Justifying the rape of women

Perhaps this is why.

There is a lot more appetite on the Gazan side to publish footage of the dead and maimed victims. The Israeli officials have taken a different approach to what is shown, and sought relatives permission, blurred images etc.

Most of the actual Hamas recordings I personally saw were right at the start, they have mostly been deleted from social media now.

The Israelis have shown screenings to global officials and selected media, which are uncensored or less censored.

"People on mn deny, miminise, say that it wasnt proven, doubt the stories or saynshow me the link of the rapes, killings, torture and burning of Israeli people at the festival and kibbutz.

However, believe everything that comes from Gaza."

@Noelectricheating Have you seen the videos of what's happening in Gaza? There must be thousands of them. Dead children, children with limbs blown off, children with their skulls blown off. Tiny, lifeless babies. Children so traumatised they can't stop shaking.

Of course we believe what's coming out of Gaza. We've seen it with our own eyes.

The horror of what is happening in Gaza is proven beyond doubt.

No one is saying that the October 7th attack wasn't horrifying. Of course it was.

However some of the claims being made are just that. Claims. There appears to be no independent, verifiable evidence off mass rapes and beheaded babies.

Israel has lied so much over the past month that I think people can be forgiven for being sceptical.

People on mn deny, miminise, say that it wasnt proven, doubt the stories or saynshow me the link of the rapes, killings, torture and burning of Israeli people at the festival and kibbutz.

However, believe everything that comes from Gaza.

Some play a numbers game.

Others deny anti semitism or miminise it or say that on their march all was good and dandy whilst wandering along with people with flags of a country showing support for just those people then call them 'peace marches'. Not neutral at all but failing to see that.

People fall over themselves with excuses for why Hamas did what they did.

They shout the hospital is bombed over and over even when it is clear it is standing. They shout genocide without any understanding of the term. They use emotional language to stir more hatred yet excuse the hatred from terrorism.

If Israel really wanted to flatten the hospitals completely it could have done ages ago. If terrorists do exist under the hospital then few appear to call out the sick minds of the terrorists.

Too many have died in this war. Its an awful tragedy. Yet it appears to be a useful shield for hatred and hate speech. A people decimated by the holocaust are surrounded by enemies. Tge enemies wish to wipe them out. I'm not sure if that was us we would let them either.

The innocent children are killed and used as pawns by evil around them.

I don't know the answer and hope that international mediation can happen but as far as this country goes, people should feel safe here and the rise in extremists speak in this country should be of concern.

The fact is that many people who consider themselves liberal or "progressive", even if Women , Black or Gay have a lot of tolerance for Islamofascism.
I can understand a leftist being so inclined as I have yet to know one who isn't authoritarian and non sneering towards Classic Liberalism, due to being liberal.
And I suspect that many on the Right wing would be more openly tolerant if so many Muslims weren't Eastern heritage.
But it is the acceptance of cultural Islamofascism in and outside of the West by Liberals that has put the battery in the back of its many overt and covert proponents on The West.
And it goes without saying that Labour decided since the time of Tony Blair that the Muslim vote is more important than assimilation.
Well....the non Black Muslim vote. Because the Islamofascism and block voting doesn't come from the West African or long time pre 1930s lineage West Country and Welsh Somali heritage Muslims as far as I know.
It is mainly a South Asian Muslim phenomena.
I cannot claim to have much social connection with many non Arab White Muslims of Indo European or South Eastern European heritage.
But liberals or Labourites have too many who do not include Islamofascism on any "oppression/ oppressors" strata.
And it is that loophole within which Islamofascists place themselves in the West.

Remember a few years ago when the body of the Manchester stadium suicide bomber remained unburied for weeks because no mosque in Britain would have anything to do with burying him? There was no 'mature' discussion about whether he might have had a point, or whether British foreign policy was really to blame. British people used to know right from wrong.

I have no idea, @firstpasttheposter . I don't normally get sucked into making so many posts, but I just can't bear to see the bullying on here and the outrageous twisting of reality. I'm not Jewish and I find this very, very frightening.

What is going on with mumsnet??!!! You have multiple threads started every day comparing Israelis to Nazis, accusing them of genocide and having 'mature' discussions of 'alternative' ways of viewing Hamas and their motives (because calling people who engage in mass message killings 'terrorists' is just hysteria, right?). But I posted to say that Hamas were actually worse than the Nazis because at least the Nazis tried to hide what they were doing (a point that many Jewish commentators have made since Oct 7) and I got deleted! That's right, comparing Israelis to Nazis is just fine on mumsnet, but comparing Hamas to Nazis is offensive??!!!

