This year is the 23rd anniversary of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. While Take Back the Night impressed me, I was disappointed by Chico State’s and our Jewish community’s silence about the sexual violence of Hamas.
I was lying in bed when my mom texted me a live blog talking about how Israeli Defense Force soldiers died and people had been kidnapped. That day, Hamas was no longer a bunch of pests but a sophisticated and ruthless terror group like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
I will remember Oct. 7, 2023, for the rest of my life as a critical date, like many people remember September 11, 2001.
The most traumatic images I saw were of Naama Levy and Shani Louk. Levy had bloody pants and a battered face, Louk’s body was bent and twisted like a paperclip. While neither image confirms that they were raped, they are evidence of the violence women faced.
The IDF has compiled hours of GoPro footage for the press, which verifies rapes and other forms of sexual violence. When the hostages were paraded around Gaza, Gazans cheered Hamas and spit on the hostages despite them being injured from rape.
When the Israeli government withdrew in 2005, Gaza essentially became its own country. Hamas won the elections, beating out the Palestinian Authority and eventually purging PA members.
Hamas and Palestinian allies destroyed the Gazan greenhouses powering Israel’s agriculture industry, and they wasted money building terror tunnels and investing in weapons for the next war. Gaza could have been a Singapore; however, it ended up being just another failed state.
Most Palestinians supported the attack and Hamas, and if the PA allowed elections in the West Bank, Hamas would win.
It is sadly typical for Gazan Palestinian children to go to summer camp and get indoctrinated to kill Jews, not Israelis, but Jews.
These camps and schools are partially financed by the United Nations Works Relief Agency with American taxpayer dollars and staffed by adults who seek to raise an army of child soldiers.
Unfortunately, some people still doubt the barbarity of Hamas, while others are encouraging it.
University campuses have become a hotbed for antisemitism, with AEPI, Chabad, and Hillel facilities being harassed. And slogans like “rape is resistance,” “globalize the intifada” and “gas the Jews” have become commonplace.
In “pro-Palestine” protests, participants often wear masks or the keffiyehs popularized by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and/or wrap them like Hamas.
Some are even waving the Hezbollah flag of one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the Middle East, responsible for attacks on Jews as far as Argentina.
For a group of activists preaching to end “ethnic cleansing,” they have a habit of glamorizing violence.
Yes, Hamas is ISIS
We don’t say #hamasisis because we want to be provocative; we say it because the Middle East has not seen that level of terrorism since the height of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Much like Hamas, ISIS used human shields in Mosul and conducted an infamous campaign of ethnic cleansing and rape against countless Yazidi women.
And what Hamas did is what Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province, and the Sudanese Janjaweed are doing to Christians right now. The Western world is also silent about the rape and genocide of Hindus in Pakistan.
Future of the Islamic Civilization
Hospitality, literature, and scientific achievements are something indivisible with Islamic history and culture, just like the atrocities routinely committed by Islamic extremists as well as less visible acts of cruelty like female genital mutilation. As Muslims live within our borders, we must have an open mind and stick to our values.
Islam must reform itself, just like the Christians did during the peace of Westphalia after Christian kingdoms fought centuries of religious wars. Right now, the Islamic world is in a Clash of Civilizations, not just with the West but with itself.
Entities like Iran and the Islamic State are fighting to keep the 2 Billion Muslims in medieval conditions, while other entities like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are making slow but noticeable strides for modernization.
Women are caught in the crossfire of this Clash of Civilizations because of Islamic culture’s endemic sexism. Women deserve to prosper, yet the Islamic world remains indifferent to their suffering unless it affects the men who control them.
However, as Islam is the fastest-growing religion and their diaspora is expanding in this country, sexual assault awareness month is an ideal time to reflect on how billions of women are treated in countries less fortunate than ours.
Most of all, I hope that one day, this godforsaken war will be over, and Palestinian children can go to sports camps or theater camps just like Israelis instead of living a life where it’s only their deaths that matter.
Ari Sorokin can be reached at [email protected].
Christopher Hill // May 19, 2024 at 6:19 pm
A very unfortunate article given the call for dialog from a few months ago.
What’s true in this?: There is circumstantial evidence that Israeli soldiers and civilians, as well as Palestinian militants and civilians have been subjected to sexual violence during and after the October 7th attacks. The U.N. has been unable to investigate further due to active opposition of the Israeli government to any U.N. investigation.
