non-state armed groups;

(3) calls on all international bodies to unequivocally condemn the barbaric murder, rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping by Hamas and other terrorists on and since October 7th, and hold accountable all perpetrators;

(4) reaffirms the United States Government’s support for independent, impartial investigations of rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas on and since October 7th; and

(5) reaffirms its commitment to supporting survivors of rape and sexual violence, including those brutalized on and since October 7.

Tlaib could have happily signed on, knowing that the resolution includes every act of rape and every act of sexual violence no matter the parties responsible for these heinous crimes. But that would not have served Tlaib’s true aims, all of which she accomplished:

She inserted a new idea: that the IDF also commits rape and sexual violence. This is a lie.

She inserted a second new idea: that IDF soldiers are pedophiles who specifically prey on and prefer to rape and commit sexual violence against Arab children. This too, is a lie.

She inserted a third new idea: The resolution does not specifically focus on children as victims of Hamas rape and sexual violence. In accusing the IDF of pedophilia, Tlaib intimates that IDF soldiers are actually worse than actual (Hamas) terrorists. Absolutely false and also repugnant.  

She created a false equivalence between perpetrator and victim—Hamas committed rape and sexual violence on October 7th, and has continued since that time to rape and violate Jewish men, women, and children. The assertion that the IDF also engages in such atrocities is false and also abhorrent, since the war on Hamas is a defensive war, a direct response to Hamas rape and sexual violence.

She inverted the truth. The oldest Arab trick in the book: she accused the Jews of doing what they, the Arabs do. There was no rape or sexual violence by the IDF. The atrocities were committed by one side alone and that one side was Hamas. 

 


The Arab enemy plays dirty. It cheats and it lies and it inverts the truth. But we know what happened. “The evidence is abundant and beyond compelling. Through survivors coming forward, witnesses, video footage and independent analysis, we know that Hamas’s use of sexual violence including rape, mutilation, and brutality was not an anomaly. It was a premeditated part of its strategy to purposefully use sexual violence as a weapon against innocent civilians,” said Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, regarding the horrific sexual crimes of Hamas.

Meanwhile, there are no credible reports that similar deeds, or worse, have been perpetrated by the IDF. But with her lies Tlaib offers up new ways to demonize the Jews, with new lines of propaganda for use by the legions of ugly-minded people siding with terrorists against the Jewish victims. Antisemites don’t care about truth or proof. In their minds, all’s fair in their hatred and envy of the Jewish people.  

The Arab tactic of inverting the truth unlike Tlaib's fake "facts" is not new. A 2007 essay by Joel Fishman goes into the history and use of the "inversion of reality" as he calls it, appropriately begins with the following (ancient) verse:

Woe unto them that call evil good, And good evil;

That change darkness into light, And light into darkness;

That change bitter into sweet, And sweet into bitter.

Isaiah 5:20

A summary of the essay appearing just below these lines makes clear that inversion of the truth is a propaganda tactic designed to be used against the Jewish people (emphasis added):

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel‘s adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. Contemporary observers have identified this method and described it as an “inversion of reality,” an “intellectual confidence trick,” “reversing moral responsibility,” or “twisted logic.” Because Israel’s enemies have, for nearly half a century, repeated such libels without being challenged, they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israeli propaganda, it is important to understand what it is and how it works. This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in its methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the absolute solution it advocates. It totally denies all of Israel’s claims and leaves no room for introspection and compromise.

Why is it necessary to invert the truth? Because the truth does not serve the cause of those responsible for spreading twisted logic, the desire to demonize and ultimately, to do away with the Jewish people:

One of the tactical tools of ideological warfare is propaganda, which has been defined simply “as an attempt to influence the attitudes of a specific audience through the use of facts, fiction, argument or suggestion-often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material-with the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient a certain belief, values or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, by producing a desired line of action.”

To this definition one may add the statement of Dr. Joseph Goebbels that “propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.” Here is the classical argument that the ends justify the means. One may ask, however, if in certain cases the very means can be morally defective.