This.

Mass gaslighting, nothing to see say some or completely deny it happened. To some rapes were made up, torture didn't happen. Jewish people are right to feel afraid when whatever they say is denied.

There's an awful lot of discussion about what is credible.

It goes without saying that sexual violence as a weapon can never be justified, not any sexual violence.

There is no sane doubting of the horror inflicted on 7/10 or in Gaza in the weeks since.

The issues around details of the horror to me aren't really important, theres more than enough to go round, far, far too much.

There are issues with the credibility of reports from both sides. Hamas are known liars but Israels hands are far from clean either.

Posts on official Israeli government accounts have been widely debunked and labelled disinformation by reputable news outlets across the West.
The IDF have many times made false claims or denials in the past that they've much later admitted to.

Its not possible, certainly not wise to accept anything face value from the Israeli gov, the IDF and certainly not Hamas.

That said there are many, many reports from aid agencies and journalists independent from both in Israel, Gaza and increasingly the West Bank.

On the casualty figures the Gaza health authority works parallel with Hamas not for Hamas. They are obviously connected but there's is a level of trust in the figures because historically, in past conflicts their numbers have been very close to the UNs and the IDFs own figures.

As a rough metric the verifiable deaths of UN workers as a proportion of total UN workers in Gaza is similar (actually slightly more) to the health authorities figures as a proportion of the total population and actually suggests the indescriminate nature of the deaths.

*13:47
Israel festival attack survivor says she saw Hamas rape woman

Lucy Williamson
Reporting from Israel
Warning: This article contains distressing content
Police have shown journalists a single horrific testimony from a woman who was at the Nova festival site during the 7 October attack.
At least 260 people were killed when Hamas gunmen fired rockets and then stormed the festival in the early hours of the morning.
Others were kidnapped and taken hostage into Gaza.
The woman described seeing Hamas fighters mutilate a woman while raping her, and said that one of her attackers then shot her in the head as he continued to rape her.
Israel’s police commissioner Yaacov Shabtai told the BBC after the briefing that this was not a one-off testimony. The nature of some of the violence was hard to speak about, he said.
"You heard how they cut part of the body between one rape and another,” he said. "So you understand those guys came to do something: it’s not the rape, it’s to insult the human being."
The commissioner also suggested that investigators were relying on footage shot by Hamas to determine what had happened in some cases.
Those involved in the investigation said many of the areas where the attacks took place were still active combat zones during the crucial 48-hour window when forensic evidence for sexual assault should be obtained.
DNA was taken from bodies arriving at the main army base for identification, but police say the main focus initially was on identifying the dead, and informing families.
The head of one unit charged with collecting evidence said there were "no known living victims" of sexual assault that they could currently identify, but many of those who survived the attacks are reportedly too traumatised to give evidence.
So far, there’s little sense of the scale of sexual violence carried out by Hamas during the October attacks, but a police spokesman said they were looking into “multiple” cases.*

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-67400490

The 'problem' is that trust in the Netanyahu government and the IDF is so low that anything released is dismissed as propaganda. Is that antisemitism or is that because people are looking to paint Israel as a horror because of the last 6 weeks and the Nakba and the West Bank behaviour? I don't have an answer to that. It's probably a combination of both.

It must be awful to know that there's more trust in what Hamas are releasing than what Israel say because one is deemed a terrorist organisation and one is meant to be a democratic organisation. We may have 'better' proof from Hamas but that's because they release graphic footage of people's deaths without their consent, is that morally okay?

October 7th isn't propaganda and people shouldn't need to 'one upmanship' the horror. I truly hope that the pregnant woman and the dead babies and the torture and the rapes ARE propaganda. What people in the kibbutz experienced was 'enough' - it doesn't need making more graphic, or salacious FFS, people were watering their plants and eating their breakfast and they died. I said on another thread, Hamas had baked in that this was going to be Israel's reaction, they counted on Israel striking back hard against the Palestinian people. Hamas leaders will be revelling in this reaction from Israel. It's strengthening their position in the Arab world and creating lots of future martyrs. That's clear to see. I wish Israel could have come up with a response that was a massive fuck you to Hamas plans. A less blinded by rage and more strategic response that strangled Hamas not by force, but by thought. That ship has well and truly sailed though.

The Israeli government has been proven to lie about its actions over and over. So has ours, so has Hamas... everyone lies in war. Listen to the victims.

