SILENCE IS VIOLENCE, BUT NOT FOR JEWS
On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington, why so many progressive women have been silent about the extensive reports of widespread rape and sexual assault carried out by Hamas against Israeli women during the massacres of Oct. 7.
What followed was a master class in evasion, both-sidesism and changing the subject from the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“I’ve condemned what Hamas has done,” Jayapal allowed, briefly, before moving immediately to condemn Israel. Bash persisted: “I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking about Hamas.”
“I’ve already answered your question, Dana,” Jayapal replied, adding that while rape was “horrific,” it “happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”
A day after the CNN interview, I attended a conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, organized by the Israeli mission and Jewish groups, in which Hamas’ “tools,” to use Jayapal’s term, were described. The important testimony came from Israelis who bore witness to what they had seen firsthand or heard from eyewitnesses of Oct. 7.
Here is some of what I heard, which people like Jayapal would do well to hear also.
Yael Richert, a chief superintendent with the Israeli national police, quoting a survivor of the Nova rave massacre:
Everything was an apocalypse of corpses. Girls without any clothes on. Without tops. Without underwear. People cut in half. Butchered. Some were beheaded. There were girls with a broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart, in a split.
An unidentified survivor of the rave, shown in a video with her face obscured:
They laid a woman down, and I understood they were raping her. He was basically shifting her around and passing her to another person. She stood on her feet; she was bleeding from her back. He’s pulling her hair. She’s not dressed, and he cuts her breast, throws it on the road, and they are playing with it.
There were clear signs of sexual abuse from the first moments of the attack, and by mid-November there were authoritative reports of Hamas’ widespread sexual assaults.
Yet it took U.N. Women, the agency that has that mandate to look out for women’s rights globally, eight weeks before issuing a perfunctory statement saying it was “alarmed” by accounts of gender-based atrocities during the attacks of Oct. 7.
As for other so-called human-rights organizations, the website of Human Rights Watch — which includes a page ostensibly devoted to women’s rights — has dozens of news releases about the war in Gaza. Not a word about the rapes. The National Organization for Women denounced the Oct. 7 attacks on the day they occurred and last week issued a news release condemning “rape as a weapon of war.” But it contained no mention of Hamas.
Why not?
In a remarkable floor speech last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke of “the sting of the double standard,” which, he said, “is at the root of antisemitism.” He also recalled a talk he heard in college by Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, who confronted left-wing hecklers at an event at Harvard.
“We have lived with the double standard throughout the centuries,” Eban told the protesters, Schumer said. “There are always things the Jews couldn’t do. Everyone could be a farmer but not the Jew, everyone could be a carpenter but not the Jew, everyone could move to Moscow but not the Jew, and everyone could have their own state, but not the Jew.”
To which one can today add: Every victim of sexual violence should be heard; no condemnation of rape should ever come with qualifiers; “Silence Is Violence.”
But not when it comes to Jews.