Justifying the rape of women

[armchairactivist1]

Something I keep coming back to.. for the people whose sympathies lie with the Palestinians and think an eye for an eye and that Hamas have been pushed to act the way they have, how do you justify the brutal rape of women by Hamas?
Post edited by MNHQ

Women stay oddly silent at that here. Just chest beating screams of stop harming Gaza.

I think it's just men tbh. Gang rape happens in most armed conflicts. Even in Ukraine. It makes me think that given half a chance most men would do it if law and order broke down.

Are all Palestinians Hamas to you? All Palestinian children apprentice Hamas fighters? Please try to distinguish between Hamas and Palestinian civilians.

Outside of a few extremists I have yet to see anyone who is concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza justify the actions of Hamas.

Exploiting the brutal attacks on innocent Israelis to score points is reprehensible.

It doesn't happen at the same rate in all armed conflicts.

I didn't say all armed conflicts. You did. I said most.

My point was that in those conflicts where it happens, it doesn't happen at the same rate in all of them. Some groups and armies are far more likely to rape than others. Therefore it's not simply a men thing.

@FOJN you are right. I absolutely differentiate between the two but I think because I'm thinking in this instance about all of the social media accounts I've seen talking about Palestinians and not really mentioning Hammas as a separate extremist terror group, I've done the same thing here. In that respect, Hammas have successfully convinced a lot of people in the western world that they stand for the Palestinian people which I don't believe as they haven't had an election in 16 years

Rape is a tool of war and a daily fact of life for many. It happens in every war and everywhere. You think IDF don't/haven't raped Palestinian women? You think Palestinian men don't rape Palestinian women or that Israeli men don't rape Israeli women?
Even Oxfam people delivering aid in disaster zones use it as a fucking opportunity to rape the local women and kids.

Please don't try and frame any of this shit as if that it means justifying rape

The rape rates in war do seem to be somewhat culturally dependent. I don't think what happened in Berlin would have happened to anywhere near the same extent had the Allies forces got there before the Russians, although I doubt whether the rate would have been zero either.

@Dinkydaisy1 ok, I understand that there is doubt on both sides as to the credibility of sources, this is a difficult aspect to this situation. I watched a coroners report on the news earlier where they described broken pelvis' because of forcible penetration. But yes this was from an Israeli coroner, would there ever be an independent investigation?

I just keep thinking of the girl with the blood stained joggers

People seem not to have read the OP.

women are normally horrified by rape, including rape as a war crime. Hamas raped women and children so violently they broke their pelvises. Nothing Israel has done or could ever do could possibly justify this, but this thread shows posters dismissing, minimising and saying they don’t believe the Israeli reports, despite Hamas’s own footage showing horrendous atrocities (but we all know Jews are sneaky and devious, don’t we?).

I'm getting a little tired of posters minimising the 7 October atrocities. Israel has actually now held screenings for foreign journalists showing a combination of footage filmed by the terrorists and Israeli responders, exactly because there are these constant attempts to minimise.

The same people seem to believe every claim and figure that Hamas care to produce.

Hamas isn't all Palestinians

Rape as a tool of war or terrorism is wrong

That doesn't make other actions such as killing thousands of children right or automatically justified

I don't see this as hard to understand ?

Well whatever reports there are, someone will always question their validity because the source is Israeli. But there are many, many reports that these deaths were not 'clean kills', that men, women and children were not 'just' shot, but tortured first. The descriptions of the 45 minutes of footage (some of it filmed by Hamas and retrieved by the Israeli army) that was shown to journalists the other day are absolutely horrific Isis level atrocities, a modern day pogrom. But of course some people will question all that because the source is Israeli. And yet we all saw the images of the naked (dead?) young Jewish woman being paraded around on a truck by Hamas in the immediate aftermath of their attack.

Anyone interested in reading more about this topic in general, I'd recommend Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women by Lamb (aside: she's a very interesting panel speaker if you ever get the chance to see her).

Rape is horrendous, killing is horrendous. Don’t do either. Don’t condone either. Refuse to support or behave in this way and insist your sons and fathers husbands and uncles do the same.

I don't think that's hard to understand at all. What I struggle to understand is how so many people can't seem to hold any space at all for the absolute horror of the acts of 7th October. It's a total side issue to them, 'yeah that's bad, but ...'

FFS no-one is justifying, minimising or dismissing anything!

@Dinkydaisy1 really? Again? People saying this is fake. How dare you. Have you heard about the horrific footage that Israel needed to show journalists to prove what happened in this horrific tragedy? How dare you deny this.

@Dinkydaisy1 just managed to.

It’s very ugly antisemitism. My eyes have been well and truly opened to the extent of antisemitism over the last couple of weeks.

Me too. Some of the things posted on here in the last couple of weeks have made me shudder. The worst was justifying what happened to that poor woman whose body was paraded round like a hunting trophy. I'll never forget those images and I could not believe what that person posted.

I wonder if the people who demand that Israel, above all, be proportionate would be happier if fewer Palestinians were killed but were killed in the exact same manner as Hamas killed the Israelis?

Tbh the only people I have seen justifying anything on mumsnet are the people calling children collateral damage and insisting they need to be killed for the protection of Israeli children.

Personally, I don't think anything justifies what Hamas did to civilians. If they wanted to kill people they should have gone for the fuckers in charge of Israel. That might have actually made a difference.

@Maireas this is what I am talking about and perhaps I am looking too much on social media but I think this is a good indicator of what people really think. There are a lot of people that I am seeing expressing the sentiment of well what would you do if you'd been oppressed, this is the lengths people are pushed to and this isn't just random people, this is university academics and active feminists. And it wasn't the Palestinians who were responsible, it was Hammas so to me that does sound like they're glossing over the horrific violations that have reportedly happened.