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Sexual Abuse on October 7: The Campaign to Deny Atrocities & Defend Hamas

The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

On March 4, the United Nations envoy on sex crimes during conflict presented a 24-page report on sex crimes perpetrated against Israelis during Hamas’ October 7 atrocities, and against hostages being held captive in Gaza.

According to the report’s findings, there is “clear and convincing evidence” that Israeli hostages suffered (and are likely continuing to suffer) in Gaza, and there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that rape and other acts of sexual abuse were committed by Hamas during its invasion of southern Israel.

This report is the latest confirmation that sex crimes were a tool in the arsenal of brutality that defined the events of October 7.

However, in the months that have followed the initial attack, there has been a movement of denial brewing in alternative media outlets and on social media, which calls into question the incidence of rape and sexual abuse of Israeli victims, accuses Israel of cynically exploiting claims of sexual abuse for military purposes, and seeks to redeem Hamas’ image in the eyes of their selective audiences.

Since December 2023, much of this denialism has focused on “debunking” the claims made by The New York Times in its front-page profile, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

This crusade against The New York Times’ account of the sexual crimes that occurred on October 7 has been spearheaded by far-left and anti-Israel online publications such as The Intercept, The Grayzone, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss.

Central to these sites’ claims of “debunking” The New York Times’ narrative are pointed questions regarding the newspaper’s evidence, a disregard for the trauma experienced by those who witnessed acts of sexual abuse or were victims of it, and a dismissal of any evidence that does not meet their exceedingly high evidentiary standard.

As part of its investigation, The New York Times interviewed 150 people (including witnesses, soldiers, medical personnel, and rape counselors) and analyzed GPS information, video footage, and photographs.

Out of this litany of evidence, The New York Times profiled several people.

One of these was Gal Abdush, known as the “woman in the black dress,” who was killed on October 7. It is widely believed that due to the position of her body, she was the victim of sexual abuse prior to her murder.

In the wake of the publication of  the Times story, some of these “debunkers” have latched onto claims made by some of her siblings to Israeli television that she was not abused prior to her death.

For these skeptics, if The New York Times is incorrect about Abdush, it must unravel the newspaper’s entire narrative about sexual abuse on October 7.

First, it should be made clear that some in Abdush’s family (such as her mother) do accept the assertion that she was a victim of sexual abuse before her death.

Second, as noted by the X (formerly Twitter) account @daniela127, her family members may be trying to be protective of her dignity, especially as she was the mother of young children. This was alluded to in a Hebrew-language interview with her brother-in-law in January 2024.

Third, it is obvious to any rational person that a question about one piece of evidence does not automatically disqualify the whole case.

The Grayzone seeks to do the same thing with witness Raz Cohen, impeaching his testimony and thereby working to discredit the entire piece.

The far-left news site calls into question his testimony about witnessing a gang rape of an Israeli woman while he was hiding, pointing out that it took him two days from his first interview (October 9) to make any mention of this.

While most people would understand that in the immediate aftermath of an immense trauma it might take time for anyone to open up about their experiences, The Grayzone only finds a nefarious cause behind his testimony.

The psychology behind October 7 mass-rape denial is the same as Holocaust denial. They know the truth. What antisemites enjoy is planting seeds of doubt and watching us Jews plead our case. I’m not going to play that ancient game. They can fuck right off.

— Howard Lovy (@Howard_Lovy) March 5, 2024

Much like The Grayzone’s disregard for Raz Cohen’s trauma influencing his testimony, other “debunking” sites show little regard for the victims and other witnesses.

Mondoweiss finds it “convenient” that the few survivors of sexual abuse on October 7 are unable to talk to the press about their experiences due to their undergoing intense therapy and psychiatric treatment.

The anti-Israel site also calls for journalists to have access to all the evidence of sexual abuse, a grave breach of privacy that no victim of sexual abuse or rape in any other Western country would be subjected to.

Another way that these sites seek to “debunk” the New York Times piece and the Israeli charge of sex abuse during the October 7 attacks is by dismissing any evidence that does not meet their high evidentiary standard.

