If the overture in a recent New York Times news feature doesn’t grab your attention, I guess nothing will.
The reality described here is the use of rape as a weapon of war — a weapon that is even more devastating in the age of GoPro cameras and social media. Rape has been used as a weapon in wars for centuries, in many different cultures, with many different excuses and justifications. In this case, it’s impossible not to ask questions about the role of religion in these war crimes.
The headline on this New York Times story is blunt: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Yes, in this case many readers may have appreciated some kind of #triggerwarning about the content:
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
Many news reports are starting to pour out the details now — R-rated stories about sexual tortures that Hamas attackers inflicted on their hapless Israeli victims the morning of Oct. 7.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today produced stomach-churning stories of what a demonic hatred for Jewish women looks like. Which tells me there’s been some reporters with boots on the ground piecing all this together and sorting through the gory aftermath.
NBC News also produced a report on Dec. 5, much of it with blurred images because the reality was too graphic for the screen. Click on the link if you want some really graphic descriptions of what was done to these women.
The Times said their two-month investigation involved “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors.” It ran a map showing seven locations where more than 30 bodies of women were found that had been raped or mutilated. The woman in the black dress was one of them, of course.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
If you can, read about people being slaughtered like farm animals; about gang rapes that take evil and gruesome to new heights. Reporters have printed what they thought their readers could stomach. Imagine what they had to leave out. As for NBC:
Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre.
Kudos to these outlets for investing the money and time to do this work; a sad necessity in an era when so many clueless nitwits refused to believe even basic, hard-evidence facts about the attacks simply because official Hamas press contacts denied it all. You heard echoes of some of this language on the streets of American cities this fall.
Ask yourself the question: What kind of beliefs led these attackers to do this? The Times gives this hint:
A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
Now we know the attackers were Muslim men. Doesn’t that lead one to wonder if their twisted versions of Islamic beliefs just might have fueled this insane hatred?
Also, there was not just one religion involved in the Oct. 7 attacks. There were two.
Let’s look at more details. USA Today came out with this non-paywalled story on Dec. 20:
Handcuffed and dazed, she struggles to exit the trunk of the Jeep. She's barefoot and limping. She's bleeding near her temple. Her ankle is cut.
Her gray sweatpants are bloodied. At gunpoint, she is dragged by her long brown hair into the vehicle. A crowd looks on. The car speeds off.
That is the last time, captured in a video taken on Oct. 7, that Naama Levy, 19, was seen alive. She is among 17 female hostages ages 18 to 26 still held by Hamas somewhere in Gaza.
Just in case anyone missed the point, Levy’s sweatpants were covered in blood because the 19-year-old had been raped within an inch of her life. She wasn’t at the Supernova music festival; she was at home when the attack happened.
Google “rape” and “slaves” and “Quran” and you get a bunch of commentary on how captive women, aka “slaves” can be treated by invading Muslim armies. Here is one CNN headline from that search: “ISIS: Enslaving, having sex with ‘unbelieving’ women, girls is OK.”
The new USA Today story mentioned something I’ve not seen elsewhere –- female hostages that have been released are admitting they were raped. It’s basically a given the remaining 17 are still being assaulted.
One of the doctors assessed that "many" of the released Israeli female hostages ages 12 to 48 -− there are about 30 of them −- were sexually assaulted while held by Hamas in Gaza.
What follows is truly chilling.
The doctor said people who have been sexually abused typically have a mortality rate four times higher than someone who has not been sexually abused.
It also asks:
Why were the Hamas attacks so brutal? Were the killers high on the drug Captagon?
Even if they were, there were things done to women’s bodies that I haven’t read were done to men’s bodies (Captagon would have been equal opportunity brutality) that points to a consuming hatred of women.
Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, the much-maligned Somali Muslim-turned-Dutch atheist activist who has since immigrated here and very recently professed Christianity, wrote about Muslim attitudes toward women in her 2021 book “Prey.” She documents how once men from majority-Muslim countries started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers, violence against European women skyrocketed.
Once I read it (last month), I understood why the woke crowd avoided this book in droves. A former Muslim herself, Hirsi-Ali spent much of the book explaining that ingrained cultural attitudes of non-Westernized Muslim men contribute to their degrading views of Western women, whom they regard as little more than pieces of meat.
She blames two things for this. One: the Islamic practice of allowing multiple wives per male, saying this reduces women to a commodity useful for the bearing of children and little else; and two, a religious modesty code that compels women to fully cover themselves with flowing garments and head coverings.
On the streets of European cities, it’s open season on those who don’t. Read what happened in the German city of Cologne on New Years Eve 2015 to get my drift. Or search for these two words — Lara Logan.
Think I’m extreme? Well, what happened to these Israeli women was off the charts and it’s about time reporters called it out for what it was. The attackers believed that their violence was sanctioned by religion, just as much as it was driven by revenge.
Hindu human-rights activists have no illusions about these realities. I chanced upon a political Hindu site that compares the Hamas brutalities against Jewish women with Muslim invasions of India and the mass rapes of Hindu women as recently as 1971. An excerpt:
When Hindus see hundreds of Islamic terrorists paragliding into Israeli border neighborhoods and raping women, they are reflexively reminded of the countless invasions mounted against India over the past millennium in which Islamic invaders destroyed Indian cities, killed adult men, and carried off women and young children. In fact, during the previous millennium, the concept of Jauhar – in which Hindu women committed mass immolation – became popular because it was preferable to becoming the slave or concubine of an unwashed, illiterate, lascivious marauder from Afghanistan, Iran, or Tatarstan...
Such atrocities of Muslim invaders have left an indelible scar on the collective Hindu psyche. This is why many Hindus are saying: We are all Israelis in this war.
Read the whole thing because it goes on to blame the whole rape-and-sex-slavery emphasis of invading Islamic hordes on Islam allowing each man four wives and limitless slaves and concubines. The latter really aren’t in vogue in the 21st century but ISIS had a huge sex slave system going among captive Yazidi women in Iraq and Syria roughly from 2014-2017.
Yes, this must be said: Any story on this topic can, and should, include the voices of Islamic leaders who can respond - instead of deny - the evidence of the massive sexual brutality on the part of Hamas. None of the stories I cited above had such a response. I know there are Islamic scholars out there who reject the idea that the Quran endorses the rape of female captives. What can they say about Oct. 7?
Sadly, I’m afraid there is no inner debate in the Muslim world over these news reports, mainly because their news outlets are not reporting them. I saw nothing in Al Jazeera mentioning these latest findings even though there was a major press conference at the United Nations in early December (here’s CNN’s coverage of that) detailing these atrocities. The only Al Jazeera story I found regarding the rapes called them “unsubstantiated.”
One last article in the Wall Street Journal on the sexual violence describes the atrocities in less graphic fashion and doesn’t even mention a religion angle. It does bring up a potential Nuremberg-style trial that Israel hopes to bring against the leaders of Hamas.
The bottom line: Can journalists ignore the religion angle when describing these kinds of crimes in this context? If so, why is that?
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited graphic used in tweet from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus