R. Amy Elman
October 7: Passionate Anti-Zionists, Pornography, and Feminist Impersonators
It has become fashionable among anti-Israel protestors to deny Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israelis and the sexual violence that accompanied it. Their revisionism exploits the unspeakable character of the atrocities to inflict further harm on Jews, negating the victims’ experiences and denying that victims even exist. This essay focuses on three elements of this trend on American campuses: 1) the passion of anti-Zionists; 2) the pornography of perpetrators; and 3) the feminist impersonators who give cover to atrocity denial. Their obscuring of lethal sexual abuse and antisemitism heightens the vulnerability of all Jews to these threats.
Passionate Anti-Zionists
Faced with the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, campus administrators seemed as placid about Hamas as anti-Zionists were passionate about its attack on Israel. The equivocations, elation, and denials that followed proved deeply concerning. There was the pro-Hamas student at the University of Pennsylvania who felt “so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near” that she implored her peers to “bring it to the streets” (Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “UPenn Student Who Praised ‘Glorious’ Hamas Terror Attack,” New York Post, November 12, 2023). A Cornell University professor of history similarly declared that he was “exhilarated” by October 7 (Jess O’Neill, “Cornell University Professor Calls Hamas Terror Attack ‘Exhilarating’ and ‘Energizing’,” New York Post, October 16, 2023). A George Washington University (GWU) professor of psychology, who later departed for Qatar’s Doha Institute, went on the offensive to condemn those who “slander the names of our martyrs as terrorists” (Alek Schemmel, “'How Dare You Slander the Names of Our Martyrs',” The Washington Free Beacon, October 16, 2023). A student from my own campus was contemptuous of the “white bitches” who had the audacity to express their horror at Hamas’s slaughter. Those speaking out against the sexual violence of so-called freedom fighters are derided as “colonial feminists” and racists.
Hamas and its supporters raped women and girls, cut off their breasts and tossed them about, shot bullets into the vaginas and heads of their victims, beheaded others, and mutilated men’s genitals. Captured terrorists acknowledged that the sexual violence was not incidental. Enacted as a weapon of war, it systematically occurred in each zone of the massacre (“Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” Tel Aviv: The Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, 2024, www.1202.org.il/images/arcci_report_-_seuxal_crimes_in_october_7_updated_29.2.pdf). A dead terrorist’s notebook that was found contained a translation key. In Hebrew, it read: “take off your pants” (Caroline McCaughey, “Where Are the International Women’s Organizations,” The New York Sun, November 16, 2023). These words help account for the piles of bloodied corpses naked below the waist.
That this sadism is characterized as “resistance” testifies to the depth of antisemitism and the normalization of sexual abuse that often accompanies it. Terrorists called home from the killing fields. One boasted, “Your son killed so many Jews. Mom, your son is a hero.” His jubilant mother exclaimed, “I wish I was with you” (Carrie Keller-Lynn, “IDF Shows Foreign Press,” Times of Israel, October 23, 2023). Gazan women and children as young as 10 followed the so-called “heroes” into Israeli homes where they looted and aided the terrorists for hours (Andrew Tobin, “Netflix and Kill,” The Washington Free Beacon, December 15, 2023).
Pornography
Terrorists filmed themselves with body cameras and cell phones and posted clips of their actions on social media belonging to their own families and to the friends and families of their victims (Sheera Frenkel and Talya Minsberg, “Hamas Hijacked Victims’ Social Media,” The New York Times, October 17, 2023). Sometimes they forced the love ones of their victims to witness the rapes in public view (“Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” 23). Their behavior is reminiscent of Serbia’s fascists who used rape (and the pornography they made of it) “as a public spectacle to induce women to leave their homes and never return” (Natalie Nenadic, “Femicide: A Framework for Understanding Genocide,” in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein [North Melbourne: Spinifex Press], 456–464: 459). Nearly 200,000 Israelis have since been evacuated from their homes, and many are unlikely to return. That one set of perpetrators raped “for Serbia” and another to “Free Palestine” does not mean that rape was then (or is now) the perpetrator’s only tool or that women and girls were their only victims.