For example, Electronic Intifada dismisses most of the evidence since it was collected by the IDF (as they were one of the first on the scene). This is as absurd as dismissing evidence in a criminal case because you don’t like the police.

Likewise, Mondoweiss seeks to undermine Israel’s case by calling into question the lack of forensic evidence of rape and sexual abuse.

Although forensic evidence of sexual abuse during war is normally rare, the Israeli government was initially focused on identifying bodies rather than collecting evidence for criminal cases. The fact is that many bodies were retrieved in an active war zone, and the scale of victims was much larger than the police laboratory could handle by itself. Despite this, Mondoweiss appears to view these as convenient excuses meant to hide the fact that there were no instances of sexual abuse and rape during October 7.

I read the attempt to discredit the NY Times reporting on Hamas’s systemic sexual violence so you don’t have to. You should, so you can see the full extent of the depravity & misogyny enabled & required by antisemitism. But here are the highlights. https://t.co/VAKoPIee8C

— daniela (@daniela127) March 3, 2024

Concurrent with the attempt to delegitimize the case that there was a rash of sexual abuse and rape is an attempt to absolve Hamas of any wrongdoing.

For these observers, even if sexual abuse did take place during the massacre, it was certainly not perpetrated by Hamas, the noble Palestinian resistance movement dedicated to fighting the evil Jewish state.

Both freelance British journalist and anti-Israel activist Jonathan Cook and The Intercept seem to largely absolve Hamas of any guilt in this regard and re-focus it on the deluge of Palestinian civilians that followed the initial wave of Hamas terrorists into southern Israel.

The Grayzone and Mondoweiss even go one step further, using the opportunity to not only call into question the use of sexual abuse by Hamas terrorists, but also to seemingly glorify those who took part in the October 7 invasion.

In its questioning of The New York Times, The Grayzone ponders whether it’s “plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandos suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?”

For The Grayzone, it appears to be inconceivable that these “hardened Hamas commandos,” who also engaged in the butchering of 1,200 people and the war crime of kidnapping roughly 250 others, would engage in the demeaning tactic of sexual abuse. While sex crimes are not uncommon in wartime, The Grayzone judges it to be absurd that Hamas terrorists would stoop to such a level.

For its part, Mondoweiss claims that not only did Hamas members not engage in sexual abuse, but the Islamist terrorist organization is known to treat women properly, based on the calm comportment of those hostages who were freed in November 2023 as they were released to the care of the Red Cross.

While there have been published videos of captured Hamas terrorists admitting to sexual abuse and rape, and there has been testimony that the released hostages were sedated prior to their release (along with the fact that many still have relatives in Hamas captivity), Mondoweiss disregards these pieces of evidence as “absurd” and discounts their validity.

For a publication that seems intent on attaining the facts regarding October 7, it seems that it only cares for the facts that are convenient to its narrative and disregards the rest.

It should be noted that these Western media outlets are echoing the same sentiments expressed by Hamas itself, alleging that Hamas members can’t have engaged in these acts as they are against “Islamic values and culture.” At the same time, Hamas also regarded the October 7 massacre as “glorious.”

For those who seek to invalidate the claim that sexual abuse occurred on October 7 and “debunk” The New York Times’ in-depth profile, the allegations of abuse and rape are part of a campaign by the Israeli government to validate its military actions in Gaza.

While the mass killings and kidnappings of October 7 would have been enough to warrant a military response against Hamas in Gaza, The Intercept, Jonathan Cook, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada all claim that these allegations are central to Israel’s case for “ethnic cleansing” and “mass killings” in Gaza.

For these alternative outlets and their eager audience on social media, the attempt to discredit the sexual assault claims is not a mere search for the truth, but is part of a concerted effort to invalidate Israel’s military campaign against Hamas and to rehabilitate Hamas’ image in the West.

Thus, these “debunking” efforts are an effective propaganda tool on behalf of a tyrannical terrorist organization that perpetrated the worst single day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.

And as long as these efforts are allowed to maintain a veneer of credibility, they will help pave the way for future Hamas atrocities.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Sexual Abuse on October 7: The Campaign to Deny Atrocities & Defend Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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