March 6, 2024

"Tensions at The New York Times over an investigative report on Hamas' use of sexual violence in the October 7th attacks have erupted into the open..."

"... over the past week with fresh conflict surfacing nearly every day. The Times crisis reflects a series of cultural divides – between the conventional newsroom and the paper's ascendant audio division; between management and many of the rank-and-file; between factions with differing reactions to the war in Israel and Gaza; and between the two sides of yawning industry chasm over whether to handle dissent internally or air it in public. The Times Guild, the newsroom union representing nearly 1,500 journalists at the paper, filed a formal grievance yesterday with the paper.... At the heart of the newsroom tensions stands a powerful story about sexual violence during Hamas' deadly Oct. 7 attack in Israel. The story, published in late December under the byline of international correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers, said The Times had documented a pattern of sexual assault by Hamas as a brutal strategy...."

NPR reports.

84 comments:

Yancey Ward said...

Raping someone to death for leftist political purposes isn't rape-rape, right?

deepelemblues said...

Breaking news, the younger generation of journalists is riddled with anti-Semites.

Todd said...

Don't you know that this IS the New Your Times! Actual journalism is NOT allowed here any more!

Aggie said...

How dare they report facts. Didn't they know it would trigger these poor snowflake journalistas ?


Who will be left to report on their approaching demise?

Original Mike said...

When you're excusing/hiding rape, that old "Are we the baddies?" bit should come to mind.

n.n said...

Murder, rape, torture, and abduction. Stand with Hamas, UN, and transnational human rites (sic) corporations.

Christopher B said...

Interesting juxtaposition with the post below.

An openly public kiss during a moment of great elation and national celebration is so obviously non-consensual sexual assault that it deserves to be banned.

Reporting on a deliberate strategy of violent sexual assault as an instrument of terror generates controversy because there isn't iron-clad proof of the accusations in a few cases.

rhhardin said...

I don't see the problem. Raping the women is traditional and it's meant to debase the husbands. See Bosnia. So it's pro-Palestinian in being the traditional strategy, and pro-Israel in having merited retaliation.

It's a stupid strategy against a force militarily superior to you.

Jupiter said...

"The Times crisis reflects a series of cultural divides – between the conventional newsroom and the paper's ascendant audio division; between management and many of the rank-and-file; between factions with differing reactions to the war in Israel and Gaza; and between the two sides of yawning industry chasm over whether to handle dissent internally or air it in public."

Maybe they could unpack that a little. Are the audio types pro-rape, or is that the conventional newsroom? I'm guessing the management is going to view rape more favorably than the rank-and-file, but who knows with the NYT? And if I were an industry chasm, I don't think I'd want to do any yawning around any of these guys.

Kevin said...

#BelieveAllJews

Chris N said...

Does Mother Jones have anything to say about what NPR said about The NY Times?

Jupiter said...

When you consider that war is chiefly about killing people, it might seem that rape is not so bad. "Hey, we could have blown her brains out!" (of course, in many cases, they did. After they raped her). But I think the confounding factor is that in war, killing people, while possibly regrettable, is necessary to the overall political goal. It's not so easy to see how it could be necessary to rape someone -- mostly some unarmed girl or woman, actually -- in order to fly your beloved flag over their capital city. It really kind of seems that raping is something a dirty rotten bastard who ought to be stood against a wall and shot to death might do. For his own, entirely selfish reasons. You know? But I guess there is a nuance here that I'm missing. For once, I'm under-thinking something. There are two sides to this issue, and both are well-represented at the NYT.

Sebastian said...

What exactly is the prog objection? Since rape = resistance, as Judith Butler herself reminded us, doesn't reporting the facts of Hamas brutality serve the decolonial cause? Shouldn't progs be celebrating the exposure of Hamas bravery and Israeli humiliation?

Jersey Fled said...

Sceptical of reports of Hamas sexual atrocities, but not a single doubt about Russia, Russia, Russia.

