Mick Hartley

The horrendous brutality of the crimes against Israeli women by Hamas was all too clear to see. But…well, they're Jews: they had it coming. Nicole Lampert at UnHerd:

After Hamas terrorists set about murdering, raping and abducting as many women as they could, one might have expected widespread condemnation from the West’s feminist groups. After all, Hamas had provided enough evidence of its crimes — within hours, they were posting footage of abducted young women in bloodied trousers being paraded around Gaza. Even beforehand, its feminist credentials were hardly glowing: it mandates the hijab, has made it illegal to travel without a male guardian, and refused to ban physical or sexual abuse within the family.

The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars”, to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to “colonial feminism”.

Here in the UK, typified by the Sisters Uncut stunt, shutting down Liverpool Street station for Palestine, it's been the same old story. On the left now, and in left feminist groups, Jews don't count. In fact, Jews are the enemy. So…zero sympathy for those Israeli women raped and butchered by Hamas.

For one British Jewish VAWG worker, who has been in the sector for 20 years, the silence of other organisations was to be expected: “I have seen this become a real thing in the last few years — where ideas are imported from America: that if you are white, you will always be the oppressor. If you are working for one of these charities, you are used to a victim/perpetrator narrative which is normally true in the domestic violence context, but not when it comes to geopolitics.”

She describes how, during mandatory training at the last charity she worked for, her team was told that Jews don’t experience racism. “Incredibly, they used the Second World War as an example of racism, but of anti-black racism because of how people from the West Indies were treated.”

Let that sink in.