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Hamas 'mass rape' claim lacks evidence. But it's being used to justify genocide
Cook, Jonathan
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2023-12-18/hamas-rape-evidence-genocide/Date Written: 2023-12-18 Year Published: 2023 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX25039 Claims of systematic rape on October 7 appeal to a racist trope of the savage, predatory Arab. Which is why western politicians and media are so unconcerned by the dearth of evidence. Abstract: - Excerpt: This article is intended as a follow-up to my last article, on the western media’s refusal to investigate what happened on October 7. As I argued there, journalists are suppressing evidence from credible sources, including the Israeli military, suggesting that Israel was responsible for many of the deaths of its citizens that day, including those whose charred remains are regularly cited as proof of barbarism by Hamas – and by implication, all Palestinians. My previous article makes the point that these allegations against Hamas are being used to justify a genocidal bombing campaign that it is known to have killed so far more than 19,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, as well as an ethnic cleansing campaign that has driven some 2 million Palestinians from their homes and left them exposed to disease and starvation in a tiny area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt. The goal is obvious: to push Palestinians out of Gaza and into Sinai. But here I want to address another, more specific part of what amounts to an Israeli and media psy-op against western publics: the claim that Hamas leaders ordered their fighters to carry out mass rape against Israelis, and that those fighters indeed used sexual assault systematically, as a weapon of war. The veracity of this claim is now treated as axiomatic by western media and politicians, even though there appears to be no meaningful evidence for it. Subject Headings |