That’s the NYT for you.

rrsafety said...

Progressives: "Sure, they murdered babies but they certainly didn't sexually assault anyone. Hamas treats issues of consent in sexual encounters with the utmost seriousness!"

Jupiter said...

Perhaps I'm being unfair. On closer inspection, it appears the dispute is not about whether rape is bad, or just how much rape is acceptable, when the victims are Jewish. It's about whether to even discuss rape in the NYT. It's a family newspaper. Kids will be reading this! Would you want your kids to see pictures of some mostly-naked and possibly dead Jewish chick being raped in the back of a white pick-up that the UN bought for some deserving Palestinian? Of course not.

n.n said...

To be clear the women were raped and rape-raped. It's an Obama/Biden/Clinton [ethnic] Spring, already in progress in America.

RCOCEAN II said...

I find Americans, especially the elite, so bizzare and weird. Rape is a terrible thing, but that Hamas KILLED over 1000 people on Oct 7th, seems a little bit more important. But to Americans its "OMG,OMG, someone got raped. OMG!!!"

And meanwhile 30,000 women,children,and old men have been murdered by the IDF. People are starving in Gaza and being killed while trying to get to food trucks. But do Americans care? No. "Those A-rabs deserved it. That's war, baby", they say in their tough guy voice. But then they think of those Israelis who got raped, and dissolve into tears: "How could this happen, why didnt the heavens cry out?!".

Jeff said...

The genuine underlying conflict: Are Jews human?

Jupiter said...

"I don't see the problem. Raping the women is traditional and it's meant to debase the husbands."

Well, I'm not so sure about that, RH. Sometimes a rape is just a rape. She's defenseless, you have a dick, Boom! You don't need to get all analytical about it. She may not even have a husband. You want to get analytical, think about the fact that every Y chromosome in existence, including yours and mine, has been reproduced thousands of times by rape. We would not be here if we were not descended from a long line of rapists. Now what does evolutionary theory say about that set of circumstances?

Earnest Prole said...

When you’re a Hamas fellow traveler, rape, terror, and torture are the very definition of news unfit to print.

Hey Skipper said...

Crack Emcee hardest hit.

Joe Smith said...

Now do the killing gays part.

gilbar said...

i don't understand?
are they complaining about the reporting of the news?
or are they complaining about the reality of the rapes?

can we Assume, that they're like rcocean, and just hate jews?

Narayanan said...

is raping 'grab'em by pussy' taken to another level?

dontcha know who to blame?

AntiBathos said...

Unless three or four Muslim adult males confirm an accusation of rape, it did not happen. it is merely a public confession of adultery by a woman who thus deserves execution (like some death row inmates in Pakistan who claimed they were raped without standing or the requisite confirmations). I can't believe the NYT would be culturally insensitive enough to spin these events in a way contrary to Shariah.

Quaestor said...

From NPR:
Critics argued the anecdotes weren't fully nailed down. For example, in the instance of Gal Abdush, whose family was shown in a photograph accompanying the Times story, her brother-in-law told the paper he feared she had been raped. After the story's publication, the man told Israeli journalists he no longer believed there had been a rape, but would not provide the Times with the material that he said changed his mind.

The entire Holocaust was treated as anecdotal until after the camps were overrun. Nazis resent and deny the non-anecdotal details of Jew-hatred, then and now.

JAORE said...

Didn't Kissinger say something about both sides in the Iran/Iraq war?

Rob Crawford said...

Is there a site the Jew hater "rhhardin" hasn't soiled?

JAORE said...

Rape? Sure, whatever. Yawn.

But were there pictures of non-consensual kissing?

THAT would have united the "journalists".

CJinPA said...

This is not the first time this has happened to The New York Times.

Black reporters forced an editor out of his job when he published Sen. Cotton's op-ed calling on the National Guard to quell the 2020 riots. These journalists, grown men and women all, claimed publication literally put their safety at risk.

Appeals to reason by the black editor-in-chief were to no avail.

The latest uprising likely also features a good amount of employees of color. For years, the Times has heavily promoted the idea that non-whites are never wrong in a conflict with white citizens. (The progressive Oppressed/Oppressor rule.)

They do not have a system in place to counter the latest revolt. They replaced it with a race-based one.

Spiros Pappas said...

This is so hilarious! A conspiracy of Western feminists, global human rights organizations and American liberals insist that the Muslims did not gang rape Israeli women and children and that ANY evidence to the contrary was fabricated by the Israeli government. This is so much worse than MTG's space lasers!

Jupiter said...

But to Americans its "OMG,OMG, someone got raped. OMG!!!"

I think I covered that, RC. It's not that raping someone is worse than killing them. It's that killing people, in a war, is not incompatible with being fit for civilization. If the guy you just met at your BBQ turns out to have killed some people while he was in the Army, that will likely change how you feel about him. But it doesn't put him outside the pale of civilization. Guys who shot at each other in a war, will sometimes meet after the war and feel a sense of camaraderie, having shared an experience mostly alien to others. But nobody enjoys running into her rapist at a reunion. As I think I made clear above, a rapist is a dirty rotten bastard who deserves to be stood against a wall and shot. He is unfit to live among us. The only argument against the death penalty for rape is the inherent difficulty of being certain a rape occurred.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

radical pro-Palestine Pro-Hamas lunatics do not want any truth to come out on the horrors of what Hamas did that day.

to the corrupot AOC left - lies are king.

tommyesq said...

And meanwhile 30,000 women,children,and old men have been murdered by the IDF.

Remarkable how IDF has killed 30,000 people and not one of them was a fighting member of Hamas, or even a military-aged man.

RigelDog said...

Yancy asks: "Raping someone to death for leftist political purposes isn't rape-rape, right?"

You are 100% correct! Besides, the bitch was asking for it.

Jupiter said...

It is something I have pondered on, at some length, that movies with graphic images of men being killed are mostly considered "entertainment" in our civilization. It is permissible to laugh about a guy getting his head blown off. But when a woman is raped in a movie, it is generally to provide advance justification for some guy getting his head blown off. Or else it is "pornography".

Although that seems to be changing. I remember a scene from a movie the Coen brothers made a while back, with a very explicit depiction of a woman being stalked, captured, mocked, tortured and killed, which they mostly played for laughs. I assume many of you paid to see it. I guess nobody raped her, so it's OK. It's "Art".

FullMoon said...

Hamas atrocity

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more

tommyesq said...

"I don't see the problem. Raping the women is traditional and it's meant to debase the husbands."

Well, I'm not so sure about that, RH. Sometimes a rape is just a rape.


Actually, in a war setting, rape is a means of eliminating the other side's very presence - in this case, the next generation, and every generation thereafter, will not be purely Jewish. It is, in a sense, a form of genocide. From Wikipedia:

"In 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established by the United Nations made landmark decisions defining genocidal rape (rape intended to affect a population or culture as a whole) as a form of genocide under international law. In the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba Commune in Rwanda, the Trial Chamber held that "sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide."

hawkeyedjb said...

RCOCEAN II says that Hamas "killed" Jews, but when the IDF retaliates it is "murder." That is a moral inversion that is sickening.

The one true thing in that disgusting rant is "That's war, baby." Yes, it is. Civilians support genocidal leaders while it's fun, until it isn't fun anymore. When enough of them are dead, those who remain give some thought to the wisdom of their choices. So it goes, in nearly every war. No Japanese attacks on... anybody, for the last 80 years.

RigelDog said...

"Reporting on a deliberate strategy of violent sexual assault as an instrument of terror generates controversy because there isn't iron-clad proof of the accusations in a few cases."

