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Israel’s obstruction of investigation into 7 October rape allegations risks truth never being found, advocates warn
(www.middleeastmonitor.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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That should tell you the answer right there. A state that has overtly lied to cover its own action in their ongoing genocide, that has painted their enemy as fascists have always tried to paint their enemies, is saying one thing and refusing to offer proof and refusing to allow the matter to be investigated.
It didn’t happen.
Not to mention, they were caught pushing the story in the NYT to begin with, which is where the rumor started. I don’t need any more proof that it didn’t happen like they say it did.
Rape happens in war. I don't believe it was used systemically on Oct. 7, as Israel claims, or at least, there's no evidence of that.
However, to claim that no one was raped during an attack that long and protracted, and with so many people involved, defies history and the realities of conflict.
What's worse, anyone claiming "no rapes happened" as a counter to "it was systemically used", means that a single case of rape invalidates their claim, and by default, bolsters Israel's lie.
Right. As I was writing, I changed the definitive final sentence to a less definitive “it didn’t happen as they said it happened.” I never said there was no rape whatsoever.
Unfortunately rape is used in war. You’re right about that. Both sides are allegedly using it as a tactic. But their story was systematic rape used as terror on Oct 7 was a lie.
The OP article makes a big deal, too, about this distinction between Israeli women who were raped by Hamas fighters because the Hamas fighters wanted to rape, as opposed to because their commanders told them to go out and rape. I'm not sure that's a super impactful distinction. Why do you think it's an important distinction?
(Actually, the OP article says something stupider than that; it says that "some reports have asserted that those acts and other reported atrocities were committed by civilians and those not affiliated" with Hamas, without explaining what the fuck they're even talking about, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt and dealing mostly with their treatment that it's important whether or not Hamas "ordered it" to happen, which is still stupid to me but not transparently absurd like the idea that unaffiliated civilians suddenly started coming in and raping all these Israeli women at the same time that the October 7th attacks were going on.)
There's a huge difference between isolated incidents, and the systemic use of rape as a weapon of war.
One's a regular criminal offense, and the other is Hague War Crime Tribal level of offense.
Not even slightly. Or, I mean, not for quite a while; the treatment of rape in war has evolved past what you are describing since quite some time ago.
Then in 2008, the UN took the fairly sensible when you think about it step of saying that if you are fielding an army, and that army is raping people with any regularity, then that is your problem i.e. a crime against humanity and you don't get to mount the defense that you didn't tell them to, and so it's not your problem if it is happening.
Your viewpoint is disgusting and explicitly rape-apologist, as well as in this case legally incorrect.
Are you relying to the wrong the wrong comment? Or did you just not read mine correctly...?
Before I lay into the absurdity of your response as it relates to my comment, please double check.
Because it should be obvious that my comment adheres to the UN charter you reference and I never claimed that systemic only includes weaponized rape ordered through the chain of command.
You said that a soldier raping a civilian is a regular criminal offense. I cited the UN resolution that says among other things:
I mean, it's possible that we're saying the same thing; sort of contingent on what you mean exactly by "isolated incidents". I am saying that widespread rape on October 7th is indicative of a war crime regardless of whether approval for it came through Hamas's chain of command. Is that what you're saying?
This is the other thing that's weird about the "it was all debunked" side. So, they invaded the music festival, shot a bunch of people including plenty of women and children, hauled away a bunch of hostages, burned up some homes, and yet, nobody raped anybody. Just didn't happen. That's a red line that these music-festival-goer-shooters adhered to absolutely without fail.
The Israeli government does much worse, unprovoked, and much more systematically. But that doesn't mean all of a sudden that you have to say every bad thing about Israel is true and every bad thing about Hamas is false, and these people who invaded a music festival and shot more than a thousand innocent people are these noble paladins you have to protect the right and honor of.
Rape does not happen during an attack it happens after. See israel raping Palestinians in their concentration camps.
Hamas certainly isn't going to drop their weapons with Apache helicopters and rockets flying overhead to rape a blown up bodies in a car.
If Hamas would be raping people it would be the kidnapped hostages. Yet that rescued hostage from yesterday did not look very pregnant.
I said I wasn't going to indefinitely play the game of you saying total bullshit and me citing sources for why it's wrong, because going back and forth with it too many times usually isn't a good use of time, but for some reason this one irritated me all afresh.
I(17) from the report, page 5: "With respect to hostages, the mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing."
Tell me what that information is. Surely you have evidence to present.
Since I already cited a few entries out of the UN report to you, I'm gonna make this one into one of those "exercise for the reader" type of things. Like teaching a man to fish. In what entry in the table of contents to the report do you think the answer to this question might be contained?
I realize you will have to read most of the whole first page of the document to find it, but I believe in you. Hold your focus. Persevere.
You didn't cite any evidence you just posted the summary.
What information is used to come to those conclusions in the summary? It's in the report surely you've read it right?