What is not true? Basically everything else.
“When the Israeli government withdrew in 2005, Gaza essentially became its own country. Hamas won the elections, beating out the Palestinian Authority and eventually purging PA members.”
The United Nations, scholars of international law, and Israeli civil rights organizations are all in agreement that this is complete nonsense. Israel never stopped controlling Gazan borders, continued to have a monopoly on Gaza’s airspace, and had ultimate control of all imports and exports into Gaza. The Israeli occupation did not end, it just changed form amidst domestic and international pressure, especially from Israeli settlers who wanted more of a push for illegal land seizures in the West Bank.
“Most Palestinians supported the attack and Hamas, and if the PA allowed elections in the West Bank, Hamas would win.”
This poll did show that a majority of Palestinians supported the attacks (though fewer in Gaza than in the West Bank). Your source notably does not say that Hamas would unambiguously win elections. It does show that Hamas went up a bit in the polls and would easily beat the notoriously corrupt PA leader Abu Mazen, who is widely seen as a gangster and Israeli puppet. Hamas would lose to Marwan Barghouti, who in addition to being a secular politician, has a reputation for campaigning against corruption and being something of a left-wing dissident within al-Fatah. Unfortunately for these prospects, he’s serving 5 life sentences in prison for leading guerrilla attacks after the breakdown of the peace talks after the 2000 Camp David Summit.
Many Israeli politicians and military officials have called for Barghouti’s release because they think he’s pragmatic, but Bibi is against it. Presumably because of his long-term support for Hamas against secular and left-wing Palestinian groups.
“It is sadly typical for Gazan Palestinian children to go to summer camp and get indoctrinated to kill Jews, not Israelis, but Jews.”
The source you cited here is literally a conspiracy theory website that should not be cited by anyone, unless their point is “look at this ridiculous conspiracy theory.”
It is interviewing a man that even mainstream Israeli media considers to be a far-right extremist, and cites no sources other than Herzog’s say-so. There are sources that partially cite a document claimed to be an internal Hamas memo, but this section at least does not say that children are to be trained to “kill Jews”.
Hamas has run military summer camps for years and other Palestinian organizations have criticized them for it, but they’re also very small in comparison to secular summer camps.
And we can’t forget…this kind of camp exists in Israel.
“These camps and schools are partially financed by the United Nations Works Relief Agency with American taxpayer dollars and staffed by adults who seek to raise an army of child soldiers.”
Your source makes this claim, but the source is itself engaging in obfuscation. It cites a study by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, but the conclusions it puts forward are not actually from this study, but from IMPACT-se, a conservative Israeli NGO.
The GEI study concludes that there is room for improvement, but that: “Palestinian textbooks are produced and located within an environment saturated with ongoing occupation, conflict and violence, which they in turn reflect. The analysis revealed a complex picture: 1) the textbooks adhere to UNESCO standards and adopt criteria that are prominent in international education discourse, including a strong focus on human rights, 2) they express a narrative of resistance within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 3) they display an antagonism towards Israel.”
“University campuses have become a hotbed for antisemitism, with AEPI, Chabad, and Hillel facilities being harassed. And slogans like “rape is resistance,” “globalize the intifada” and “gas the Jews” have become commonplace.”
Most of your sources here are not about campuses, but about random people on twitter. Some are actual incidents of racist harassment, while others are purely political criticisms of Israel being framed as anti-semitic. Within a general climate of rising racist violence, it’s not at all surprising that there will be people using the opportunity to attack Jewish and Arab students.
Regarding Intifada: This is literally just the Arabic word for “revolution”. In the Palestinian context it connects obviously to the previous Intifadas against Israel, but to call it a slogan calling for murder is basically meaningless unless one thinks the same of the term in English. There are even left-wing Israeli and Palestinian organizations who call on Jewish youth and workers to join the “Intifada”, which obviously is incompatible with a call to murder Jewish people.
“In “pro-Palestine” protests, participants often wear masks or the keffiyehs popularized by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and/or wrap them like Hamas.“
To call Arafat an arch-terrorist is a strange one. Many Israeli portrayals of Arafat have been overwhelmingly positive, with him being viewed as a Mandela like figure who tried to lead al-Fatah away from violence and towards peace. The Conservative NGO that was the ultimate source for your earlier comment on Palestinian schools even uses the focus on Arafat and his striving for peace as a positive aspect of Palestinian curriculums.