Ironies abound. A groundbreaking, iconic feminist book, "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape" by Susan Brownmiller carefully documents the fact that rape has always been used as a weapon of warfare. Brownmiller relies heavily on this fact to then argue that rape is a strategic action whereby all men keep all women in a state of subjection. Very much along the lines of today's Woke claim that racism is a system perpetrated by all whites against all non-whites.

William said...

I read about a third of the article and gave up on it. It was too ghastly to even read. The rapes were accompanied by acts of mutilation and torture. This isn't Israeli propaganda. It happened, and the people who did it are evil beyond the ordinary construct of evil.

Rabel said...

Read the article in the Times, if you can.

Rick67 said...

rrhardin said It's a stupid strategy against a force militarily superior to you.

Yes and mostly no. Shortly after October 7 I read a couple interesting articles explaining why Hamas engaged in widespread sexual assault. Historians have studied the use of sexual violence as a war strategy. Because even after the strong military retaliates, and that territory is reclaimed, women will not want to live there. See https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbray/p/hamas-and-the-military-logic-of-sexual?r=14nbwp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1) families with children and 2) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

What school of journalism do journalists go today?

The Diversity Equity and Inclusion University of Narratives.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I’m going to assume no Israeli Trans-women were raped.

Hamas needs… what would I call it? Sensitivity Training.

Leland said...

Now that the NYT has at least acknowledged the rapes; I guess for that newsroom, it is too much to ask they acknowledge the murder of the child hostages.

tolkein said...

Believe all women, unless they're Jews. Is that the new leftist line?

This is the last straw. Rape is OK, sexual assault is OK, if the right people are doing it to the wrong people?

I'll assume now that all public claims of sexual impropriety are politically motivated unless proven to the contrary.

Ampersand said...

After the left takes control, they purge the Mensheviks, the kulaks, the wreckers and hoarders. Only true party members survive. Until the party evolves. The definition of true Party member changes. Death to Robespierre!

R.C. said...

Hamas violated women repeatedly while forcing those same women to watch as their loved ones were butchered, and as their infants were shoved into ovens and cooked alive. And then killed the women while violating them. And then violated them some more thereafter.

And then they bragged about it, to their approving relatives, back in Gaza.

Who then cheered in the streets about it.

That's what happened, and it's reasonable that reasonable persons should express disgust and fury about it.

Now, "ROCEAN" makes the following objection:

Rape is a terrible thing, but that Hamas KILLED over 1000 people on Oct 7th, seems a little bit more important. But to Americans its [sic] "...someone got raped. OMG!!!"


Why should that seem so strange?

Yes, killing is worse than rape, all other things being equal.

But there is a difference, let's stipulate, between a killing of a home-intruder who breaks down one's door late at night with a machete, and the slow torturing-to-death of a helpless innocent victim. These differ, even though both are "killing." Is that not so? Similarly, there is a difference between an unconsensual sexual penetration perpetrated by a drunk partygoer on a similarly drunk acquaintance in a back-room who was initially up for some fooling around, and then seemed not to be, and the intentional-and-enthusiastic gang-raping of a kidnapped stranger. Both are rape, and horrible, but these differ.

What causes the lucid observer to note the nastiness of Hamas' rape-spree is the fact that they (a.) explicitly planned it, (b.) perpetrated it with enthusiasm against the helpless, and (c.) generally went on to butcher the victim thereafter. The rape was for the purposes of making the victim's last experience one of terror and horror, while giving the perpetrators a thrill they went on to express pride and contentment about.

This requires the perpetrators to embrace a monstrous and demoniac mindset rather different from that of, say, shooting another soldier when I am afraid he is about to shoot at me. (Is that not so?)

Had the Hamas terrorists merely gone about killing Israelis, that would have suggested a less-demoniac mindset. But what the October 7 attacks made clear is that, had they but had the leisure, they would rather have raped all the victims first, and neglected to do so for practical reasons.

