Rape Denialism as a Public Sport

News Alert: Engaging in rape denial or justification doesn’t make you "pro-Palestinian."

Famed technology executive Sheryl Sandberg recently produced a feature-length documentary about the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. (photo: screamsbeforesilence.com)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Mallory Mosner.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

There are certain moments in life when you realize how ignorant or wrong you’ve been about something, and suddenly it feels like the floodgates of shameful revelation open into your entire being.

I’ve had that feeling several times in my life, one of them in early February of 2016 while listening to a “This American Life” episode, called “Anatomy of Doubt.”

I was organizing a closet in the women’s domestic violence shelter where I volunteered every week, listening to the podcast as I worked. I usually enjoyed learning random tidbits from the show, exploring new perspectives, and hearing Ira Glass’s voice. But this week was different.

The shelter was in a secret location in North Seattle, and the episode also discussed something strangely relevant that had happened in North Seattle: the story of a horrific, brutal rape, of an 18-year-old woman who had spent most of her youth in foster care.

The story, which was also told in a harrowing but exceptionally powerful work of journalism by ProPublica, explores the incidents and outcomes of a sequence of brutal rapes across Colorado and Washington, expertly committed by a serial rapist who had been a U.S. Army veteran, with no criminal record.

Marie, the 18-year-old, had a uniquely disturbing story. Despite significant evidence of the atrocious crime she was victim to, no one in her life believed her — not the police, and not even her two longest-standing foster mothers, one of whom actually tipped off the police to the notion that she was probably lying, and contributed to them both closing the case and charging Marie with making up a crime!

I had to undergo a month of rigorous training in 2015 so I could work at shelter and manage the domestic violence hotline; that was another one of those watershed moments for me, for a plethora of reasons.

But it wasn’t until hearing this podcast that I realized how the politics, the almost foundational assumption of disbelieving or blaming women who experienced sexual violence was entrenched even in my own way of thinking. It was an important corollary in understanding and coming to terms with the sexual violence that I had incurred, and also blamed myself for.

#MeToo was not a panacea.

Fast forward a year, and the #MeToo movement was in full swing. Suddenly it felt like there was a clarion call to address the systemic violence and inequality that women had been facing in America for too long — there was a long overdue sense of hope.

Of course, while it catalyzed a wave of brave women coming forward and a widespread push for accountability in cases of sexual harassment and abuse, the #MeToo movement wasn’t the panacea we had all hoped it could be.

And with a culture of sexual and physical violence against women and girls as endemic as the one in America (where the vast majority of victims of sexual and domestic violence are women or girls), it feels woefully intuitive that it will take time and great dedication to change.

October 7th and Mass Rape Denialism

On October 7th of 2023, Hamas broke into Israel and committed unspeakably heinous crimes against humanity, including torturing, kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering over a thousand civilians — including babies, children, and elderly Holocaust survivors, all in one day.

Harrowing images and videos showed the violent abductions of women being loaded into trucks with the crotch of their pants soaked in blood, wrists bound by zip-ties. Women were gang-raped, shot and stabbed in the genitals, mutilated by having their breasts cut off, violated in front of their families and then slaughtered or burned alive.

There are still women (and babies) held hostage in Gaza, and they are likely to be experiencing rape and torture. One woman who was freed in a previous hostage deal recounted sexual assault and torture in a New York Times article — one among several that have continued to be rejected and dismissed by the Left, including people who have the audacity to refer to themselves as “feminists.”

Prominent feminists like Angela Davis co-signed a letter referring to accusations of mass rape on October 7th as a mechanism for “weaponizing” sexual assault (which they clearly disbelieve) in order to pursue a war against Hamas.

Publications like The Intercept have dedicated themselves to attempting to discredit any and all accusations of sexual violence on October 7th; in April “activist” Susan Sarandon, who stirred controversy in November when she told a crowd that antisemitism gives Jewish people “a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country,” referred to the rapes by Hamas as myths.

Yet the United Nations says otherwise in a report released March 4th.¹

“Following visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Ms. Pramila Patten, finds sexual violence occurred on October 7th, and against hostages and calls for a fully-fledged investigation,” according to the UN report.

Rape denial has become the new normal, particularly among the Left, and among people who otherwise proclaim their values to be dedicated to “intersectional” feminism — which apparently does not extend to Jewish people.

