Feminist chat groups immediately lit up. Not, as you might expect, with horror at this violent attack, which was being livestreamed. Instead, there was debate. Quite a lot of it was hinged around those bloodied trousers.
Dreadful, shameful, disgraceful, women, disbelieving women. What's wrong with these people that they need to deny, minimise, excuse, deflect, criticise, debate, anything but believe these victims of appalling crimes.
"The sexual violence was never really hidden by Hamas: the way Shani Louk’s half-naked corpse was paraded and spat on in Gazan streets, the blood-soaked pyjama crotch of the female hostage as she was forced into a car.
The images were put on social media by Palestinian terrorists and beamed around the world on October 7, 2023. Feminist chat groups immediately lit up. Not, as you might expect, with horror at this violent attack, which was being livestreamed. Instead, there was debate. Quite a lot of it was hinged around those bloodied trousers.
To some of them – experts in sexual violence – it looked like clear evidence of rape. But others were determined to diminish what their own eyes were telling them. Perhaps the blood had come from her handcuffed wrists, they asked, desperately.
Within days, one group of “prominent feminist scholars” in America insisted that they could not stand in solidarity with Israeli women because that would give in to “colonial feminism”. UK charity Sisters Uncut suggested that claims of sexual violence by Hamas were “Islamophobic and racist weaponisation”. The mantra of “believe women” was buried because Jews were not allowed to be victims. Ever.
Where so-called feminists led this assault on female victims, the world took its lead. While rape has been used both within war and as a weapon of war for as long as man has existed, this is the first time in which it was both documented by the aggressor and yet denied."