Thanks again for sharing @Alcemeg it is true what you say, Ignoring all this, and hammering Israel for responding to it, is like a massive collective gaslighting exercise that must intensify the unfathomable trauma of 7 October.

I am horrified for all those impacted by the decisions of vengeful men who don't care about how many have to die in their stupid war, just so one of them can say, I won. Nobody wins. Both, all sides, are suffering. I wish everyone could remember that.

“Some of most brutal attacks occurred in Beeri, where militants cut open the belly of a pregnant woman and dragged her fetus onto the ground.”

So that’s the entirely of the “proof” from the Washington Post article. It’s editorializing, no source given, no victims names, no independent verification. From a newspaper that is publishing racist, bigoted cartoons and commentary, which also published the 40 beheaded babies claim without fact-checking.

No one is denying Israelis were killed by the Hamas terrorist group. Witnesses are confirming the IDF also killed civilians. But the use of emotive Israeli propaganda to try and win over a global audience and excuse its mass-killing of civilians in a long-planned ethnic cleansing exercise is straight from the Nazi playbook.

The Israeli government has been proven to lie about its actions over and over. Without independent verification, anything sourced from that regime and its army is not to be believed at face value. The only thing that can be believed from its officials is that they intend to execute the next Nakba, which is what we are seeing and is actually being verified by multiple sources.

I'm dismayed that so few people can be bothered watching the Israeli accounts. The view counts on YouTube are quite low.

It's possible to piece together a coherent, albeit fragmentary, picture of some of the events. For example....

The girl you watched only survived because her boyfriend led her away from the bunker that was soon attacked by Hamas, who threw in grenade after grenade onto the people sheltering and spraying them with machine gunfire. One of the few survivors is this guy, who describes what happened
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Another survivor of that bunker was kidnapped. This news reporter realised, in the middle of an interview with parents, that he had seen footage of their son with his left forearm blown off, being taken by truck to Gaza. He waited until they were not on air to share the news, and the parents were so pathetically grateful just to see evidence that at some point their son was still moving with dignity (helping himself onto the truck although he had been left-handed), although whatever happened to him next is anyone's guess

Those who survived mention that this young lad, a childhood friend of the one with his arm blown off, protected everyone in the shelter by repeatedly throwing the grenades back outside the bunker. Unfortunately, he died in one of the explosions.
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I won't share the footage from this particular bunker just after an explosion that killed most of the occupants.

There's a general overview about the bunkers here. This is just one of many horrific stories.
https://news.yahoo.com/ran-bomb-shelter-safety-instead-151646860.html

Ignoring all this, and hammering Israel for responding to it, is like a massive collective gaslighting exercise that must intensify the unfathomable trauma of 7 October.

Agree. Awful to see this style of posting. Really off

Why are hypothetical beheaded babies more important to you than the almost 5000 Palestinian child death toll?

What a gross sentence to write, seriously wtf. I'm sure everyone cares about any child dying as a result of any war, not just this one, but your denial of one sides suffering while you quote a death toll for the other... how do you know that figure is real??

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/12/hamas-planning-terror-gaza-israel/

https://twitter.com/mrconfino/status/1724385046583234841

The pregnant woman and the rapes are discussed in the above two links @Fancylike

I'd say stating categorically that these things didn't happen is as much blind belief as anything.
The ongoing minimisation of the atrocities Israel suffered, that started almost straight after the attack, has been sobering.

Israel’s government was fine sharing burning body imagery publicly until they were exposed as AI fakes

This in itself is incorrect. Here's one source but there's plenty more out there. Denying a murdered baby the dignity of acknowledgement isn't great.

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/expert-debunks-ai-tools-claim-that-israels-photo-is-fake

Why is your blind belief in Israeli propaganda allowing you to not read clear text?

She does not say she witnessed these beheading or pregnant women being sliced open. She’s repeated IDF talking points. She has not in any way said she was a witness to these deaths I’ve highlighted, it’s all “they did this” but without any firsthand account or names attached. What she did witness is the IDF bombing their location, after arriving 12 hours after they were first contacted.

A reminder that there is only one baby (sadly) listed in the official victims list provided by the IDF, no pregnant women indicated. Why are hypothetical beheaded babies more important to you than the almost 5000 Palestinian child death toll? We are currently watching incubator babies die in real time, but your thoughts are with victims who at this point probably don’t exist. And don’t say it’s “for privacy” - Israel’s government was fine sharing burning body imagery publicly until they were exposed as AI fakes. They are all okay with filming Palestinians being deliberately driven over for TikTok and showing Noa’s body, so there’s nothing to do with human decency here.