The rise of technology and social media has made spreading lies easier than ever, making the inversion of truth the perfect tactic for modern-day antisemites, for instance Arab propagandists like Tlaib, who have infiltrated the US government. Seventeen years have passed since this essay was penned, yet the ideas and tactics outlined here remains remarkably current (emphasis added):

Inversion of reality as a tool of media war, with its paranoiac state of mind, has persisted to the present. Although contemporary observers have been able to describe its manifestations with considerable accuracy, many have not placed it in historical context. It was in this sense, for example, that the French researcher and philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff applied the term “absolute anti-Semitism” to describe the post-1967 outlook of the Palestinians. He wrote that for them, “Zionism, then, is a new ‘Nazism’ threatening to dominate and destroy the whole human species…. Thus, in a context where Western elites never tire of calling for the avoidance of ‘Islamophobic’ utterances, the head of the Islamic Center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, coolly denounced ‘the genocide being organized against the Muslims.’”

It is noteworthy that Ramadan’s story line is nearly identical to that of Nazi propagandists. Both presented themselves as targets of a Jewish conspiracy, and the potential outcome of their “logical process”-to use Hannah Arendt’s expression-was genocide. Although both have inverted the truth, their assertions contain an additional feature which is disturbing and dangerous: the inversion of morality which leads to criminal behavior and violence without constraint.

Citing Melanie Phillips as his source, Fishman now quotes Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born author and journalist who described the inversion of reality with regard to Israel, as it plays out in British public discourse (emphasis added):

In a remarkable inversion of reality, Israel has become a pariah state because of its determination to defend itself. A grotesque double standard now operates, where murderous Arab terrorists are hailed as “freedom fighters” yet Israeli security forces are treated as fascistic thugs. No nation has been more demonized than Israel. One recent survey across Europe revealed that Israel is now regarded as “the greatest threat” to world peace, an utter absurdity given that Israel is actually the only democratic, free society in the Middle East. But such a finding reflects the strength of the hysterical anti-Israeli propaganda that fills the airwaves of Europe. No matter how much this anti-Israeli feeling is dressed up as support for Palestine, it is in fact profoundly antisemitic….

It is clear that nothing has changed since 2007, except for it being easier than ever to invert the truth and spread antisemitic lies whether in Britain or DC—or anywhere else where there are people who don’t like Jews. The Arab inversion of truth, however, really hits its stride beginning in the 1960s:

Prof. Arnold Toynbee delivered a lecture in Montreal in January 1961 in which he “compared from a moral standpoint, the attitude of Israel to the Arabs in 1947 and 1948 with the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.” The ambassador of Israel to Canada, Yaakov Herzog, read this statement in the Montreal newspapers and challenged Toynbee to a debate which followed on 31 January 1961 at McGill University. Ambassador Herzog did well in this disputation, but it is not clear if Arnold Toynbee’s statement represented an isolated event or, in the years which followed, provided a source of inspiration to others. (Two years later, in April 1964, Arnold Toynbee came to Egypt on a twelve day visit to lecture at Egyptian universities.  It would be interesting to know, if, beyond considerations of academic scholarship, an authoritarian regime such as Nasser’s Egypt had other motives for showing Toynbee such a public sign of great favor.)

During the 1960s, and particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced some of the old propaganda themes. Israel’s victory represented a humiliation to the Soviet cause and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority.  Domestically, it heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews. Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism as a means of shifting world attention from their defeat. They endeavored to delegitimize Israel, to brand Israel as the aggressor, and to bring about its isolation. Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:

·        The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense.

·        The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” on 10 November 1975 which gave the standing of international law to a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany.

·        The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.

·        The Hamas Charter of 1988.

·        The unprecedented assault on Israel at the end of August and beginning of September 2001 which took place at the UN Conference in Durban.