I sent you a link to the full report. Maybe that needs to be the first part of your challenge then: Finding the link to the report, and then finding the table of contents, and then identifying which entry in the table of contents might contain the answer to your question.
Do you really not want to take on the challenge of finding it? I am trying to help you become more capable with sources and verification procedures. I wasn't expecting finding the report that I sent the link to to be the hard part, but I honestly don't think any part of it should be altogether super-challenging.
I already read the report and stated what is in it. You are the person claiming differently so link the part where they had anything other than witnesses to present.
What page of the report did you read that dealt with hostages?
Not that I don't believe you; I just have forgotten, and I want you to remind me so I can reference it really quick so we can continue the conversation.
Can you cite the evidence or are you going to keep asking questions about page numbers?
I'm gonna quit being a sarcastic dickhead for a second to take this question seriously.
I already gave citations of evidence -- a link to the report with some criticisms of what the article was saying was literally my first comment here, and then after that, I responded to questions usually with page numbers or section citations or quotations (examples here, here, and here).
But that made absolutely no difference to how you reacted. You continued to make 100% wrong claims about what was in the report, and didn't react substantively to the demonstrations that what you were already saying were wrong.
As I said, I don't feel like simply continuing that cycle of me providing citations and you continuing to blandly argue wildly wrong things like this. I decided to try a different tactic of asking you about the citations, providing enough hints that you should easily be able to find them in the report you claim to have read. I'm actually pretty happy with it, since it breaks the cycle of "duck season" "rabbit season" "duck season" and so on, and throws it into sharp relief when you're pointedly ignoring some kind of evidence that disproves your case.
Honestly, I'm happy with the result so far. I think it's a lot more effective at highlighting the fact that you're not actually interested in looking up information, or checking these wild claims you're making against some kind of objective basis.
So. Are you sure you don't feel like looking in the table of contents of the link I sent you, and locating the specific section which might possibly contain the answer to your question? There is, really, only one entry that qualifies. It should be very easy.
Of course, you could also pretend that someone me sending you the link and telling you to look in the table of contents near the bottom of the first page and you will probably find the information you seek, represents me not giving you a citation. You can claim that. It is your right. I will not stop you.
Once again a wall of text without evidence. I am wondering why I am taking the time to even read this.
You seem to be unable to discern between a conclusion and the evidence for said conclusion. One cannot come to a conclusion without evidence for it.
What information is used to come to the conclusion in the UN paragraphs you are linking?
Yeah, sure, my lack of posting documents with detailed explanations of what the evidence was, and pointing to where within those documents you can find that information -- that's the problem here. How could I not have seen it 🙂. I can only hope to do better in the future.
(Pages 8-11 cover the standards of proof and methodology employed in general, and of course each subsection discusses briefly what specific evidence was employed in reaching the conclusions of that section.)
Here's the link to the report. I sent it to you already, but maybe it was eaten by a bear in transit.
Hey, quick question -- you seemed to say that the report covered only the festival itself, as part of an argument where it would be impossible for rape to even have occurred because apparently attacking the festival was an active firefight and not a terrorist attack on a helpless and terrified civilian population. What are the five subsections of III(c)1 that come after the first one (festival and surroundings), please? I am testing your reading comprehension and ability to follow links to evidence, since you seem to be having a great deal of difficulty in doing so.
I did not ask you which factors were taken into consideration I asked you which factors were used as evidence for the conclusion of the report. Which the UN refuses to use as evidence that Hamas committed rape.
Consider reading https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/pramila-pattens-rape-fantasies instead of the UN report. Legalese proves too difficult for some.
Hey, quick question -- you seemed to say that the report covered only the festival itself, as part of an argument where it would be impossible for rape to even have occurred because apparently attacking the festival was an active firefight and not a terrorist attack on a helpless and terrified civilian population. What are the five subsections of III(c)1 that come after the first one (festival and surroundings), please? I am testing your reading comprehension and ability to follow links to evidence, since you seem to be having a great deal of difficulty in doing so.
No thanks I don't feel like taking a pivot. Go read Finkelsteins blog spelling it all out and come back then if you have any questions about it.
Actually, I got curious and read a bit of your link, and I have some comments:
II(7) claims that the team was purely guided and fed information by the Israeli government, and didn't offer "any dissent, even a peep, from the official 'narrative'". This is verifiably false; Patten debunked some of the Israeli government's more outlandish claims by analyzing evidence, and also among other things visited the West Bank and called for a corresponding investigation into IDF and settler sexual violence (section IV(81) in the UN report.)
III(10) wildly mischaracterizes the scale of the abuse that the UN report alleges; adding up various selected numbers from the report to arrive at a lower bound of 5 on the number of instances of sexual abuse, which is so wildly out of line with what the report actually says that it only be explained by someone who read the UN report, but cherry-picked some things out of it and presented them with the assumption that people would read the dishonest summary and not compare it to the original report.
