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October 7: Rape As an Instrument of Genocide

An Israeli soldier walks near pictures that are part of an installation at the site of the Nova festival, where people were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, in Reim, southern Israel, Jan. 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

JNS.orgAs the world marked International Women’s Day on March 8, the various social-media platforms lit up with posts from pro-Israel celebrities and influencers demanding the release of the female hostages who remain in the captivity of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

In the depths of the sewer that is social media—with X/Twitter at the head of the pack when it comes to antisemitic and anti-Zionist barbs—these posts were a welcome tonic, providing us with a glimpse of humanity amid all the hatred and dehumanization. But what they won’t achieve is the defeat of the Oct. 7 denial trend that is being actively stoked by far-leftists (and a few far-rightists, too), Islamist sympathizers and fellow travelers, assorted minor academics, virtue-signaling Gen Z’ers and many more of the sub groups encountered on these platforms.

I was struck, as I surveyed these outpourings, by a simple realization. We—the Jewish community and the non-Jewish allies we cling to—have been stuck at the first hurdle in telling the terrible story of Oct. 7. Too many people don’t believe us. Too many people won’t believe us. The atrocities—the mass rapes and decapitations, the orgy of slaughter—are, in their fevered minds, a cynical Zionist fabrication designed to do what Zionists always do: Change the subject and shift the world’s attention from the situation on the ground in Gaza.

Just as there is no point in debating Holocaust deniers—all of whom are predisposed to the belief that the Holocaust was fabricated for the purpose of winning sympathy for Jews and Israel, but who nonetheless would embrace the opportunity to finish what Hitler started (or didn’t start!)—there is no point in debating Oct. 7 deniers. These are not people who sift through evidence with an open mind. They come from an ideologically fixed position. They are unbending.

To my mind, there is a more important task than arguing with these useful idiots. And that is securing the recognition that the bestialities carried out by Hamas were war crimes and crimes against humanity. The pogrom was a necessary, integral component of its bid to destroy what the Hamas charter calls the “Zionist project” it characterizes as “the enemy of the Arab and Islamic Ummah… a danger to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability.” In other words, a program of genocide.

That perhaps explains why so many commentators sympathetic to Israel hailed the recent U.N. report confirming many of the accounts of sexual violence committed by the Hamas monsters on Oct. 7. The United Nations, a thoroughly anti-Zionist body despite the fact that Israel is a member state, not only authenticated these claims but opened the door to a legal process targeting the Hamas leadership and its key operatives.

It is that latter goal that we need to focus on: The creation of an international tribunal to prosecute Hamas for its crimes in the legal tradition established by the post-World War II Nuremburg trials, as well as more recent international courts to try the atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda.

By the United Nations own legal calculus, the foundations for such a tribunal are firm. Witnesses interviewed by the world body’s investigative team during its visit to Israel effectively described Oct. 7 as an “indiscriminate campaign to kill, inflict suffering and abduct the maximum number possible of men, women and children—soldiers and civilians alike—in the minimum possible amount of time. People were shot, often at close range; burnt alive in their homes as they tried to hide in their safe rooms; gunned down or killed by grenades in bomb shelters where they sought refuge; and hunted down at the Nova music festival site as well as in the fields and roads adjacent to the Nova music festival ground. Other violations included sexual violence, abduction of hostages and corpses, the public display of captives, both dead and alive, the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation, and the looting and destruction of civilian property.” At the Nova site, as well as on Road 232, the artery used by some festival-goers to escape the onslaught, and at the kibbutzim overran by the terrorists, the U.N. team found that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred… including in the form of rape and gang rape, during the 7 October 2023 attacks.”

When it comes to prosecuting these horrors, there is a clear precedent set by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when 850,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered by the loathed Interahamwe militias. One of the perpetrators, a former schoolteacher named Jean-Paul Akayesu, was prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on 15 counts that included rape. Through its deliberations, the tribunal determined that rape and sexual violence “constitute acts of genocide insofar as they were committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a targeted group, as such. It found that sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide.”

These words apply to the Oct. 7 atrocities with the same degree of legitimacy. Hamas is dedicated not just to the destruction of Israel as a sovereign state, but the physical destruction of its Jewish citizens as well. The rapes on Oct. 7 cannot be explained as the consequence of high spirits, ease of access to young, defenseless women by armed men or the effect of the amphetamines ingested by some of the terrorists. Rape was a predetermined part of their genocidal strategy, as necessary for the fulfilment of their aims as the murders and other atrocities.

Not surprisingly, the United Nations has given little indication that it intends to act on the findings of its own report. Both the Israeli government and the Jewish organizations present at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva need to hold the organization to account. The global agency now recognizes that the accounts of mass rape were genuine, and it recognizes, too, that rape is a key instrument for the execution of a genocide. We learned that in the Balkans and in East Africa, and now we’ve seen the same phenomenon in Israel as well. So, let’s worry less about what the deniers think and more about securing justice for the victims.