The UN Resolution of 1975, later overturned, declaring that “Zionism is racism,” is another prime and historic example of how truth can be stood on its head in order to demonize the Jews (emphasis added):

On 10 November 1975, the Soviet Union and its supporters passed UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” which transformed an anti-Semitic slogan into an internationally accepted “truth.” Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman explained that “the term ‘racism’ was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of ‘Aryan superiority’ over Jews and other alleged untermenschen.” According to the original meaning of the term, then, “racism” denotes one of the great abuses of Nazism.  Thus, to equate Zionism with racism represents a serious accusation and inversion of reality.

In considering the tactic of reality inversion, once must also look at the results. The academic in his ivory tower knows the truth, but pushes the lies that serve him. The common man on the other hand, the regular Arab Joe/Yussef on the street, actually believes the lies. He wants to believe the lies, because they put him in the right and the Jews in the wrong. Nadav Shragai describes the impact on ordinary Arab Muslims of the lie that the Jews aim to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque (emphasis added):

The Palestinians and many Muslims charge that Israel “seeks to destroy al-Aqsa” and build the Temple in its stead on a site where no Temple ever stood; that the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount is al-miza’um, that is, “supposed,” “fraudulent,” “invented,” or “imaginary;” that the Jews have no connection to the Temple Mount or, for that matter, to the Western Wall.     

This is a libel on top of a libel, a double lie. The many Muslims who are convinced that al-Aqsa is in danger are now also convinced that “their” al-Aqsa stands on a place where “our” Temple never stood – the latter being nothing but a fabrication.

Some of the legitimacy that terrorism draws from the libel rests on that added lie. It is more legitimate to libel and murder Jews, so as “to protect the captive al-Aqsa and free it from the Jews who are plotting to destroy it,” if Israel and the Jews who “conspire to attack the site,” have only a false and concocted connection to it. Thus, the lie that undergirds the libel also bolsters the legitimacy to murder in its name. From the standpoint of the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” terrorists and their supporters, they do not murder only those who seek to wrest the Mount from their hands. As they see it, they are also murdering the falsifiers of history, who have no link to the site at all. They also want the Mount to be “liberated” psychologically so that their historical and religious narrative will prevail.

Already a decade ago, Lesley Klaff described how the Holocaust has been appropriated by the enemy, and distorted and abused to blame and demonize Israel for the condition of the Arab people (emphasis added):

What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion’ involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of ‘the Jews’). More: those who object to these inversions are told [that] they are acting in bad faith, only being concerned to deflect criticism of Israel. In short, the Holocaust, an event accurately described by Dan Diner as a ‘rupture in civilisation,’ organised by a regime that, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss observed, ‘had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews,’ is now being used, instrumentally, as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews. ‘The victims have become perpetrators’ is being heard more and more. That is Holocaust Inversion.

Klaff goes further, underlining the ways in which even the memory of the Holocaust is abused, as it places unique moral strictures on the Jewish people—the actual victims of the Holocaust—alone:

Holocaust Inversion [involves] the abuse of the Holocaust memory to issue a moral stricture aimed at Israel and ‘the Jews’, imposing upon them a uniquely onerous moral responsibility and accountability in their treatment of others.

Dr. Yechiel Shabiy, writing for BESA, elaborates on the inverted logic that portrays the Arabs as indigenous to Israel even in the face of absolute proof to the contrary (emphasis added):

The elected representatives of Israel’s Arab community claim that the Palestinians are the original owners of the land—an indigenous minority disinherited by foreign invaders. According to this notion, which is aimed at undermining the Zionist narrative about the Jewish people’s return to its historical homeland, the Arabs of the Land of Israel—like the Indians in America, the aborigines in Australia, and the Zulu tribes in South Africa—are victims of European imperialism/colonialism, which turned them into a disenfranchised and oppressed minority in their own land. From this standpoint, Zionism is a crude perversion of Judaism because the Jews do not constitute a people but only a religious community with no national attributes or aspirations, let alone any right to a state of their own in even a tiny part of the Islamic-Arab-Palestinian patrimony.