I thus judge the strong reaction to the rapes as sign of discernment: The observant person notes that this was not merely a lethal attack (which is bad enough), but one which the perpetrators made as hellish as they could given their time and resources, and would have made more hellish had more time and resources been available.

Isn't that correct?

R.C. said...

...continued, from above...



"ROCEAN" goes on to claim:

And meanwhile 30,000 women, children, and old men have been murdered by the IDF.


Not so.

Presuming the numbers of dead to be entirely accurate -- and there's no good reason to presume that, given the sources, but let's go with it -- the claim of murder is a claim of not mere killing, but wrongful killing.

But that presumes facts which are not in evidence, and contrary to IDF policy, for which there is ample evidence.

When an airstrike (for example) kills one Hamas commander and ten persons not identified as combatants, to prove murder you're required to demonstrate that the IDF knew the other ten persons were even there, and were not targeting the Hamas commander, but one or more of the other persons, and that the IDF had reason to believe that the other persons were probably or certainly non-combatants. You also have to demonstrate that the Hamas commander (contrary to Hamas' policy and habit) had not intentionally gathered a bunch of innocent non-combatants to his side for the purpose of ensuring that if he were killed, they also would be killed. (For, if he did that, the blame for murder is on him, not on the IDF.)

R.C. said...

...continued (final part)...

"ROCEAN" then claims:

People are starving in Gaza and being killed while trying to get to food trucks. But do Americans care? No.


That's a mostly false claim.

All other things being equal, Americans do want to get food into the bellies of starving third-worlders, as has been demonstrated by the American habit of their own private donations (through organizations like Samaritan's Purse and the like) regularly outstripping U.S. government foreign aid, year after year, for more than the last half-century. (Didn't you know?)

But, there has always been a difficulty doing this in areas controlled by terror organizations: The terrorist leaders literally take all the foreign donations, live fat off them, and divert the leftovers not to the people under their control (whom they prefer to keep at the point of starvation), but to the arms trade, or for vehicles, or tunnel-making equipment.

This happens, even with actual donated foodstuffs and medicines; but, once the people are close-enough to starving, Hamas carefully strips off any logos that might betray the source of the aid as American or Israeli, and then rebrands it as coming from themselves, and distributes the pittance to the grateful hands of the starving. This is their Standard Operating Procedure. (Didn't you know?)

As a consequence, Americans (and others) are left with the feeling that there's very little they can to do solve starvation in Gaza, unless the starving persons they care to feed are limited solely to Hamas fighters. Those, after all, are the only folk who're going to receive what's given (or, the resale value thereof).


All this is old news, of course. Any person stationed in the region for any period of time has known it. Retirees who recall the Marines-barracks bombing several decades back were already familiar with the pattern. (In fact, both Lenin and Stalin did similar things back in the old Soviet days, when their self-perpetuated famines were alleviated by donations from the West.)

But it's tiring having to spell it out, every time some adolescent (one suspects) noob like "ROCEAN" interrupts the conversation at the adults' table. It takes too many words, and too much time.

It's a lot like what happened that time when a truck driver in Atlanta had a heart-attack at the wheel, and crashed his truck, which was carrying a load of fertilizer.

It took mere seconds for the landscape to be covered in bulls***,
but it took hours of diligent work, to clean it all up.

Dave Begley said...

I don't understand. Does the NYT Union favor rape? Or just rape as a weapon of terror and war?

If it wasn't already clear, a large segment of the American Left is both insane and morally bankrupt.

Laughing Fox said...

tommyesq says: Remarkable how IDF has killed 30,000 people and not one of them was a fighting member of Hamas, or even a military-aged man.

It is indeed remarkable. Israel claims about 13,000 Hamas fighters have been killed (the data from about a week ago). The IDF uses cameras and drones with cameras to check on movements by IDF soldiers and planes bombing, so their data should be pretty good. And their control over soldiers' actions, forbidding murder (deliberate avoidable killing of non-fighters), is quite good also.