I stopped reading at that point. As with a lot of these things, it's not possible for me to verify anything directly about what actually happened on the ground in Israel or Gaza. I can only read reports. But, I can definitely say that when one report is being grossly dishonest in its summary of what is contained in a different report, which I can also obtain and read for myself, then that first report is clearly lying.
II: The report debunks a few cases.... Which were often already debunked. Such as the Kibbutz cases. It would not reflect well upon the report to report verifiably debunked claims. As the report does not cite its sources for the newer claims those are virtually impossible to debunk.
III:
Hey, quick question -- you seemed to say that the UN report covered only the festival itself, as part of an argument where it would be impossible for rape to even have occurred because apparently attacking the festival was an active firefight and not a terrorist attack on a helpless and terrified civilian population. What are the five subsections of III(c)1 that come after the first one (festival and surroundings), please? I am testing your reading comprehension and ability to follow links to evidence.
I never said the UN report covered only the festival. Once again reading proves difficult.
Now please cite the information used as evidence for the conclusion. you have had enough time to read the report.
Yeah, yeah, you meant something totally different when you said "There were some stragglers playing hide and seek but the operation was mostly over the second the IDF copters shows up which was within 24 hours. The 'witness allegations' which turned out to be untrue were during the main raid including the festival. The UN report allegations also pertain to the festival. These were the earliest hours." That whole line of argument was something totally different than what it clearly was.
Be that as it may. Let's dive a little bit into "If Hamas would be raping people it would be the kidnapped hostages. Yet that rescued hostage from yesterday did not look very pregnant."
Your assertion is that one woman rescued from captivity who doesn't look very pregnant has some bearing on whether her or any other women are being raped in custody? I mean I follow the basic premise, I just wanna hear a little bit more about the logic and the evidentiary standard here.
Out of order. You can easily make the same point without resorting to perpetuating a misogynist myth about rape.
“Out of order” is not quite a strong enough reaction for “We found a woman who doesn’t look pregnant as far as I can tell so that means that her and all the other women definitely didn’t get raped, so stop worrying about it”
Did you really just try and claim that rape doesn't happen during active and protracted urban combat...?
Also, while I agree that of the attackers that day, the Hamas forces were the least likely culprits due to training and defined mission objectives, they weren't the only people to enter Israel after the barriers were breached. That doesn't mean they didn't, just that I think there are other scenarios with a higher probability.
And last, I'm not really sure if you're being intentionally honest with your retelling of events, or if you really just don't know that much about the scope and duration of the attack. Either way, you don't really have a firm grasp enough to speak on this with any sort of authority, certainly not with the confidence you seem to have.
Since empathy with brown people appears to be impossible let's switch it up a bit.
Let's say the IDF kidnaps a Palestinian. Do they stick an electrified stick in their ass while in a firefight with Hamas, or do they kidnap the Palestinian back to base and then rape them?
Thanks for clearing that up, you're being intentionally disingenuous.
Never have I defended the IDF, nor have I condemned any Palestinian combatants.
I certainly never expressed any skepticism about the genocide or sexual violence that does appear to be deliberately systemic within the IDF, or at minimum, widely tolerated up the chain.
So, with that out of the way. Re-read my comments, and then decide to engage honestly, or just go and try and peddle your uninformed garbage somewhere else.
I am saying that nobody rapes during combat in the middle of a firefight. Being in mortal danger is not a huge turn on.
The rape if it happens, happens after a victim is extracted to a safe location or an area is fully captured.
Same for the rapes that happened in Ukraine. There were no rapes during combat that happens after all combat is over.
It's telling that you think a multi-day combat operation over a geographically dispersed area is just one very long firefight.
It sounds like you're basing this off a mixture of movies, television, and your gut.
I think they are basing it off the conclusion that they have already decided that they want to reach
There were some stragglers playing hide and seek but the operation was mostly over the second the IDF copters shows up which was within 24 hours.
The "witness allegations" which turned out to be untrue were during the main raid including the festival. The UN report allegations also pertain to the festival. These were the earliest hours.
The only one basing things off their gut is people claiming they have evidence of rape which they clearly don't have.
Quick question, since you're clearly familiar with the report: Section III(c)1 is divided into 6 different subsections, of which the first is the festival and surrounding areas. What are the other 5 subsections?
I can start to give some hints if you have trouble answering this question. There's also III(c)2 and 3 but I already asked some questions about III(c)2.
(That was another hint, a big one, to one of my earlier questions you still seem to be having some trouble with.)
So, you don't feel like checking III(c)1 to verify your claim that the UN report pertains only to the festival? I am trying to make it easy for you to learn how to check your claims against sources, but you do not seem eager to develop your skills in this area.
What concentration camps? What are you talking about? You are literally just making this up.
These ones
It looks like you sent the wrong link. This article is related to prison abuse and has nothing to with concentration camps.
Not surprising, since as I said, they do not exist.