Ambereen Dadabhoy is a professor at Harvey Mudd College who referred to October 7th as “iconic” and in a tweet suggested that Hamas “aren’t rapists and they have standards.” Her first sentence mocked a hostage’s report that she was in constant fear of being raped while in captivity. Astonishingly, Dadabhoy remains employed by Harvey Mudd.

One of the most beloved activists in Gaza, Bisan Owda, has family connections to the terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Aside from the fact that she’s also the daughter of Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera Bureau Chief in Gaza — Al Jazeera is Qatari state media — remember where Hamas leadership luxuriously lives? It’s Qatar. — she also used her massive platform to discredit claims of sexual violence on October 7th.

These are just a few isolated examples. The onslaught of hateful, sickening rape denialism has been unconscionable and maddening. And yet, as chants of “Long live October 7th!” reverberated in Vancouver only last week denote, a large part of the public sees nothing wrong with kidnap and rape in political conflict, as long as they agree with its “context.”

It took the UN almost two full months to say anything about sexual violence on October 7th. They are so politicized and antisemitic that roughly a dozen United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) staffers participated in the October 7th attack, a fact conceded by the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And yet, even their own reports found conclusive and widespread evidence of sexual violence in the grievous attack.

Still, people call for intifada, which incontrovertibly means one thing in the context of Israel — random acts of violence against Jewish civilians around the world, like the ones where kids were randomly stabbed or blown up on buses and in pizza parlors in the early 2000s, and now presumably with the addition of sexual violence and brutality as of October 7th.

To say “intifada” means merely “revolt” is like saying “Mein Kampf” means merely “my struggle.” And denying that Hamas raped and is probably continuing to rape hostages is like saying: “Believe women — except Jewish ones.”

The message is clear: Any form of violence, including even the most atrocious sexual violence, is acceptable if it is perceived that the victims “deserved it” or that the perpetrators were sympathetic enough to imply that they “had no other choice.”

Sheryl Sandberg — a famed technology executive, philanthropist, and writer — recently produced a feature-length documentary that focuses on the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. Through interviews with professionals who have dedicated their entire careers to preventing sexual violence as a tactic of war, she noted that the denialism and justification in this case is unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.

Why is that?

Because the impetus to believe that Israeli people deserve to either die or be displaced (because they’re mostly Jewish, though 20 percent of their population is Arab, with full and equal rights) is a far stronger belief than any intrinsic value that sexual violence is unconditionally wrong.

And that is why we see such a loose and conditional morality pertaining to sexual violence at large in our society. I broke down crying that day I heard about Marie’s story while volunteering at the woman’s shelter, because even after all my training, even after enduring physical and sexual abuse, even after proudly considering myself a feminist, there was still a part of me that identified with how the women she most trusted assumed she was lying.

The conditioning that victimhood is not real, and moreover the DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender) is so ingrained in our society, that many of us will see victimhood in almost anyone but actual victims.

Generations of disbelieving and disempowering women have consequences, and now we see this manifestation of the cycle of abuse, where the people who are alleging to be gatekeepers of “progress” are now the most likely to not only completely disavow those values, but actively harm people by supporting Hamas and its illusory, twisted goal of wiping out Israel and the Jewish People.

What we have witnessed in Western society since October 7th should frighten everyone. Chants of “Death to America!” are not progressive, but propagandist calls originating in extremist Islamist places like Iran, which fights proxy wars in Israel and beyond as part of their plans to establish an Islamist caliphate with sharia law.

To those who don’t recall the “women, life, freedom” movement, let it be known that the gender apartheid that is responsible for the hundreds of killings of women and people protesting forced hijabs in Iran is not something to look at as “progress.”

It is something to forcefully condemn; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the connective tissue behind Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and every other terrorist proxy fighting in the Middle East and influencing leftists.

America has many problems, including when it comes to gender equity and violence, but there are many places on this planet where it is far worse, and it could be far worse here as our own history demonstrates: Spousal rape has only been prohibited for a few decades in America, but it remains legal in the vast majority of Muslim countries, as a single example.

You can express support for Palestinians, criticize the Israeli government, and grieve the loss of life in war without resorting to rape denial or justification.

Engaging in either of those two things (rape denial or justification) doesn’t make you “pro-Palestinian.” It makes you a terrorist or a terror sympathizer — as well as a burden to social progress and equality.

---

1. “Following visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Ms. Pramila Patten, finds sexual violence occurred on 7 October, and against hostages and calls for a fully-fledged investigation.” United Nations.