William said...

Six simple words:

The inmates are running the asylum.

BUMBLE BEE said...

Oh well.
They're already here.
Thank a democrat voter.

Jason said...

It's amazing:

I've been reading rcocean's comments on this blog for years. But it never dawned on me what a vile, poisonous piece of shit he is.

Weird.

Big Mike said...

I don't understand. Does the NYT Union favor rape? Or just rape as a weapon of terror and war?

@Dave Begley, probably they just don’t regard gang-raping Jewish women as a crime. Why do you think Bari Weiss quit? Lefties object to a picture of a young, uniformed member of our military stealing an exuberant kiss from a woman he doesn’t know when he learns he’s survived a World War, but gang-raping and murdering young Jewish women is clearly not nearly as bad in their bubble.

Static Ping said...

The article is somewhat confused on what exactly the issue(s) are. Some of it is technical stuff about leaks. Others are about questioning the proof of the claims of the article, which are superficially justifiable but almost certainly motivated by biases and would not be brought up if the roles were reversed. I am not inclined to read it again to get a better understanding.

The real issue is the New York Times is led by incompetents and staffed with fanatics. Why anyone would trust these people to tell them the truth is beyond me. Half of them would lie to me for my own good, and the other half wouldn't know the truth if it bit them in the arse.

wildswan said...

Hamas claims to be carrying out a jihad and to be religiously motivated hence it cannot admit that it violated the Islamic rules for a jihad by raping, mutilating and killing women (as well as killing children ad older men and women.) But the silent lack of support for Hamas from surrounding Arab countries reminds me of Dave Chapelle explaining how the black community IS supporting Jussie Smollett "with our silence. Because we knew this brother was clearly lying."

Dave Chapelle
https://youtu.be/wZXoErL2124 (crucial quotes begin about 2:40)

Similarly the surrounding countries knew Hamas was doing terror, not jihad and lying about its actions in order to gain support as jihadists. But Islam has rules of warfare which ban the barbaric actions of Hamas on October 7. These rules were first set forth by the first Caliph who had them from Mohammad, the Prophet himself. These rules banned treacherous beginnings of a war; attacks on women, children and old people; mutilations of the dead
He said:
"O people! I charge you with ten rules; learn them well! Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for your guidance in the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy's flock, save for your food. You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."

I think the NYT is silent for different reasons. As others have pointed out, it simply cannot reconcile its campaigns to refuse to hire or to work with men and women for alleged "speech violence" against women with its indifference to ghastly violence against women by Hamas. So it wants to say the violence didn't happen. We need to look at how HR works at the NYT. It's allowing the hiring of supporters of violence against women.

n.n said...

tommyesq says: Remarkable how IDF has killed 30,000 people and not one of them was a fighting member of Hamas, or even a military-aged man.

Our faith is in Hamas, United Nations, murderers, rapists, torturers, and empathetic advocates... a Jewish Spring in the Obama/Biden/Clinton hope and change. Such a "burden"... uh, burden. Let us bray.

n.n said...

Does the NYT Union favor rape?

Rape, sodomy, torture, abortion, etc. in the pursuit of social progress is no ethical vice.

n.n said...

gang-raping and murdering young Jewish women is clearly not nearly as bad in their bubble.

Not just Jewish women. They are notably diverse, equitable, and inclusive in their enlightened disposition... Spring is in the air.

Dr Weevil said...

RigelDog (12:38pm):
"Susan Brownmiller carefully documents the fact that rape has always been used as a weapon of warfare" - is that a "fact"? Always?

I remember reading 15-20 years ago that someone severely criticized the Israeli armed forces for not raping Palestinian women. No, really! It meant they were terrible racists.

