Ignoring Israeli women and the deplorable sexual violence they are experiencing simply because they happen to be Jewish really beggars belief and tells us all we need to know about so much of modern feminism and the MeToo movement.
The Australian Sky News host Sharri Markson has done a terrific job reporting from Israel this past week. Of course this was mainly done as an acknowledgment and a reminder of the horrific atrocities that happened on October 7, 2023 by Hamas, and are still happening by the terror organisation. We must never forget.
In her programs from Israel she had a number of moving interviews with victims of all this, including those who survived the day and were able to speak about it, and some who were finally released as hostages. We heard such tragic and shocking stories, especially as to what the women had to endure at the hands of their Islamist captors.
Sharri and others asked some obvious questions that still deserve answers: Where are all the Western feminists when you need them? Why have hardly any of them been speaking out for the Israeli—and other—females being treated so diabolically by Hamas? Why the silence? Why the selective outrage?
Yes, some voices over the past twelve months have been heard on this, but far too few. For example, late last year Candice Holdsworth asked, “Why can’t “intersectional feminists” condemn Hamas’s misogyny?” She said in part:
It is surely possible to express opposition to Israel’s military action in Gaza without whitewashing Hamas’s crimes. But in recent weeks it has been disturbing to learn just how many people are willing to deny Hamas’s atrocities, or to view its sadistic violence as a legitimate form of “resistance.”
When self-declared feminists join in with this apologism, they make clear that they do not see all women as worthy of the same moral consideration. The woke belief in an “intersectional” hierarchy of oppression, which paints Palestinians as eternal victims and Jews as oppressors, seems to have blinded them to the brutal violence that so many Israeli women were subjected to six weeks ago. Their rigid ideology will not let them see Hamas’s mass rape of women for the atrocity that it is.
Condemning Hamas’s violence against women really shouldn’t be difficult. It is a very peculiar kind of feminism that insists otherwise.
And a half year ago Nils A. Haug wrote about this as well:
The reality is that for all advocates for women’s welfare, especially in the area of sexual violence, the crucial concern at this time should be the terror perpetrated on defenceless females of all ages through acts of sexual depravity, torture, and death by Hamas in Israel on October 7.
The moral obligation of lovers of peace, and those who hold to the sanctity of human life, is to speak out against injustice. This is particularly so in crimes of violence against the defenceless. It is therefore fitting to expect women’s rights groups to speak out on behalf of traumatized females of all ethnic and religious categories.
This approach was ratified in by Nobel Peace Prize winner Eli Wiesel in his 1986 acceptance speech: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Archbishop Charles Chaput remarked that “tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil.”
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