That thesis is not only baseless but a complete inversion of the historical truth.

It was Arab/Muslim invaders who came to the Land of Israel as an ascendant imperialist force in the decade after the Prophet Muhammad’s death and laid the groundwork for the colonization of this land by a long string of Muslim empires up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. During this lengthy era, the non-Jewish and non-Christian residents of the land identified themselves as Muslims—not as Arabs, and certainly not as Palestinians—until WWI, when the idea of Arab nationalism gathered steam with the help of British imperialism.

One need only look at common family names among the Palestinians to see their colonialist origins: Hijazi, from the Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, from which the original invaders came; Bosniak, from Bosnia; Turk, from Turkey; Halabi, from Syria; Hindi, from India; Yemeni, from Yemen; Masarwa/Masri, from Egypt; Mughrabi, from the Maghreb, and so on.

In contrast, countless place names in the Land of Israel testify to a Jewish presence over thousands of years. Take, for example, the Narbeta River in northern Samaria. Narbeta, which is the Aramaic pronunciation of Arubot, the biblical city in which one of King Solomon’s 12 governors lived, ruled the whole region of northern Samaria. In Narbeta, as Yosef ben Matityahu (Josephus) recounts, the Romans slaughtered thousands of Jews during the Great Revolt (66-73 CE). The area teems with archaeological relics from the Second Temple, Mishnaic, and Talmudic eras.

Each year, Israel is faced with the dilemma of whether to allow Muslim worship on the Temple Mount during Ramadan. With the season upon us, concurrent with Israel’s war on Hamas, the issue was once more discussed and decided: The Arabs are to be allowed to worship on the Temple Mount, in spite of the war and the Arab propensity for violence with the Jews as their target. When Israel was confronted by the same yearly conundrum in 2022, David Weinberg took the opportunity to outline some of the more inflammable Arab rhetoric batted about in regard to Jews and the Temple Mount along with the history of how it has evolved (emphasis added):

I am infuriated by the calls of Western leaders upon Israel, all week long, to "ensure the status quo" on the Temple Mount and "respect the sanctity" of its Moslem holy sites. Often this has been accompanied by tsk-tsking about "provocative incursions" by Israeli police and so-called "excessive force" employed by police to disburse "peaceful Arab worshippers."

The inversion of truth contained in the above description of events and the perversion involved in blaming Israel for Arab rioting on the Temple Mount – is utterly galling!

The plain facts are that the so-called "status quo" on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem long has been dead. It has been violated repeatedly in recent years by radical Palestinian and Islamic actors who have turned the Mount into a base of hostile operations against Israel, instead of protecting it as zone of prayer and peace. Israel, on the other hand, has acted with utmost restraint in the face of Arab assaults. (Too much restraint, in my opinion.)

Waqf and Islamic movement provocateurs have attacked Jewish visitors to the Mount, Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall below the Mount, and Jewish worshippers on their way to the Western Wall. They have attacked Emiratis and Bahrainis praying in Al-Aqsa Mosque (because these countries signed Abraham Accord peace treaties). They have greatly restricted visitation rights to the holy Mount for all non-Moslems; and have hijacked the pulpits in the mosque on the Mount to preach hatred and violence against Israel.

Palestinian terrorists have smuggled machine guns onto the Temple Mount and killed police guarding the gates of the Mount. The terrorists launched their attack from within the Temple Mount and then fled into the shrines on the Mount. The tens of thousands of boulders and rocks stockpiled by Arabs on the Mount for their periodic, planned "outbursts" of rock-throwing violence, including repeated attacks over the past week, are no less outrageous.

The Waqf also has conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, a supposedly "moderate" Palestinian figure, continues to roil the waters and foment violence against Israel by repeating the canard that "Al Aqsa is in danger," meaning that "the Zionists are conspiring to blow-up the mosque and Islamic shrine" on the Mount. This is a blood libel that goes all the way back to the notorious pro-Nazi Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini in the pre-state period.

