Confronting Acts of Sexual Terrorism Committed by Hamas on October 7

How can anyone still defend Hamas?

“I didn’t want to read this article.”

Almost all the remarks in the comments section of a recent New York Times report on sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women by the forces of Hamas on October 7, 2023, began the same way.

Well, almost all.

No one wanted to read the story.

It’s doubtful, judging by the approximately 90 days it took America’s “Paper of Record” to report properly on the topic — for which there has been a preponderance of overwhelming evidence since about October 8 — that the New York Times wanted to write the story, either.

“‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” revealed the New York Times on December 28, 2023. “A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”

As relieved as many in the U.S. who have been following the story in the Israeli press and from international media outlets — many of which have been covering the sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women on October 7 since shortly after the attack — to see the New York Times finally publishing an account of the devastating level of sexual violence unleashed by Hamas on October 7, the wait for this news coverage has been agony.

The New York Times is the paper that parroted in October, without caveat, Hamas propaganda accusing Israeli forces of bombing a hospital in Gaza.

The NYT description of the violence was horrific, well nigh unendurable.

What’s more, Jewish people, feminists, and right-thinking individuals of every description were forced to endure two levels of heartbreak reading about the extreme suffering, torture, and brutality endured by the female victims of Hamas on October 7.

On the one hand, the toll this type of terrorism visits upon its victims, their families, and the national consciousness is unimaginable. Unthinkable.

Unbearable.

On the other hand, the silence from respected Western media outlets on the subject — as from the bastions of academia, international human rights organizations, and erstwhile #MeToo activists— is heartbreaking in its callousness and inhumanity.

Perhaps sympathy for the purported cause of radical Islamists — ostensibly “peace” — from ISIS to Hamas to the Taliban, is to blame?

If so, this sympathy for Hamas is deeply misplaced, misguided, and wrong-headed. Hamas doesn’t want western sympathies, and it certainly doesn’t want peace.

The ordinary citizens of Gaza were enduring no Israeli airstrikes before Hamas coordinated and carried out the most stunning acts of brutality against the ordinary citizens of Israel that Jewish people have endured since the Holocaust.

Hamas won’t stop until it pushes every last Jew in Israel into the sea. So say its leaders. Hamas has demonstrated a chilling willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

Hamas apologists who still managed to find some excuse for the brutality detailed by the New York Times yesterday understand even less about Hamas than they do about the history of the West Bank.

Hamas wants to kill all the Jews in Israel. Calling for the genocide of Jews is in the founding charter of Hamas. Hamas, and other Islamist extremists like it, blame Israel for the war, violence, and displacement afflicting the region.

They also blame — even more so — the United States.

And Americans. Including every commenter on the New York Times expose of Hamas war atrocities defending Hamas fighters despite what they — proudly — did on October 7.

In the opinion of Hamas terrorists — and everyone currently parroting Hamas propaganda, apparently — no Jewish person in Israel is an innocent civilian. As colonialist occupiers of stolen land, all Israeli men, women, and children, are seen as enemy combatants under a death sentence.

And so are all Americans — including American college students chanting “Free Palestine!”.

Do Hamas apologists in the U.S. believe that innocent American civilians — men, women, and children — deserve to be treated as Israeli men, women, and children were treated by Hamas on October 7?

Hamas apologists on college campuses, in newsrooms, and in boardrooms believe — as Hamas does, or claims to — that Israel is the architect of every misbegotten ill bedeviling the poor, innocent citizens of Palestine and the Middle East.

Well, radical Islamists blame another architect even more for the misfortunes of Palestine and the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq.

The United States.

Do readers of the New York Times — who, finding out the details about sexual violence visited upon Israeli women on October 7, still insist on defending Hamas — believe that Americans deserve to suffer the same fate for the foreign policy blunders and war-time sins of their government?

Do their “colonialist” neighbors deserve to be tortured, raped, and murdered at the hands of Hamas? Do their friends deserve this fate?

Young women at a music fest? Teenage girls asleep in their beds?

Hamas isn’t only Israel’s problem.

Every atrocity they committed against Israelis on October 7, Hamas would do to Americans in America if they could — in a heartbeat. And Hamas terrorists would use the same justifications they are using now.

Would Hamas still have defenders on college campuses and in the New York Times comments section?

Would it take the New York Times 90 days to report about it?

Is this supposed to be what “decolonization” looks like?

(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)