Unfortunately, the objectification of women is engrained in every culture on the planet. This includes ‘modern democracies’ and European cultures. Rape is a universal weapon of war. In war, we women are always being raped on all sides. I don’t think the reports of rape were being suppressed by the UN, I don’t agree there is some sort of antiSemitism at play either. It all seems to be the usual ah rape, well that’s war business as usual to me.
Every other war on the globe past or present, rape is part of it. All posturing by world leaders and the UN condemning weaponised rape has been lip service. All militaries that claim they are moral and would never are liars. They all do it. I’ve seen it over and over and over. Doesn’t matter what race or age you are or where in the world the war is, if you are female rape is as probable as death and can happen in either order. This extends to civil wars, to terror organisations eg the Boko Haram kidnap Nigerian school girls in their hundreds rape them until they are pregnant and then force them to be suicide bombers. In the jungles of Central America, the CIA funded contras would raid villages and take back a dozen or so girls and women and over a week or two rape and torture them to death. I could go on, the examples of men’s savagery are endless.
Why? Because all of us are still viewed as objects for men to possess or their enemies to steal/violate/destroy. The men on ‘our side’ will refer to us as “our women” as Nethanyu possessively commented during the press announcement on Friday when he said of Hamas’ ‘they took OUR women’ instantly objectifying all the female hostages just as Agamemnon did when he rallied the Greeks to destroy Troy because a Trojan had taken HIS woman millenium ago. The stories of Helen being so beautiful or it being about love are romantic whitewashing, it was about you don’t steal my woman. Or Chengis Khan when he said it is great for the Mongol horde to defeat their enemies and then “lie on the soft bellies of their wives and daughters.”
Men have not evolved beyond this prehistoric and ancient mentality at all. The past fifty years of feminism has not been enough to undo the misogyny so deeply engrained in them.
The men on the other side, say we are ‘their women’ as in the women possessed by the men of the other side. So women become objects upon which enemy soldiers vent their anger and indulge in their most base and depraved fantasies. To take us hostage is with the intent to possess, to take something from the men of the enemy and then to crow ‘I have taken your women.’ We don’t get the quick, clean merciful death.
During a war, soldiers will even rape the female soldiers serving alongside them. Have you ever read the accounts of females in the military of sexual assault and rape within the ranks? Every military has this ‘problem’ as they call it which is yet more minimisation.
Yes rape is minimised, it’s a shrugged off weapon of war that is viewed as less damaging than a hand grenade. The sexual violence done to women and girls doesn’t ever get the attention it should because men don’t really want to change and that is sex based oppression and patriarchy in war. Israeli women, Jewish or Arab, or foreign National women taken hostage by Hamas are being treated no different from women in any war ever, past or present.
I know this may be difficult for some younger posters to accept, especially if they’ve grown up in a country that has never experienced war on their soil in generations or worked with female refugees from war torn countries.