In fact, Abbas has stoked a broad-scale campaign against the authenticity of Israel's historic rights in Jerusalem. In September 2015 he screeched about "filthy" Jewish feet that were "desecrating" holy Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. "Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher," he bellowed. "They (the Jews) have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won't allow them to do so, and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem."


In 2019, Tzvi Fleischer wrote of the UN inversion of the truth in regard to the status of Arab women, be they Arab women with Israeli citizenship, or those who live under Abbas or Hamas (emphasis added):

The UN has produced another one of the anti-Israel absurdities for which it has become infamous. On July 23, the UN’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council voted 40-2, with 9 abstentions, to single out Israel as the only state in the world branded as a violator of women’s rights. Among those who voted in favour were such paragons of women’s rights as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen (Australia is not a member).

Most of the long resolution said nothing about women but simply parroted generic UN anti-Israel rhetoric, accusing the Jewish state of numerous crimes, but the key clause condemned Israel and the “occupation” as “a major obstacle for Palestinian women and girls with regard to the fulfilment of their rights, and their advancement, self-reliance and integration in the development of their society.”

Of course, the resolution did not mention how Palestinian women’s rights are impacted by their own governing authorities—the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. These surely have the primary responsibility for progressing the “advancement, self-reliance and integration” of the Palestinian women of the West Bank and Gaza respectively.

Yet with regard to the situation of the Palestinian women who are citizens of Israel, recent years have seen achievements which make a mockery of the UN’s claims. A decade ago only 22% of Israeli Arab women were working outside their homes. Today, that number is more than 40% (admittedly, this is still way below the workforce participation rate of Jewish Israeli women, who have one of the highest participation rates in the OECD).

The jump in employment rates among Israeli Arab women is in part the result of deliberate Israeli Government policy. The Israeli Government has set a target of 54% employment for Arab women by 2030. To help achieve that goal, they have been improving public transport to Arab villages so women can reach jobs, building industrial zones in large Arab towns like Nazareth that can offer employment closer to Arab villages and have set up 22 employment centres specifically for Arab women to help match them with available jobs.


The UN is still busy inverting the truth when it comes to Israel and the Jews. CNN reports that UN is investigating “credible reports” that IDF soldiers did to Arabs the disgusting things that Arabs did to Jews (emphasis added):

United Nations experts have called for an investigation into what they described as “credible allegations of egregious human rights violations” against Palestinian women and girls in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces.

The allegations include extrajudicial killing, arbitrary detention, degrading treatment, rape and sexual violence, according to a statement by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released on Monday. It did not detail how they did their fact-finding, but they referred to photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances reportedly taken by Israeli troops and uploaded online.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied the accusations and said it adheres to international law. “Without precise details or proof of individual cases it is not possible for us to examine them in depth,” the IDF said in a statement to CNN.

 i24 News further elaborates (emphasis added):

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of raping Palestinian women and girls in detention, sparking a contentious dispute as Israel vehemently denies the claims.

In a report by Sky News, the UN Human Rights Office a few reports of Israeli officers allegedly sexually assaulting Palestinian women and girls while in detention.

Allegations include strip searches conducted by male soldiers and alleged instances of sexual violence against detainees.

“We are particularly disturbed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have been subjected to several forms of sexual assault,” accused the UN agency, affirming that “they had been stripped naked and searched by male soldiers.” “At least two Palestinian detainees were raped, while others were threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the agency said, adding that “photos of detention in humiliating circumstances were taken by the IDF and uploaded on the Internet".

Naturally, no proof is provided. Because there is none. Yet, Reem Alsalem, she of the Muslim Arab-friendly first and surname insists that Israeli violence against Arab women has been “normalized,” and that anyway, the women don’t speak out because they’re afraid of “reprisals” (emphasis added):

The panel of experts said there was evidence of [at] least two cases of rape, alongside other cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said the true extent of sexual violence could be significantly higher.

