<big><big>JTAWe believed diverse coalitions would include Jewish women. Now we fear we are alone</big></big> Seven weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel, the strangely silent women’s rights group UN Women issued an Instagram statement on allegations of sexual violence in the invasion “We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages...”
...then deleted it... replaced with a statement that dropped the condemnation of Hamas and only called for the release of the hostages. Word spread ... reigniting [Jewish women’s] contention that this … official arm of the United Nations focused on promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment ... holds a double standard when it comes to gender-based violence ... Some of the critics — including Sheryl Sandberg, a former top Meta executive — have lobbied openly on the topic. Many have used the hashtag “#MeToo_UNless_UR_A_Jew.”...
Finally, António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, former prime minister of Portugal, a member of the Portuguese Socialist Party, serving Since 2017 as the ninth secretary-general of the United Nations, posted:
Why at last? Possibly because November 25 marked the 42nd International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
Globally, an estimated 736 million women and girls,one in three [—up from one in 4—], will be subjected to some form of physical and/or sexual violence, at least once in their life… [and]
and they couldn’t just sit there.
Or they can’t just sit there anyway:
TheGuardian<small>[TRIGGER WARNING]</small><big>”Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves—This isn’t some ghoulish competition, where any empathy shown to other victims leaves less available for Palestinians”</big>
Harrowing stories had begun emerging within days from the desert rave where traumatised young women, who survived only by hiding from the gunmen, described watching in silent horror as other women were gang raped, mutilated and shot”…
...Israeli women’s rights groups, worried [for loss of forensic evidence] in the initial chaos ... swiftly mobilised – and last week, Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the lawyer chairing a civil [NGO] commission hastily created to document crimes against women and children during the massacre,flew to meet UN officials to discuss the testimony collated…
...Look away now if you would rather not read about women and young girls found dead with their pants pulled down, bleeding, bruises, scratches, smashed pelvises, semen samples, graphic details I wouldn’t normally go into on these pages except that otherwise it seems people don’t believe it….
...She was drinking. Her skirt was too short. She went willingly back to the footballer’s mansion, or up to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel suite, so what did she think was going to happen? Maybe she was a teenage runaway, or a sex worker; he was a good boy, or a much-loved celebrity. There is a long list of reasons rapists get away with it, but it all too often starts with a jury’s refusal to listen to a woman they have already decided for some stubborn reason not to [give a damn about]. Remember that…
...[because we are recognizing] a pattern deserving of investigation. ... when tales of Islamic State fighters raping and enslaving Yazidi women began to surface, or when horrific stories started filtering out from women in occupied Ukraine last year, I don’t remember too many sceptics demanding to see video proof. Nor do I recall many victim support workers responding as the director of the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta in Canada did after 7 October, by signing an open letter condemning genocide in Gaza that criticised a Canadian politician for repeating “the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence”. Only in this conflict have some normally proud progressives seemingly gone out of their way to show they don’t always #BelieveWomen, after all….
READ THE WHOLE GUARDIAN ARTICLE.
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy is a lawyer and scholar of international law, gender and human rights, founder with colleagues of the NGO Civil Commission on October 7 Crimesby Hamas against Women and Children,NOTE: the dead, injured, and hostages are NOT only Jews, and in fact include Muslim victims too.
On our past diaries and elsewhere, I’ve posted links to reports that formonths unarmed female members of IDF surveillance reported uniformed members of Hamas drilling and training in a wide range of tactics to overcome everything from heavy armament to individual resistance, removing components of the border fence, even being visited by officials arriving in high-end foreign luxury cars to address the fighters, one of them wagging a finger and grinning right into the camera when the surveillance worker zoomed in on his face. These women, and their one female analyst officer, for months urged their superiors to pay serious attention, were told they are merely the eyes of IDF intelligence, not the brain, and that they would be courtmartialed if they persisted in their demands, to just shut up and do their jobs. (Most of those women were killed Oct 7.)
<big>I also broughta report of The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming</big> whose intel their male “superiors” rejected.
If women had been heeded, 9/11 might never have happened. If women had been heeded, there might never have been a 2023 Israel-Hamas War. This is a war of men, by men, for men, on everyone else, like all the rest. When such dismissal of women’s expertise and good judgement goes on in ‘advanced’ nations, how much worse is it in most of the world?
<big><big><big>There IS a global war on women, by men in power and all their collaborators on down, and the whole world is suffering and dying for the sake of all these men’s ambitions.</big></big></big>
All who still doubt it are being willfully blind. In doing so, they make themselves passive collaborators culpable in the agonies of this planet.
<big>LISTEN TO WOMEN. BELIEVE WOMEN. <big>ELECT WOMEN. </big></big>