Hamas forced Israeli hostages, including a young boy, to repeatedly watch the pornography they produced on October 7. Held alone for 6 weeks, Hamas told him that his kibbutz and Israel no longer existed (American Jewish Committee, “Day 81 Hostages Update," 2023). For those still in captivity, the sexual torture continues (Agam Goldstein-Almog, “The Girls I Met in the Tunnels,” The Free Press, January 16, 2024). In the 1990s, feminists warned that the rape death camps central to Serbia’s “ethnic cleansing” offered a pornographic script that others would enact. One wrote: “We can be sure that all present and future fascists and misogynists of the world are watching and taking note about how to do it and get away with it” (Nenadic, 460).
The fact that pornography is seldom regarded as evidence of harm testifies to the success that men, and the women who ally with them, have had in concealing sexual abuse by photographing it. Stated simply, through pornography, sexual abuse is often decontextualized as assaultive and reconstituted as “art,” “speech,” “sex work” and, now the “resistance” of “freedom fighters.” Predictably, Hamas’s supporters include pornographers like Mia Khalifa who, on October 7, tweeted: “Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal” (Ross Anderson, “Porn for Palestine,” Tablet Magazine, February 21, 2024).
While survivors of October 7 testified to the pleasure that Palestinians took in the crimes they committed (Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, “Screams Without Words,” The New York Times, December 28, 2023), no less important is the thrill they and their accomplices derive in denying that the atrocities took place. Their feigned incredulity is pernicious. Like Holocaust deniers, they dispute the forensic evidence and direct testimonies of Jews as malicious lies. Because the Holocaust and October 7 are emblematic of evil, deniers are able to revitalize antisemitism by convincing others that the crimes for which Jew hating can be blamed never happened (Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory [New York: Free Press, 1993]; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992]). Thus, tearing down hostage posters under the pretext that they are Islamophobic propaganda becomes a moral imperative.
“Feminist” Deniers
The protean character of antisemitism and its denial is also evidenced through the ostensibly feminist cast of campus characters who subscribe to it. Such feminist impersonators include an adjunct professor of Gender and Women Studies at UC Berkeley who attended a November Oakland City Council meeting to promote a one-sided ceasefire resolution that condemned Israel’s response to Hamas. There she stated, “the notion that this [October 7] was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative” (Dion J. Pierre, “UC Berkeley Lecturer Calls Oct. 7 Massacre” The Algemeiner, November 30, 2023).
A professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota made headlines weeks later when, as an applicant for a senior administrative Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) position at the university, they denied the sexual violence of October 7. Speaking as a “rape crisis counselor” who “believes survivors,” the professor compared Israeli rape survivors to white women whose racist fabrications of rape against black men in the segregated South led to lynching (Haley Cohen, “University of Minnesota Professor Who Denied,” Jewish Insider, December, 2023). This position parroted the rape denialism broadcast by Electronic Intifada (EI) weeks prior. Stressing the absence of “first-hand testimony,” EI downplayed why victims were no longer alive to provide it. One commentator likened the terrorists to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy falsely accused of offending a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955 (Ali Abunimah, “Debunking Israel's ‘mass rapes’ atrocity propaganda,” December 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMqRK5LpGy4). Thus, she and others have since cast Jews as white nationalists and terrorists as victims of false allegations in ways that not even the far-right and proponents of “false memory syndrome” (Michael Salter and Ruth Blizard, “False Memories and the Science of Credibility,” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation23.2 (2022): 141-147) could have imagined.
Casting themselves as truth seekers, deniers exploit the reluctance of traumatized survivors to come forward and discredit those reporting on the abuse. Consider The Grey Zone’s relentless campaign to disgrace “august liberal [news] organizations” (e.g., The New York Times and The Guardian) for their coverage of sexual violence. Insisting these and other reporters issued “fabrications” curated by Israel to “present a story in order to justify genocide” in Gaza, its editor omits Hamas’s calls for Israel’s eradication. With rhetoric redolent of Holocaust deniers, he insists instead that no systematic sexual atrocities occurred on October 7 and that reporters engaged in “the biggest media scandal of our time” (Max Blumenthal, “NYT Pulls Hamas Rape Story,” The Hill YouTube Channel, 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=paDjsRkhc28).