“We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are,” said Alsalem, who was appointed special rapporteur by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2021.

She noted that reticence in reporting sexual assault was common because of the fear of reprisals against victims. She said that in a wave of detentions of Palestinian women and girls after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on 7 October, there was an increasingly permissive attitude towards sexual assault in Israeli detention centres.

“I would say that, on the whole, violence and dehumanisation of Palestinian women and children and civilians has been normalised throughout this war,” Alsalem said.

Interestingly, Alsalem claimed to be unaware of any rocket attacks against Israel. In spite of actual evidence, something she does not have in regard to imagined Israeli crimes against Arab women.

Perhaps the most galling part of this concerted effort to invert reality was the insertion of a supposed need to investigate reports of imagined Israeli crimes against Arab women, in a UN investigation of actual Hamas sexual crimes against Jewish women (and men and children).

In a piece called UN Investigator: ‘Convincing Information’ of Rape and Torture, But Check the Jews Too Just In Case, the Jewish Press, author David Israel tells us that while "Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict reported on Monday that she and a team of experts had found 'clear and convincing information' of rape and sexualized torture being committed against hostages seized during the October 7 terror attacks.”

Based on reports in the media, when Patten arrived in Israel, I was encouraged that even though, as a UN representative, Patten was unlikely to be sympathetic to Israel, she would be fair in her investigation. And she was. Up to a point. That point being the one where Arab guilt must be balanced by the presumption of Jewish guilt, even in the absence of proof (emphasis added):

The NY Times report on Patten’s report points out that it “also cited allegations that Palestinians detained by Israel have also been sexually abused.” No need to provide citations, of course, because it’s a known thing that Jews rape Arab women all the time. The fact is that from 1950 to this day there hasn’t been a single rape complaint of an Arab woman against Israeli soldiers. Several academic researchers have actually argued that this phenomenon is an expression of Israeli racism…

According to Israel Police data, between 2007 and 2014, Arab men committed 533 sexual offenses against Jewish women, of which 70 were outright rapes. In many cases, the rapists called their victims “dirty Jews,” later explaining that “Jews are subhuman,” and “Jewish girls have no honor.”

Oh, and the Patten report for some reason noted deep suspicion among Israelis toward the United Nations.

Shocking.

The Patten report was disheartening, because my expectations had been higher than they should have been. By now, I should know better. Where there is proof of Arab malfeasance and no proof of Jewish malfeasance, the idea of Jewish malfeasance will be inserted to minimize that of the Arabs. It’s just the way it is.

Since October 7, world Jewry has woken up to the fact that there is overwhelming Jew-hatred everywhere. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done or haven’t done. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do. We Jews live in a time where the truth doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t serve our enemy, which is most of the world. 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, December 19, 2023


Israel Hayom (Hebrew only as of this writing) reports that on Monday,  a member of the Belgian parliament, Nadia El Youssef, said rabbis call for the rape of Palestinian women.

She made the accusation to the Israeli ambassador in Brussels, Idit Rosenzweig-Abo.

The ambassador was astonished, saying, "Rabbis call for the rape of Palestinian women? This is the first time I have heard such a thing, unless there is a problem with the translation."

El Youssef said " I think it is important that we have all the facts, so that we can be as objective as possible and we can think about what we can do from here."

It sounds a lot like other antisemitic accusations through the years, like Israeli rescue workers stealing organs, and then the antisemites say they are just calling for an "investigation" which would make people think that where there's smoke, there's fire.

There is really no lie too outrageous for today's antisemites to hurl. But cumulatively, they work, and cause people to hate Jews - which is the entire point.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

When the war started, I phoned my neighbor to make sure she knew she was welcome to bring her family to our safe room, at any time of the day or night. We talked about logistics and how we were having a key made for them and how I didn’t at all mind a LOT of children in a small space because I’d had 12 of my own. The whole time, my neighbor, whom I’ll call “Terry” out of respect for her privacy, said, “Thank you, but so far we’ve been sitting in the stairwell, and that’s fine with us.”