I forget whether this person was a Palestinian or a westerner, man or woman, singular or plural. But he/she/they thought that the only possible reason for victorious soldiers not to rape the women they caught in conquered areas was if they found them unattractive. Israelis rarely if ever raped Palestinians, therefore they thought all Palestinians were ugly. Finding all the women of a particular race unattractive certainly looks racist.

It apparently never occurred to this idiot (these idiots?) that there might be other reasons soldiers would avoid rape - and not just fear of punishment by superior officers. Most well-brought-up men in the western world think rape is horribly wrong, and are not particularly tempted to seize any opportunity that occurs to commit it.

Brownmiller should have written "usually" - maybe even "always, in previous centuries". Wait, is even the latter true? Did women fear rape by either side in the American Revolution?

rastajenk said...

Did the Union signal its disapproval by snapping their fingers repeatedly?

Iman said...

Just say NO! to leftwing lies, puppetry and punditry

Jersey Fled said...

Per news.un.org:

“Following a 17-day visit to Israel, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict reported on Monday that she and a team of experts had found “clear and convincing information” of rape and sexualized torture being committed against hostages seized during the 7 October terror attacks.”

Chris N said...

The reality is a war. Israel and its military are going to do what they do. Many innocents will die. This will increase anti-Semitism and risk in the region and worldwide. It will mean a lot of suffering in Gaza. It’s complicated and tragic. This conflict has been years coming given leadership and decision-making.

We have a lot fewer good traditions, institutions and leadership of our own so understanding such brute facts is harder than usual.

The Godfather said...

Think for a moment: Is there ANY possibility that a "Palestinian" state governed by those who purpetrated these attrocities could live in peace with Israel in a "two-state solution"?

Dude1394 said...

The times reporters are upset that people are using their own false propaganda tactics against them.

Lawrence Person said...

Today's Democratic Party: Objectively Pro-Rape.

RigelDog said...

Dr. Weevil quotes me and asks: "RigelDog (12:38pm):
"Susan Brownmiller carefully documents the fact that rape has always been used as a weapon of warfare" - is that a "fact"? Always? "

I did not mean to convey that Brownmiller claimed that every single act of inter-group aggression (i.e. "warfare") always includes rape. Rather, she notes that rape has always been a commonly used weapon in the arsenal of aggressive acts that combatants might choose to employ. I don't see how anyone can argue that rape is NOT often used systemically in this fashion--it's right there in the Bible, the Koran, history, anthropology, archaeology, genetic testing etc.

I am aware of the ludicrous claim, made a while back, that the IDF MUST be raping "Palestinians" and that if the IDF did not engage in rape, that could only be due to them being racists or something mutter mutter mutter.


Big Mike said...

Think for a moment

@Godfather, you’re asking a lot from mainstream journalists and folks like Cookie and rcocean.

Dr Weevil said...

RigelDog:
I wasn't intending to criticize you so much as Brownmiller. Glad to hear even she didn't go as far as I had thought. I have no quarrel with your 6:44pm.

Aggie said...

I was listening to the coverage of this on NPR. The gist of it was, certain of the journalists on staff were triggered by the reporting on rape not being investigated to the proper degree to verify all of the facts. I am confounded by this, quite frankly, when I contemplate the fact-checking standards applied to other categories. But then, the capper: Apparently the crowning offense was when somebody leaked material being prepared for a show. OhMiGod. They leaked information that their broadcast colleagues were working on, before the show !! OhMiGod. Again with the confounded reaction, as I was reflecting on how the Legacy Media like the NYT was Anybody's Squeeze, the Sweetheart of the Rodeo, whenever some member of le Resistance had some Important draft internal classified document to leak for maximum damage to the Trump Administration.

The sad thing is, if these hypocrites got what they really deserved, they probably wouldn't understand why.

Cameron said...

Rape for Islam is a recruiting tool for Islamic causes as far back as Mohammad himself. Its a feature of Islam, not a fault.

Narayanan said...

They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.
=================
Moghal conquerors in India would slaughter cows at Hindu Temples and use stone from razed temples to raise mosques on site!