Silencing survivors and their communities under the guise of fact-finding and feminist anti-racism is an especially effective means of gaslighting that ensures further anguish, rape’s banalization, and a likely legitimation of corroboration requirements for rape that feminists ended decades ago. The assumption that atrocity deniers are ill-informed and educable can be naïve. It is consistent with the redemptive narrative that views higher education as a panacea for ethical values and its graduates as purveyors of truth, a position countered by German universities in the Third Reich. As Niall Ferguson reminds us: “A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it”(Niall Ferguson, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” National Post, December 15, 2023).
The above-mentioned professors are far from marginal. The former GWU professor served as president of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology section. The University of Minnesota professor held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston, completed a PhD at Stanford, and taught at Wellesley College before arriving at Minnesota.
These deniers have amassed authority over years and their influence extends beyond the classroom to include governmental and non-governmental organizations, the media, the legal profession, and social movements. Consider the 2017 Women’s March at which organizers demanded the expulsion of Zionists from the movement. Soon after, Jews unwilling to renounce Israel were banished from student organizations.
Conclusion
Countering the messaging of Hamas’s supporters who claim to be both feminist and anti-racist requires exposing their sinister politics as antisemitic and dangerously disingenuous (Phyllis Chesler, “A Feminist Open Letter Justifies Hamas Rape,” Jewish News Syndicate, March 3, 2024). In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, distressed by the failure of US campuses to recognize the dangers of Holocaust denial, warned: “properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations” (Lipstadt, 208). As prescient as she was, it is unlikely that she anticipated the role that feminist impersonators would play in fostering that foothold.
With terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters and their academic apologists cloaked as feminists and anti-racists, we are witnessing the obliteration, not only, of Jews, but of humanity and truth itself.
R. Amy Elman is Professor of Political Science and the William Weber Chair of Social Science at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She has worked on behalf of women's rights and against antisemitism domestically and within Europe for decades. Her last book was The European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
Passionate Anti-Zionists
Faced with the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, campus administrators seemed as placid about Hamas as anti-Zionists were passionate about its attack on Israel. The equivocations, elation, and denials that followed proved deeply concerning. There was the pro-Hamas student at the University of Pennsylvania who felt “so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near” that she implored her peers to “bring it to the streets” (Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “UPenn Student Who Praised ‘Glorious’ Hamas Terror Attack,” New York Post, November 12, 2023). A Cornell University professor of history similarly declared that he was “exhilarated” by October 7 (Jess O’Neill, “Cornell University Professor Calls Hamas Terror Attack ‘Exhilarating’ and ‘Energizing’,” New York Post, October 16, 2023). A George Washington University (GWU) professor of psychology, who later departed for Qatar’s Doha Institute, went on the offensive to condemn those who “slander the names of our martyrs as terrorists” (Alek Schemmel, “'How Dare You Slander the Names of Our Martyrs',” The Washington Free Beacon, October 16, 2023). A student from my own campus was contemptuous of the “white bitches” who had the audacity to express their horror at Hamas’s slaughter. Those speaking out against the sexual violence of so-called freedom fighters are derided as “colonial feminists” and racists.
Hamas and its supporters raped women and girls, cut off their breasts and tossed them about, shot bullets into the vaginas and heads of their victims, beheaded others, and mutilated men’s genitals. Captured terrorists acknowledged that the sexual violence was not incidental. Enacted as a weapon of war, it systematically occurred in each zone of the massacre (“Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” Tel Aviv: The Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, 2024, www.1202.org.il/images/arcci_report_-_seuxal_crimes_in_october_7_updated_29.2.pdf). A dead terrorist’s notebook that was found contained a translation key. In Hebrew, it read: “take off your pants” (Caroline McCaughey, “Where Are the International Women’s Organizations,” The New York Sun, November 16, 2023). These words help account for the piles of bloodied corpses naked below the waist.