I got the idea she didn’t think the missiles were all that big a deal, and so finally I confessed, “Yeah. To tell the truth, I don’t worry so much about the missiles either. It’s the other stuff I worry about.”

“Exactly. It’s the other stuff,” said Terry.

Neither of us had to elucidate the nature of that “other stuff,” and I won’t say it here, either. But the thing I think about when I think about that “other stuff," is rape.

I can’t swear that this is the thing that worries my neighbor most, when she thinks about the things she fears most. She didn’t say. But then again, she didn’t have to—fear of rape is not exclusive to this writer—it’s fairly universal among women and researchers have been studying the phenomenon for years.

Take, for example, this abstract from “Fear of Rape Among Urban Women,” a 1985 paper by the (in-)felicitously named Mark Warr, of Penn State University (emphasis added):

Sample survey data from Seattle are used to examine fear of rape among urban women. The magnitude and prevalence of such fear are striking, particularly among younger women, who fear rape more than any other crime. The high fear attached to rape stems from the fact that it is perceived to be both extremely serious and relatively likely; and from the fact that it is closely associated with other serious offenses such as homicide and robbery. Fear of rape also lies behind fear of other offenses among women in our sample, and is strongly associated with certain social or lifestyle precautions.

Some four paragraphs into the introduction to this paper, Warr says something that touches on the universal nature of fear of rape among women. More women, it seems, are scared of rape than are actually raped (emphasis added):

This paper is not about those who rape, nor is it about those who are direct victims of rape. Rather, the paper considers a much larger group: those who fear rape. One of the major developments in criminology during the past 20 years has been a general realization that the social consequences of crime are not limited to those who are directly victimized. That principle is particularly true when it comes to fear of victimization, because the number of fearful individuals greatly exceeds the number of actual victims during any given period.

Wikipedia has something on “Rape Fear” that speaks to cause: the socialization of women. Women have been raised to fear and protect themselves from rape (emphasis added):

Socialization of Women

The fear of rape, unlike other fears of specific crimes, is almost exclusive to women. Among women, it is also one of the strongest crime-related fears, and is the strongest crime-related fear for young women. Levels of fear of rape vary among women by age, race/ethnicity, residential area, and other factors, but are especially high for women who have been victims of rape in the past or know victims personally (the latter group may include a significant portion of women, with one study estimating that over half of women know rape victims). Women are socialized from a very young age that rape can happen anywhere, to anyone, at any time. They are taught that they should always be aware of the possibility of rape and protect themselves from it. Young women are taught strategies to keep themselves safe, and this idea is instilled in them at a young age. This teaching women about the possibility of rape at a young age may contribute to higher levels of fear of crime in women. Studies have shown that women that take more precautionary steps to avoid being raped have more fear of actually being raped, whereas women who work nights and are outside in the dark tend to have less fear of rape. This may be because women that are out in the dark alone are more familiar with the area, so they feel that there is less of a threat.

What women know and men don’t: Women have an ever-present fear of being attacked,” a 2019 review of a PBS documentary, begins with a taste for the reader, of how fear of rape is experienced by women, and why (emphasis added):

Every day, women live with fear. It’s not paralyzing, but it’s omnipresent -- whether you’re walking out of work in the dark or asking a friend to watch your drink.

“Ask any woman you know. You always have a plan,” said Mary Dickson, who worked on a PBS documentary about women and fear in 1996. Nothing’s changed since then, she says.

The fear is low hum beneath the music of your regular life, implanted in your teenage years. You’re afraid a strange man will attack you.

So you don’t run at night.

You don’t park in a public garage.

You don’t enter an elevator already occupied by a single man.

You don’t leave a party without your friends.