Also, Arafat certainly made the keffiyeh more popular among pro-Palestinian activists in the west, but they’re also just plain popular among Palestinians and Bedouins in surrounding areas for hundreds of years. As for wrapping them “like Hamas”…if the keffiyeh is red or white, they’re definitely not into Hamas.
“Yes, Hamas is ISIS
We don’t say #hamasisis because we want to be provocative; we say it because the Middle East has not seen that level of terrorism since the height of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Much like Hamas, ISIS used human shields in Mosul and conducted an infamous campaign of ethnic cleansing and rape against countless Yazidi women.
And what Hamas did is what Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province, and the Sudanese Janjaweed are doing to Christians right now. The Western world is also silent about the rape and genocide of Hindus in Pakistan. “
Simply…no, Hamas is not ISIS. They don’t even have similar ideological frameworks. Hamas actively suppressed ISIS organizing in Gaza, and ISIS does not support Palestinian self-determination, but the subsumption of Palestine into an Islamic Caliphate. The only commonality is that they both support terrorist tactics, and proclaim allegiance to Islam:
The thing about violence against Hindus in Pakistan btw? That definitely does happen, as well as violence against atheists and other non-Muslims in Pakistan. The source you used though? It’s part of an extremist propaganda outfit by the Indian BJP which seeks to use claims of Muslim violence against Hindus in order to justify its own persecution of Indian Muslims.
“Future of the Islamic Civilization
Hospitality, literature, and scientific achievements are something indivisible with Islamic history and culture, just like the atrocities routinely committed by Islamic extremists as well as less visible acts of cruelty like female genital mutilation. As Muslims live within our borders, we must have an open mind and stick to our values.
Islam must reform itself, just like the Christians did during the peace of Westphalia after Christian kingdoms fought centuries of religious wars. Right now, the Islamic world is in a Clash of Civilizations, not just with the West but with itself.
Entities like Iran and the Islamic State are fighting to keep the 2 Billion Muslims in medieval conditions, while other entities like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are making slow but noticeable strides for modernization.”
This is a frankly bizarre statement. The basic problem here is that you are falsely assuming that the type of Islam promoted by Hamas or other advocates of conservative Political Islam are some kind of longstanding survival of an earlier period.
You say that Islam needs to go through a reform like Christianity, but the problem is that these are precisely reform movements within Islam.
Salafism is a modernist movement within Islam that, in contrast to liberalizing modernizing movements, responded to western imperialism by putting forward a call to return to the ideas of the “Salafiyyah”, the “pious predecessors”. It saw the Islam of the late 19th century and early 20th century as too liberal and polluted by innovation, and promoted a return to an imagined pure Islam of the time of Muhammad and his companions.
Wahhabism, a subset of Salafism, became the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. This state has continued to promote this “reformed” type of ultra-conservative Islam across the world, with this sometimes mutating into movements that are more extreme than Saudi Wahhabism. This is where you got movements like al Qaeda.
The major architect of reforming Salafism into an actual political program instead of a theological school? That was Sayyid Qutb, and he did this in the 1950s as head of the Muslim Brotherhood. (Hamas was a nationalist split from the Palestinian branch of this organization)
Qutb claimed that the Islamic world had been saturated by “western ideals” like democracy, feminism, and especially Socialism, and that, in effect, Islam was “extinct”, and that it was necessary to revive it. He combined an extreme Salafist theological worldview with a program of an idealized Islamic society and a willingness to use violence against other Muslims who were considered to be apostates if they did not follow his vision. He then combined this worldview with the idea of a centralized vanguard party that he borrowed from his left-wing opponents.
This was a minority movement for a very long time…the main thing that led to it becoming as strong as it is today? That would be the Cold War. Qutbists and other Salafis were firm opponents of Socialism and Communism, and so they received huge amounts of support from the U.S. and other western countries in opposing secular left-leaning or revolutionary movements in Muslim majority countries.
There were other reform traditions that moved towards positions of increased secularism and progressive politics, these have just become extremely marginalized in the context of the “dollar Jihad.”
Rona // May 13, 2024 at 12:47 am
Wonderful and insightful article. We can’t allow extremism to commandeer western democracy, and we can’t accept glorified terrorism under the guise of ‘activism’.