Today (Dec. 2, 2023) – RAPE IS RAPE (and rape in war is wrong).
But until recently – for progressives and those in the main stream media at least -- when the women who have been raped are Israelis -- apparently that wasn't really true.
As the hideous sexual violence committed by Hamas monsters against Israeli women is suddenly receiving some attention, it should not be forgotten that the betrayal of women by progressives and by most in the media is a feature, not a bug, of oppressor/oppressed ideology.
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It has been almost two months since the massacre and kidnapping of over 1500 innocent Israelis on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists – attacks that included acts of such hideous sexual violence by the Hamas monsters (note that I do not refer to them as “animals”, because such a descriptor does not do justice to the brutality, barbarism, and sadism of their actions) that I cannot describe them here because doing so would bring me to tears and make my nauseous.
Since then, the “silence is violence” “#believe all women” “microaggressions produce trauma” crowd has been conspicuously quiet about these sexual assault atrocities. Not a whisper from the many Harvard students who decided that any violence that occurred on Oct. 7 was the fault of Israelis themselves. Not a word referencing the insanely brutal rapes from the presidents of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, Wellesley, Cooper Union, Princeton (you get the drift). Nothing from the Democratic Socialists of America or from Code Pink or from the female members of “The Squad” or from leaders of sexual assault support groups.
But during the past few days, thanks to the tenacious efforts of a number of activists and reporters (including Brianna Gologryda and Jake Tapper at CNN and social media activists operating under the #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew hashtag on X and similar efforts on Tik Tok and Instagram), the issue is suddenly receiving the attention it had deserved.
In Newsweek for example:
https://www.newsweek.com/believe-womenexcept-israelis-like-me-opinion-1847706
Jeopardy host Mayim Bialyk in the NY Post:
The always-insight Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/israeli-women-victims-sexual-assault-need-support.html
In The Times of London
Phyllis Chessler (author of the 1970’s feminist classic Women and Madness)
And an article by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/24/sexual-violence-israeli-women-media/
Rubin was also a guest discussing this issue on the usually predictably anti-Israel Katie Phang show on MSNBC this morning (Dec. 2), while even the very left-wing, typically very anti-Israel Guardian has seen fit to publish an article decrying war rape by Hamas terrorists:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/01/israel-hamas-war-rape-israelis-palestinians
And in an action that almost qualifies as hell freezing over, the “United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women” finally (after ignoring the issue for >50 days and after at least one false start tweet that they deleted) was shamed into posting a tweet acknowledging that sexual violence against women occurred on Oct. 7, a tweet that actually mentioned Hamas by name as the perpetrators.
But my reason for posting about this issue is not simply to take note of the beyond belief horrors of the Hamas terrorists’ actions, but also to argue that this event is just one example of the betrayal of women by progressives, and that such betrayals are a feature, rather than a bug, of the morally bankrupt progressive oppressor/oppressed ideology.
So let me mention a few other (somewhat idiosyncratically selected) examples of the betrayal of women by progressives:
Ignoring the oppression of women in the Muslim world.
A few years ago, while walking across my university campus, I came across a booth set up for that year’s “Wear a Hijab Day”. As I stopped to watch a line of non-Muslim American college females happily submitted to having a hijab put on their heads – at the same time that women were (and of course, still are) dying in Iran for the right to be able to show their hair. I was shocked that so many female students would feel that they were being “inclusive” and “tolerant” by submitting to a ritual symbolic of, and actually a part of, the oppression of hundreds of millions of women in the Muslim world. And then there was the recent spectacle of the female members of the avowedly feminist Swedish government wearing hijabs when visiting Iran, thereby giving their imprimatur to the practices that limit the lives of Muslim women. What a shameful betrayal of the courageous Iranian women who have been imprisoned, and in some cases died, for the cause of freedom for women in Iran. And while American college students are protesting daily in support of Hamas — where are the protests and social media campaigns supportive of Muslim women who are being oppressed within Muslim countries? Even the issue of female genital mutilation in the Muslim world is rarely mentioned by the “#metoo” crowd.
Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal
Perhaps not well know to most Americans, this scandal involved the systematic sexual exploitation and abuse of more than a THOUSAND teen girls in England by gangs of primarily Pakistani Muslim men. A major reason why the abuse continued despite numerous reports about the abuse to authorities was that the authorities did not want to be accused of being racist; because the abusers were members of a religious and ethnic minority, while most of the victims were not, authorities were hesitant to take action to stop the abuse. The betrayal of all these girls (primarily lower class) by the British elites shocks the conscience.
Participation of transwomen in female sports and their inclusion in female spaces
Obviously, this is a huge and contentious topic that I will probably focus on at much greater length in some future posting. For now, it is sufficient to note that, although a large majority of Americans do not support permitting males who self-identify as women or girls to participate in female sports, there is a particular strain of progressive gender ideology that considers such a position to be transphobic and bigoted. Indeed, if one listens to NPR (as I do most days), it would be hard to think that anyone who is not a right-winger could believe anything other than that. Even the usually sane and evidence-based podcast ScienceVs has taken the position that science supports the policy of allowing males who identify as girls or women to participate in female sports (a patently false conclusion). Of course, every time a male competes in female sports, there is a cost to the females who are competing. The transwoman does not have to win to have harmed the female competitors; if a male, for example, finishes fifth in a race, every female who finished below him has been pushed down one position and males can pose an actual physical danger to females in some sporting activities.
There is also the issue of permitting transwomen prisoners to be housed in female prisons and to spend time in shelters for abused women. Most females do not want males — including males who self-identify as women — in those spaces. Arguing – on the basis of progressive “inclusiveness” beliefs – that the wishes of the females should be given less weight than those of the transwomen is, quite simply, a betrayal of the sex-based rights of females.
A feature not a bug
The indefatigable and always-worth-reading blogger Jerry Coyne has coined a simple principle that captures the overarching thesis of this posting. According to Coyne’s Law of Conflicting Progressive Priorities:
Whenever two or more progressive policy priorities are in conflict or competition with each other, the ones that focus on the rights of females will lose.
The way in which most progressives have responded to the events of Oct. 7 is entirely consistent with this principle. That is — the betrayal of the sexually violated and heinously sexually assaulted Israeli women by modern progressives is a natural consequence of progressive intersectional ideology. According to this Manichean group-membership-based world view, groups of humans that are defined according to the intersection of the dimensions of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, can be organized into a hierarchy based upon the degree to which each group can be considered to be oppressed. Any individual’s actions are then judged not on the basis of the nature of the action itself, but rather according to the place in the hierarchy of the individual’s group membership. Thus, for instance, because people with white skin are by definition oppressors of those with dark skin, there can be no such thing as someone with dark skin being a racist or engaging in a racist action against someone who is white. Similarly, because transwomen are (according to the progressives who uniquely possess the capacity to accurately establish where different groups are placed in the hierarchy) more oppressed than natal women, the rights of transwomen must take priority over those of natal women whenever a situation arises in which members of those two groups are in conflict or competition with each other.
Within this world view, as it has been promulgated on elite college campuses and within other progressive organizations, Jews are a highly successful group of white people, and therefore are located in the position of least oppressed, whereas the Hamas terrorists are darker-skinned members of a racially and religiously oppressed group. (Note that the fact that a majority of Israeli Jews are as dark-skinned as the Hamas terrorists, and the fact that there are more than 100 times as many Muslims in the world as Jews, matters not one iota to the progressives within the U.S. and Western Europe whose work establishes the rankings in the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy). Therefore, according to this world view, the oppressed Hamas terrorists cannot be condemned for their actions, no matter how heinous, as long as those harmed by their actions are members of a group classified as oppressors. Not a surprise, therefore, that following Oct. 7 there was such silence from progressives regarding the sadistic sexual violence committed against Israeli women by the Hamas monsters.
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But of course, it is good to never forget that not all voices during the past few days have claimed that rape is rape and that rape as a tool of war is wrong.
