This is actually exactly what I've been thinking and experiencing.
I saw the rape denial coming up again on Twitter last night.
I haven't really talked much about how it's affected me over the past two and a half years.
For a lot of that time, I couldn't put it into words. It had forced me back into the "emergency phase" of recovery from sexual violence. Where it's affecting your entire life, and you aren't yet able to reason with it or talk about it; you're just immersed in it.
As a sexual abuse survivor, it has been extremely, intensely traumatizing to see people publicly and en masse deny that there was any sexual assault on October 7.
A lot of people are still even denying that anything at all happened on October 7. In their version, the IDF killed any and all Israelis who died, solely so they'd have an excuse to invade Gaza.
Before I go any farther, I'm just going to hand everyone the evidence.
A UK commission spent a full year collecting ALL the evidence of anything that happened on October 7. Forensics, photos, videos, interviews, survivor testimonies, first responder testimonies, et cetera.
They compiled it all into the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report. Which you can read right here.
I will be interspersing relevant screenshots from it throughout this post. It is gnarly as fuck. Consider that your content warning.
I have witnessed many people using their platforms and authority to convince the public that there was no mass rape.
I saw a clip from one podcast on TikTok, in which a woman who was supposed to be some kind of authority got dressed and ready and appeared on this podcast, knowing that she was there to claim that mass rape did not occur.
And with her whole chest, she stated that she was willing to believe that maybe someone was raped, at some point, on October 7... but that she hadn't heard of anyone.
Which meant that, despite knowing she was going to go be on this podcast to talk about this specific topic, she didn't even bother googling it.
Because by October 13, I had heard of mass rapes occurring. Because I had actually bothered to look for eyewitness accounts from people who survived October 7. And the first thing I'd seen, a PBS interview with two survivors, featured one talking about a woman he'd seen being gang-raped and then murdered. (Similar to, but earlier than, this interview from The Times.)
I feel like my arms are vibrating, just typing this now. Almost two and a half years later. I feel like I'm shaking inside.
I was in autistic burnout when October 7 happened. Trying to recover. Trying to put my life back together.
One of my main trauma responses, I have learned, is that I will repeatedly stay up until 3 am researching and writing about a traumatic situation. Trying to find a way to control it or fight it. Trying to gain some understanding of what's going on.
I spent months and months doing that. I had no control over it. I fucked up my sleep cycle really badly, along with my ability to recover from both the preexisting autistic burnout and the new trauma.
I've finally dragged myself out of burnout, mostly, two and a half years later.
It is absolutely terrifying to see people continue to bring up the mass rapes themselves in order to tell people nothing happened.
And there are so many reasons that it's terrifying.
I get why it's still a big deal to me: someone who has read all of the evidence of it repeatedly. Someone who was not only sexually abused, but ritually abused - which means abused in the name/framework of a particular ideology. It's a big deal to me, a survivor of similar things, to have to see people saying these similar things never happened.
But there seems to be no reason for people who DON'T believe it happened to keep bringing it up.
2. I can't think of any reason to keep bringing it up that isn't deliberately cruel.
Denying it in the first place is weird and entitled and cruel, but many people are very confidently wrong about many things.
It's like... denying it when it first comes up is bad enough.
Bringing it up years later, and making a big deal again about how it never happened, is deliberate cruelty.
3. The pattern of disinformation and hatred and targeting, over the past two and a half years in particular, has made one thing especially clear to me:
A lot of people unconsciously perceive Jews as sus.
This is not new. The idea that Jews are sinister, shady, secretive, plotting, nefarious, dishonest, scheming, lying, controlling, is a core part of a ton of antisemitic tropes.
This is why there are so many conspiracy theories about Jews. Jews control the world financial systems and media and governments and all that shit, Jews have space lasers, Jews control the weather and use it to influence voter turnout, Jews have a global network of pedophilia, Jews control the drug and alcohol trade, blah blah blah blah blah.
It's fucking scary to see this idea extended into, "Jews will even lie about having been publicly raped en masse! Jews will say ANYTHING!"
It's fucking scary to see how thoroughly this idea has spread over the past few years.
The idea that you can't trust Jews.
The idea that any Jewish organization is likely to be secretly genocidal. Hillel, Chabad, your local synagogue, your local Jewish preschool; any of them. Scheming to support genocide and lying about it. That this is a reasonable premise to use in your approach to the world around you.