The post October 7: Rape As an Instrument of Genocide first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Democrats, Republicans Make Final Push for Jewish Voters on Eve of US Presidential Election

US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) speaks during the House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, Sept. 30, 2021. Photo: Al Drago/Pool via REUTERS

Both Democratic and Republican parties are scrambling to galvanize Jewish support on the eve of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

In what is projected to potentially be the closest presidential election in over 20 years, both parties believe that Jewish voters could play a major role in determining the election’s outcome. As the race for the White House enters the final hours, Democrats and Republicans have deployed some of their most vocal pro-Israel allies in a last-minute pitch to the Jewish community.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to court Jewish voters who feel alienated by Rep. Summer Lee’s (D-PA) unrelenting anti-Israel rhetoric. Torres sought to assuage fears that Vice President Kamala Harris harbors similar views on Israel as Lee.

In addition, Torres defended the Biden administration’s record on Israel, arguing that a potential Harris administration would continue to strengthen ties with the Jewish state and mitigate any threats from Iran.

“I joined the Harris campaign in showing solidarity with the Pittsburgh Jewish community, which has been profoundly shaken by both the Tree of Life mass shooting and the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism,” Torres told Jewish Insider.

“I did my best to reassure the Jewish community that the Democratic Party — despite the background noise on Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok — has been and will remain fundamentally pro-Israel and that the Vice President herself falls squarely within the pro-Israel consensus that has historically governed American politics, rejecting both the [a]nti-Zionism of the far left and the America-[F]irst isolationism of the far right,” Torres continued.

On the conservative side of the aisle, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) filmed a video with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in support of former President Donald Trump.

“This is the most important election cycle in our lifetime, and as we have seen on college campuses, the rot of antisemitism is real in the Democratic Party.

She accused the Biden White House of betraying Israel and the Jewish people. She lambasted the Biden administration for their failure “to combat antisemitism”

“It is Republicans who have always – and will always – stand strongly with Israel, and stand up and clearly condemn antisemitism,” Stefanik said.

While serving on the Education and the Workforce Committee, Stefanik has lambasted administrators of elite universities for their mealy-mouthed condemnations of antisemitism and tolerance of anti-Jewish violence on campus. Last December, Stefanik engaged in a fiery back-and-forth with the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over a purported antisemitic campus atmospheres.

Early indicators suggest that Harris is expected to win a smaller share of the Jewish vote than previous Democratic candidates. Jewish voters, highly-concentrated in important areas such as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, could prove critical in Harris’s bid to win the White House.

Liberal CNN commentator Van Jones cautioned Monday that Harris has suffered an erosion of Jewish support in the Philadelphia metro.

Jones said that he’s “worried” that the “Jewish vote in the suburban areas” of Philadelphia have dramatically soured on Harris.

“Biden won the Jewish vote [in suburban Philadephia] by 70%” Jones said, referencing the 2020 election.

“Some polls show Kamala at 50-50” among Jewish voters in suburban Philadelphia, Jones lamented.

The post Democrats, Republicans Make Final Push for Jewish Voters on Eve of US Presidential Election first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Quiet antisemitism in Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village leaves a resident wondering how this area is considered ‘progressive’

In a gentrifying West Toronto neighbourhood full of signs advocating for Black lives, transgender youth and the unhoused, the clerk’s refusal to hang up a sign of my own design […]

The post Quiet antisemitism in Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village leaves a resident wondering how this area is considered ‘progressive’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Jewish Boy Assaulted on Way to School in New York City, Assailant Remain at Large

Illustrative: An ambulance used by Hatzalah in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Orthodox Jews in New York City are again frustrated with a lack of law and order in the Five Boroughs following another attack against a member of their community, this time a child.

According to multiple accounts, an African American male on Monday morning smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The incident was the second known assault on an Orthodox Jew in the area in less than a week.

“He was riding his bike between Winthrop and Clarkson, near the hospital, when a man slapped him. He arrived at school shaken, and the school contacted his parents and Crown Heights Shomrim [a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group],” Yaacov Behrman, a local Jewish leader, posted on X/Twitter.

Behrman — a liaison for Chabad Headquarters, the main New York base of the Hasidic movement — added that the boy was filing a police report.

A teacher of the young man, Yisrael Eliashiv, added that the assailant, who remains at large, “smacked [the boy] across the face for no reason other than hate. Thankfully, he got away before anything else happened.” The teacher then noted that his student did not initially think to notify the police because he doubted the attacker would receive any punishment.

“I’m fuming to the point I’ve got a migraine … You have kids who are 13 or 14 and have grown up with the attitude of ‘if you get assaulted in the street, just take it because nothing is gonna be done.’ Those are the symptoms not of a sick but of a dead and decaying society,” Eliashiv wrote.

Crown Heights, home to a large Orthodox Jewish population, has seen numerous antisemitic hate crimes in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face.

Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.

Monday’s assault came just days after an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking through downtown Brooklyn last week.

These latest attacks on the Orthodox Jewish community continue a trend.

According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Algemeiner review of New York City Police Department (NYPD) hate crimes data, 385 antisemitic hate crimes have struck the New York City Jewish community since last October, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas perpetrated its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish hatred unlike any seen in the post-World War II era.

Beyond New York, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US spiked to a record high last year, and American Jews were the most targeted of any religious group in the country, according to a report published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Jewish Boy Assaulted on Way to School in New York City, Assailant Remain at Large first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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