OpinionIsrael at War

The hypocrisy of the feminists

Their silence on the mass rape and femicide on Oct. 7 condemns them.

Palestinian women march in Hebron in support of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2023. Photo by Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90.
Palestinian women march in Hebron in support of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2023. Photo by Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90.
Fiamma Nirenstein
Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian-Israeli author, journalist and senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. An adviser on antisemitism to Israel's foreign minister, she served in the past as a member of the Italian Parliament, where she was vice president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Chamber of Deputies.

Outrage at violence against women is the merest hypocrisy unless it includes outrage at the horrific rampage of sexual crimes committed by Hamas on Oct. 7. The only explanation for not including it is antisemitism. It can be nothing else than antisemitism.

Not only those like me who have seen the horrific films made by the terrorists themselves know this, but also anyone who watches TV or has a modicum of common sense. Hamas terrorists filmed themselves raping women, tearing their clothes, dragging them by the hair, and loading living and dead women into cars with their naked lower bodies bleeding. If you don’t care about this, and many don’t, you are antisemitic.

At morgues where the remains of murdered women were reassembled by the hundreds, often only with those body parts that could be recovered from mutilation and burning, the legs of the victims were often fractured and unrecoverable due to the systemic sexual violence. The doctors verified that little girls, old women and even very young children were raped. After extensive investigation, the DNA of the rapists was recovered.

A survivor from the rave where more than 300 young dancers were killed testified that one of her friends was gang-raped by several terrorists, held down by her hair. The rapist shot her friend in the head and continued raping the dead body. A girl had her breasts mutilated and the monsters played with them. The footage I have seen shows many girls dead, undressed and bleeding. Yet the self-appointed feminists have gone silent. They protest everything, it seems, but the systemic rape and murder of Jewish women. Some gender violence is more equal than others.

For all the good it did, and it did do much good, feminism always harbored a monster inside it. In the 1970s, I and a group of friends founded the magazine “Rosa.” It was sophisticated, intelligent and certainly left-wing. I had once been a communist and even written a booklet on the history of communist women. My feminism was primordial and instinctive. It could not have existed without the chain of the revolution, without figures like Rosa Luxemburg.

Then came issues of the integrity of the body, abortion, divorce and consciousness-raising. Yet ominously, the connection to the Communist International, the fetishization of the Third World and loyalty to the Soviet Union remained.

The antisemitism became more and more blatant. These feminists were already throwing Israeli women out of their meetings—wonderful women, who had faced motherhood and war, who excelled in science and poetry. They were heroines who fought for freedom. They were women without awe of men. Their valiant return home to Israel was a symbol, not of colonization, but of decolonization—of the self, more than anything else. They were rejected anyway.

Feminism subjugated itself to the communist movement. It had a desperate and pathetic need for its approval. The feminists could not imagine flying another flag. Thus, in accordance with Soviet policy, they could not do otherwise than reject and demonize the State of Israel. They did not care that Israel was the only country in the Middle East that guaranteed gender equality.

What they did care about was sounding the libels: colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, apartheid… Today, the surrender to antisemitic totalitarianism is absolute. The feminist is now intersectional, woke, ready to sacrifice herself to the violence of Hamas, because—in an obviously racist paradigm—“oppressors” can only be white, Christian or Jewish.

It doesn’t matter if these so-called “oppressors” save LGBT people from the “oppressed” bigots who hang them from the lampposts. It doesn’t matter if the feminists’ beloved Hamas forces female children into marriages with pedophile adults and sanctions—indeed orders—rapes, beatings and kidnappings. In a remarkable act of self-hatred and internalization of misogyny, the feminists love them anyway.

It is not surprising, given this perversion, that there has been silence from the feminists and other leftists on the mass rape and serial femicide that occurred on Oct. 7, let alone the slaughter of 1,200 people.

Why did you kidnap the boys and girls, the police asked captured terrorists. “To rape them,” they replied. And from the feminists comes the condemnation of male chauvinism, of gender violence? No. For today’s feminists, it seems, there is only the hunt for the “imperialist” and “colonialist” Jews, and the demented, sadistic joy of raping and killing them.

The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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