That this sadism is characterized as “resistance” testifies to the depth of antisemitism and the normalization of sexual abuse that often accompanies it. Terrorists called home from the killing fields. One boasted, “Your son killed so many Jews. Mom, your son is a hero.” His jubilant mother exclaimed, “I wish I was with you” (Carrie Keller-Lynn, “IDF Shows Foreign Press,” Times of Israel, October 23, 2023). Gazan women and children as young as 10 followed the so-called “heroes” into Israeli homes where they looted and aided the terrorists for hours (Andrew Tobin, “Netflix and Kill,” The Washington Free Beacon, December 15, 2023).
Pornography
Terrorists filmed themselves with body cameras and cell phones and posted clips of their actions on social media belonging to their own families and to the friends and families of their victims (Sheera Frenkel and Talya Minsberg, “Hamas Hijacked Victims’ Social Media,” The New York Times, October 17, 2023). Sometimes they forced the love ones of their victims to witness the rapes in public view (“Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” 23). Their behavior is reminiscent of Serbia’s fascists who used rape (and the pornography they made of it) “as a public spectacle to induce women to leave their homes and never return” (Natalie Nenadic, “Femicide: A Framework for Understanding Genocide,” in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein [North Melbourne: Spinifex Press], 456–464: 459). Nearly 200,000 Israelis have since been evacuated from their homes, and many are unlikely to return. That one set of perpetrators raped “for Serbia” and another to “Free Palestine” does not mean that rape was then (or is now) the perpetrator’s only tool or that women and girls were their only victims.
Hamas forced Israeli hostages, including a young boy, to repeatedly watch the pornography they produced on October 7. Held alone for 6 weeks, Hamas told him that his kibbutz and Israel no longer existed (American Jewish Committee, “Day 81 Hostages Update," 2023). For those still in captivity, the sexual torture continues (Agam Goldstein-Almog, “The Girls I Met in the Tunnels,” The Free Press, January 16, 2024). In the 1990s, feminists warned that the rape death camps central to Serbia’s “ethnic cleansing” offered a pornographic script that others would enact. One wrote: “We can be sure that all present and future fascists and misogynists of the world are watching and taking note about how to do it and get away with it” (Nenadic, 460).
The fact that pornography is seldom regarded as evidence of harm testifies to the success that men, and the women who ally with them, have had in concealing sexual abuse by photographing it. Stated simply, through pornography, sexual abuse is often decontextualized as assaultive and reconstituted as “art,” “speech,” “sex work” and, now the “resistance” of “freedom fighters.” Predictably, Hamas’s supporters include pornographers like Mia Khalifa who, on October 7, tweeted: “Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal” (Ross Anderson, “Porn for Palestine,” Tablet Magazine, February 21, 2024).
While survivors of October 7 testified to the pleasure that Palestinians took in the crimes they committed (Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, “Screams Without Words,” The New York Times, December 28, 2023), no less important is the thrill they and their accomplices derive in denying that the atrocities took place. Their feigned incredulity is pernicious. Like Holocaust deniers, they dispute the forensic evidence and direct testimonies of Jews as malicious lies. Because the Holocaust and October 7 are emblematic of evil, deniers are able to revitalize antisemitism by convincing others that the crimes for which Jew hating can be blamed never happened (Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory [New York: Free Press, 1993]; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992]). Thus, tearing down hostage posters under the pretext that they are Islamophobic propaganda becomes a moral imperative.
“Feminist” Deniers
The protean character of antisemitism and its denial is also evidenced through the ostensibly feminist cast of campus characters who subscribe to it. Such feminist impersonators include an adjunct professor of Gender and Women Studies at UC Berkeley who attended a November Oakland City Council meeting to promote a one-sided ceasefire resolution that condemned Israel’s response to Hamas. There she stated, “the notion that this [October 7] was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative” (Dion J. Pierre, “UC Berkeley Lecturer Calls Oct. 7 Massacre” The Algemeiner, November 30, 2023).
A professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota made headlines weeks later when, as an applicant for a senior administrative Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) position at the university, they denied the sexual violence of October 7. Speaking as a “rape crisis counselor” who “believes survivors,” the professor compared Israeli rape survivors to white women whose racist fabrications of rape against black men in the segregated South led to lynching (Haley Cohen, “University of Minnesota Professor Who Denied,” Jewish Insider, December, 2023). This position parroted the rape denialism broadcast by Electronic Intifada (EI) weeks prior. Stressing the absence of “first-hand testimony,” EI downplayed why victims were no longer alive to provide it. One commentator likened the terrorists to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy falsely accused of offending a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955 (Ali Abunimah, “Debunking Israel's ‘mass rapes’ atrocity propaganda,” December 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMqRK5LpGy4). Thus, she and others have since cast Jews as white nationalists and terrorists as victims of false allegations in ways that not even the far-right and proponents of “false memory syndrome” (Michael Salter and Ruth Blizard, “False Memories and the Science of Credibility,” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation23.2 (2022): 141-147) could have imagined.
Casting themselves as truth seekers, deniers exploit the reluctance of traumatized survivors to come forward and discredit those reporting on the abuse. Consider The Grey Zone’s relentless campaign to disgrace “august liberal [news] organizations” (e.g., The New York Times and The Guardian) for their coverage of sexual violence. Insisting these and other reporters issued “fabrications” curated by Israel to “present a story in order to justify genocide” in Gaza, its editor omits Hamas’s calls for Israel’s eradication. With rhetoric redolent of Holocaust deniers, he insists instead that no systematic sexual atrocities occurred on October 7 and that reporters engaged in “the biggest media scandal of our time” (Max Blumenthal, “NYT Pulls Hamas Rape Story,” The Hill YouTube Channel, 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=paDjsRkhc28).
Silencing survivors and their communities under the guise of fact-finding and feminist anti-racism is an especially effective means of gaslighting that ensures further anguish, rape’s banalization, and a likely legitimation of corroboration requirements for rape that feminists ended decades ago. The assumption that atrocity deniers are ill-informed and educable can be naïve. It is consistent with the redemptive narrative that views higher education as a panacea for ethical values and its graduates as purveyors of truth, a position countered by German universities in the Third Reich. As Niall Ferguson reminds us: “A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it”(Niall Ferguson, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” National Post, December 15, 2023).
The above-mentioned professors are far from marginal. The former GWU professor served as president of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology section. The University of Minnesota professor held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston, completed a PhD at Stanford, and taught at Wellesley College before arriving at Minnesota.
These deniers have amassed authority over years and their influence extends beyond the classroom to include governmental and non-governmental organizations, the media, the legal profession, and social movements. Consider the 2017 Women’s March at which organizers demanded the expulsion of Zionists from the movement. Soon after, Jews unwilling to renounce Israel were banished from student organizations.
Conclusion
Countering the messaging of Hamas’s supporters who claim to be both feminist and anti-racist requires exposing their sinister politics as antisemitic and dangerously disingenuous (Phyllis Chesler, “A Feminist Open Letter Justifies Hamas Rape,” Jewish News Syndicate, March 3, 2024). In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, distressed by the failure of US campuses to recognize the dangers of Holocaust denial, warned: “properly camouflaged, Holocaust denial has a good chance of finding a foothold among coming generations” (Lipstadt, 208). As prescient as she was, it is unlikely that she anticipated the role that feminist impersonators would play in fostering that foothold.
With terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters and their academic apologists cloaked as feminists and anti-racists, we are witnessing the obliteration, not only, of Jews, but of humanity and truth itself.
R. Amy Elman is Professor of Political Science and the William Weber Chair of Social Science at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She has worked on behalf of women's rights and against antisemitism domestically and within Europe for decades. Her last book was The European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).