Narayanan said...

It looks to me = Hamas was also telling their fellow folks back in Gaza this is what we are capable of and better believe it!

Fred Drinkwater said...

Remember Bataclan? Remember how the reports of sexual mutilation quickly vanished?

I remember.

Josephbleau said...

Breaking news, NYT reporters condemn that the truth was told.

PM said...

Stop bumming their Vietnam.

Keith said...

RCOCEAN II said...

I find Americans, especially the elite, so bizzare and weird. Rape is a terrible thing, but that Hamas KILLED over 1000 people on Oct 7th, seems a little bit more important. But to Americans its "OMG,OMG, someone got raped. OMG!!!"

And meanwhile 30,000 women,children,and old men have been murdered by the IDF. People are starving in Gaza and being killed while trying to get to food trucks. But do Americans care? No. "Those A-rabs deserved it. That's war, baby", they say in their tough guy voice. But then they think of those Israelis who got raped, and dissolve into tears: "How could this happen, why didnt the heavens cry out?!".
3/6/24, 10:41 AM

...

Just to say it clearly - there is a clear difference between someone spontaneously murdering and raping innocent people and taking hostages, and society's response to that, including freeing the hostages. No one made the Gazans murder, rape, and kidnap. Once that happened in any just society there must be an effort to free the hostages and punish the perpetrators. Not to do so would be injust. This is a defensive war for Israel and an offensive war for Hamas. All Hamas has to do is release the hostages. Yet they don't. They would rather the war continue rather than release innocent hostages.

Your point is "sure Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, but it's inappropriate for USA to respond. Think of all the poor innocent Japanese killed." Well the Japanese had a choice not to attack. Once they attacked the gloves came off. The Japanese, like Hamas, were the aggressors. The defenders have very little in justice to restrain them.

You should know this.

Greg the Class Traitor said...

The story, published in late December under the byline of international correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers, said The Times had documented a pattern of sexual assault by Hamas as a brutal strategy...."

Yeah! How dare teh NYT actually report the truth!

Greg the Class Traitor said...

RCOCEAN II said...
I find Americans, especially the elite, so bizzare and weird. Rape is a terrible thing, but that Hamas KILLED over 1000 people on Oct 7th, seems a little bit more important. But to Americans its "OMG,OMG, someone got raped. OMG!!!"

And meanwhile 30,000 women,children,and old men have been murdered by the IDF. People are starving in Gaza and being killed while trying to get to food trucks. But do Americans care? No. "Those A-rabs deserved it. That's war, baby", they say in their tough guy voice. But then they think of those Israelis who got raped, and dissolve into tears: "How could this happen, why didnt the heavens cry out?!".


Go back to your cave, you pathetic little troll.

1: War will always involve killing. raping civilians, OTOH, show that the people doing that are NOT "war fighting", they are terrorist scum, war criminals, and entirely lacking in human value, worth, or decency.

IOW, they're a lot like you

2: Quoting number provided by Hamas just shows you're a dishonest lying sack of shit.

3: If you start a war by carrying out an atrocity attack against civilians, then every single one of your civilians is a legitimate target.

It's called :reprisal", and it's a key part of the laws of war. Because the only ones available to enforce the laws of war are teh participants in the war. And the only way to enforce them is to "do unto others as they have done unto you."

That doesn't mean "only do to them as much as they did to you." That's bullshit. The way you punish violations of the laws of war is by doing to the other side unrestrainedly what they did to you.

Which is why everyone working on the Manhattan Project was so desperately eager to get the bomb done in time to use it on teh Germans: You bomb our cities, we bomb your cities

When teh Palestinians get tired of been killed for Hamas's crimes, they'll show that fact by rising up against Hamas and destroying it.

until then? Every single one of them, without exception, deserves to die. Die just like those peaceful Israelis who were murdered by Hamas, teh government of Gaza