4. A lot of people actively believe that Hamas Did Nothing Wrong because it calls itself the Palestinian Resistance.
It's extremely reasonable to want a resistance group to be right. To want it to be taking very dramatic, drastic steps for equally dramatic and drastic reasons.
Rape is everyone's uncrossable line. People perceive rape as inherently morally wrong and unjustifiable, in a way that (to many people) murder is not.
I suppose that we think murdering someone prevents them from harming anyone else, but raping them instead doesn't; and raping them as well is inhumane.
So this is the sticking point. People cannot accept that Hamas raped and sexually mutilated people on October 7, because that would mean the "Palestinian Resistance" is unsupportable. And for a lot of people, that would challenge everything they know about the world.
This is also why people could not center and platform Gazan activists. Why, instead, almost every Gazan peace and human rights activist I know of gets called a "Zionist" or an "Israeli shill" daily, and has been blocked by pro-Palestinian leaders and influencers. Often before even reaching out to them. Pre-emptively blocked.
Because Hamas holds Gaza in a brutal dictatorship. Gazan activists have been fighting Hamas for at least 7 years.
Westerners perceive this as a nice neat binary. Israel Versus The Palestinians. Because, for decades, we've been getting our information about it from groups that openly support Hamas. Many of which held rallies celebrating October 7.
The fact that the pro-Palestine movement has refused to center and platform the people directly affected by its work is a huge red flag.
5. It's terrifying to watch the left abandon all sorts of progressive principles when it comes to Jews.
We listen to marginalized groups about what harms them, except for Jews.
We don't accuse them of weaponizing their oppression, except for Jews.
We believe them when they talk about the hate crimes and discrimination they experience, except for Jews.
We believe people who say they've been raped, except for Jews.
We center and platform the people directly affected by our actions, except for Jews. (And Palestinians, if ignoring them is necessary in order to stay mad at Jews.)
We fight for diversity and representation and inclusion of marginalized groups, except for Jews.
6. It's terrifying to discover that there's a group out there whose sole mission is to destroy and conquer Israel -- and that it's motivated by the belief that the land belongs to the Muslim world by right of conquest 1,400 years ago, and also, the belief that Jews are Evil.
It's terrifying that Hamas didn't just explicitly plan out how to attack each village, with floor plans of its dentist offices and supermarkets and kindergartens, but also, how it would build a new caliphate afterward.
How it would decide which Jews must die, which ones must stand trial, which ones could flee, and which ones must stay and contribute their skills/education.
How it would recreate the Pact of Umar, a dense network of Jim Crow-style laws subjugating non-Muslims for profit. The same legal system that the entire region had lived under throughout 1,300 years of Arab colonization.
It's terrifying that it's promised publicly to repeat its attack "again and again" until Israel has been "annihilated."
7. It's terrifying that Hamas's original plan had been for Hezbollah and Iran to join in its attack, from the north and east, and for Iran to target the big cities. That Hamas believed it could destroy Israel that way. But its allies weren't prepared to join in, and Hamas decided it needed to act ASAP.
Because I think it's possible that it's right. If that many more forces had attacked on that many fronts at once, it would have taken much, much longer for the IDF to drive them off. I think they would have succeeded in hitting the big cities pretty hard.
Bomb shelters in Israel aren't equipped with locks. For safety reasons. Imagine if Iran had just bombed people into the shelters, ready for slaughter by Hamas and Hezbollah.
I'm just saying. Almost half the Jews on earth live in Israel. These groups explicitly want to take them out. And their fans have been explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel.
You guys just finished killing off almost half the Jews on earth 80 years ago.
Maybe you could just not??
8. Lastly, it's especially fucking terrifying that this is resurfacing at a time when the dictatorship of Iran is threatened.
A time when somehow, people are also not hearing from or seeking out Iranian voices.
A time when the dictatorship of Iran has been raping and massacring the people for protesting it.
When somehow, the only thing I hear about it on the left is "we bombed a girls' school!" (Because we're, yet again, unreservedly believing what dictatorships tell us.)
This seems like a desperate stab at keeping us mad at the U.S. and Israel, and keeping us uninformed about and distracted from what Iran is doing.
It's all just a pattern of lies to cover up fascists' torture of innocent civilians.
And, yes, also: it regularly makes me want to hide in a corner of a dark room until I'm done screaming silently into the internet for the day.
It makes me feel like someone has scraped my nerve endings. Like there's sandpaper facing inward underneath my skin.
It's fucking horrible, it has made me lose trust in many of my communities, and I fear it will never end.
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