Tuesday, February 06, 2024
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill: The left’s grotesque betrayal of Jewish women`
Brendan O'Neill: The left’s grotesque betrayal of Jewish women`
The speed with which the right-on went from saying ‘Believe women’ to ‘Rape pics or it didn’t happen’ is mind-blowing. Their cry in recent years was that every woman who makes an allegation of sexual assault must be believed. Women must be ‘listened to and believed’, they used to say. Fast forward a decade and this principle has been incinerated. We arrive at the surreal situation where upper-class women who say a Tory MP touched their knee are instantly believed, while the nightmare vision of Israeli women burnt to a cinder, their underwear removed, provokes only chin-stroking. Can we be sure they were raped?UNRWA’s time is up – let’s shut it down
So widespread is the rape denialism that some activists have felt compelled to take to the streets to raise awareness about Hamas’s sexual crimes. At the weekend, British Jews and their allies gathered near BBC HQ to say ‘Rape is not resistance’. Some wore jogging bottoms with stains between the legs, in solidarity with Naama Levy, the 19-year-old Israeli woman who was glimpsed in just such a state shortly after the Hamas pogrom. Ms Levy remains in captivity in Gaza. ‘Each minute is an eternity in hell’, wrote her mother recently about her desperate wait for the return of her daughter. The woke silence on this suffering is unconscionable. The treachery of the feminists is unforgivable.
Now we know: it’s ‘#MeToo unless you’re a Jew’, in Nicole Lampert’s words. Believe women, except Jewish women – that’s the true slogan of the woke. When it comes to 7 October, the duty of the right-on, it seems, is not to believe women, but to believe Hamas. To believe that regressive army of Islamists, anti-Semities, misanthropes, homophobes and misogynists when they say, ‘We didn’t rape women, we swear’. We’ve gone from ‘Believe women’ to ‘Believe fascists’.
How do we explain this grotesque betrayal of Jewish womankind? This vile abandonment of women by self-styled feminists, and of Jews by self-styled anti-racists? In part it’s a function of identity politics, which divides people according to ‘privilege’ or ‘oppression’, and decides their moral worth accordingly. Jewish women have more privilege points than Palestinian men, apparently, and thus they can’t possibly have been violated by Hamas. They’re oppressors, right, not victims? And partly it’s yet another expression of the Socialism of Fools that has been soaring in recent years, where the Jewish State has come to play the same role that the Jewish people once played: that is, as an entity responsible for all the world’s ills, and thus deserving of hate and nothing else.
More broadly, though, I think it speaks to the creeping victory of the forces of barbarism among the ‘virtuous’ of the Western world. These people glimpse in the violence of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Houthis a visceral revolt against a West they themselves loathe, and it excites them, it makes them feel alive, it adds the frisson of apocalyptic denouement to their otherwise dull political lives. And nothing – not the safety of Jews, not the dignity of women – can be permitted to interfere with the moral thrill these people derive from a barbarism they mistake for rebellion. If Jewish women must be collateral damage in this unholy marriage of Western self-loathing and Islamist barbarism, so be it. Yes, that’s it – they are willing to sacrifice Jews, especially female Jews, to the requirements of their own moral vanity. It must never be forgotten.
The dislocation of Arabs from Palestine, whether caused by Arab or Israeli actions, could have been quickly solved by another UN agency: the UN High Commission for Refugees, which followed in the footsteps of earlier League of Nations refugee programs. The stated goal of the UNHCR was and is to “help the millions of Europeans who had fled or lost their homes.” It would have taken just the stroke of a pen to include Palestinian refugees, as well as the 700,000 Jews who were forced out of Mideast countries where they had lived for a millennium.Bipartisan group of House lawmakers presses administration on pro-Palestinian charities in the U.S.
Instead, part of the grand plan of the Arab countries to keep the fire of Arab rejection of Israel burning was to give special recognition to the Palestinians by giving them their own agency with the UN’s creation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA. Rather than work to resettle Palestinians and integrate them into Palestinian or Arab society, UNRWA’s goal is to perpetuate Palestinian misery. How else can one explain why there are UNRWA-supervised refugee camps in the midst of the Palestinian Authority’s largest cities nearly 30 years after the PA assumed control?
As recently explained in a Wall Street Journal article, “UNRWA has kept Palestinians in permanent refugee camps” which has led to raising generations of Palestinians fed on the lie of a return to Israel and treating them as people who are not capable of standing on their own two feet. Neighboring Arab countries, too, have done their share of instilling hatred for Israel and Jews by not absorbing Palestinians within their borders into local society by giving them citizenship or work permits.
The disclosures of UNRWA employee involvement in the October 7 massacre and the use of its facilities in Gaza to assist the Hamas war effort is just the tip of an iceberg that extends deep below the surface. What lurks below that surface is a thoroughly corrupt UN agency that long ago decided to be part of the “refugee” problem rather than its solution.
Do away with UNRWA and replace it with the UNHCR; it’s going to be an improvement.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote to the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation last week requesting information on alleged links between Hamas and U.S.-based tax-exempt charities that they said may be providing support to the terrorist group.Hamas officially demands end to war for hostages’ release
Pointing to testimony provided at a hearing the committee held last year, the lawmakers raised concerns that several pro-Palestinian charities may have financial ties to Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
Such charities, they noted, employ top officials previously involved in other charities such as the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts for Charitable Development, which were shuttered by the U.S. government for providing funding to terrorists from American donors.
“Today, it appears that members of these now-defunct charities are reorganizing and forming new U.S.-based charities that may be seeking to take advantage of well-intentioned Americans by redirecting their money to support terrorist organizations like Hamas,” the lawmakers’ letter to the Treasury and IRS reads. “We are concerned that there are U.S.-based organizations with ties to Hamas that were able to evade the anti-terrorism efforts of the IRS and gain tax-exempt status.”
The lawmakers requested a briefing from the Treasury and the IRS by Feb. 13 to assess those agencies’ current efforts to monitor, identify and investigate potential support for terrorists among U.S.-based nonprofits.
In a separate letter, the lawmakers requested information on the FBI’s monitoring of antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, as well as the FBI’s own efforts to investigate charities and groups operating on college campuses that may be providing support to terrorist organizations.
The Hamas terror group on Tuesday night announced its long-awaited response to a proposed hostages-for-ceasefire deal with Israel, in what Jerusalem said amounted to a rejection of the outline.
Hamas said it “dealt with the proposal in a positive spirit, ensuring a comprehensive and complete ceasefire, ending the aggression against our people, ensuring relief, shelter and reconstruction, lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip and completing a prisoner exchange.
“We value the role of our brothers in Egypt, Qatar and all countries that seek to stop the brutal aggression against our people,” Hamas added.
The Ynet news site cited senior officials in Jerusalem as saying that while Hamas claimed it agreed to the framework as negotiated by Doha and Cairo, it was demanding “impossible conditions” from Israel.
“In any case, Israel will not stop the fighting. Hamas’s response amounts to a negative answer,” the officials said, adding that the Prime Minister’s Office was still drafting an official response to mediators.
Israel has repeatedly rejected proposals for a long-term or permanent ceasefire and maintains that it will continue in its goal to eradicate Hamas and ensure that Gaza can never again pose a threat to the Jewish state.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Wednesday, said the Biden administration was reviewing Hamas’s response and stressed it was “essential” to go ahead.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done. But we continue to believe that an agreement is possible and indeed essential, and we will continue to work relentlessly to achieve it,” Blinken stated following meetings in Doha.