Women are raised to fear and protect themselves from rape. But fear of rape exponentially increases when women read about or see images or footage of rape. Perhaps that is the reason I sensed that my neighbor Terry felt as I did, after photos emerged of a female hostage being led away to Gaza, her pants bloodied at the crotch. I am also fairly certain that like me, Terry finds it difficult to stop thinking about Shani Louk, whose story I can’t bring myself to relate here.

We, the women of Israel, know that Hamas, in addition to raping women—and it must be said, men—uses fear of rape as a form of psychological warfare, to inspire incapacitating fear in Israeli women and rage in their men. For this reason, Israeli experts have advised Israelis not to watch the footage, read the stories, see the photos, or listen to podcasts where the atrocities might be mentioned. These things spike fears; in the case of women, fear of rape.

Female Fear, a US Dept. of Justice resource, speaks of several types of media that can trigger rape fear in women, among them “frightening press accounts” (emphasis added):

In the United States, the Nation with the highest rape rate in the world, warnings, admonitions, and fear of rape are handed down from mother to daughter. Although rape happens to 1 female in 12, frightening press accounts, violent pornographic movies, cultural stereotypes of rapists and their victims, attacks on friends and acquaintances, and escalating statistics have contributed to women's fear of rape. In exploring the social and psychological specter of rape in women's lives, this study probes both the myths and realities of rape and society's response to it, including strategies women have developed to protect themselves. Fear of rape is reflected in the way women think, organize their lives, and relate to others. As the authors indicate, a reasonable amount of fear is useful in motivating women to take reasonable precautions. The book presents concrete ways both women and men can begin to alleviate the destructive effects of the fear of rape. These include educating the public, integrating women into their communities, promoting legal reform, and forcing accountability in media coverage.

Fear of rape explains the “Believe Women” campaign, which arose out of the #MeToo movement. Rape is one of women’s foremost fears and concerns. Why then, do women at the forefront of efforts to support women, make excuses for Hamas rapists when the victims are Jewish? 


The UN, however, bears special mention for its spectacular betrayal of Israeli women in the face of widespread rape by Hamas terrorists, still an ongoing situation for Israeli hostages of both sexes.   

An October 26 Jerusalem Post editorial speaks of that betrayal (emphasis added):

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s speech to a special Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war on Tuesday began promisingly enough.

“Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” he said at the beginning of the speech.

Then Guterres’ moral compass went haywire, and he began to justify what he had just said was unjustifiable.

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

Why does Guterres justify violence against Israeli Jews, and fail to mention at all, the sexual violence and the rape and degradation of Israeli women? How does anything make rape an excusable offense? In the enlightened world, how can it be that the head of the UN uses his soapbox to blame the Jewish victims and tell lies about the Jewish State—and the Gazan people?

By November 30, however, Guterres had apparently changed his tune. It must have been getting more difficult to get away with the sort of outright Jew-hatred that makes allowances for rape when the victim is a Jew. Hence his post on X.

"There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted.

"Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere."

But why so vague? Where is the mention of rape? Where are the words “support Israel women” and “believe Israeli women” and what do we gleam from these omissions?

Here is my takeaway: with his fuzzy pronouncements of “investigating accounts” and “sexual violence” Guterres is telling the world that it’s okay to suspend belief in women when they are Jewish and Israeli; that it’s understandable that Hamas terrorists would rape Jewish women; and finally, that it’s fine and dandy to lie in public and make public proclamations about Jews occupying their own indigenous Jewish territory when everyone knows the bible is their deed.

My neighbor Terry is somewhat new to Israel. She and her family made Aliyah after there was a drive-by shooting not far from their home in the States. They took the shooting as a sign that it was time to leave the States and come to Israel. She hasn’t changed her mind. Why would she when the entire world repudiates her because she is a Jew, doesn’t care if she is raped because she is a Jew?

Rape fear is real for women everywhere, but fear of rape is compounded in a woman who is Jewish and Israeli, because she knows that the world sees her rape as legitimate resistance, and that the head of the UN himself, sees her genitals and body as free-for-the-taking, subhuman instruments for the release of pent-up Arab anger.



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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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