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No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe

I was relieved to see this article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian: “Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves”. At least some on the Left have not lost their humanity.

Midway through the article, Ms Hinsliff wrote the following:

Look away now if you would rather not read about women and young girls found dead with their pants pulled down, and telltale evidence of bleeding, bruises and scratches; about smashed pelvises, semen samples, and graphic details I wouldn’t normally go into on these pages except that otherwise it seems people don’t believe it. Though some won’t, even then.

Rape is a war crime as old as war itself, and yet still often invisible thanks to the stigma surrounding survivors, the practical challenges of gathering evidence under fire, and bleakly, sometimes also the lack of survivors.

That point – that murdered women cannot speak – seems to have escaped “feminist” Briahna Joy Gray, who was National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. In a tweet quoted by tech writer Antonio García Martínez, she starts by saying, ‘“Believe all women” was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required. The same is true of the allegations out of Israel”‘, which would have been common sense if she had stopped there, but then she brightly adds, “But also, this isn’t a “believe women” scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.”

Briahna’s Joy Gray’s next tweet is also… memorable. She says,

“Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.”

That “uncorroborated” was revealing. One eyewitness account of the rape of a woman is not enough for Briahna Joy Gray, if that witness is a man and a “Zionist”. How many such witnesses would be enough to substantiate an accusation of rape in her eyes? Four?

And what did Gray mean by “*men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.”? Judging from the two newspaper front pages she includes in her tweet, she is referring to (and casually libelling) Yoni Saadon who witnessed from hiding a woman being gang-raped and murdered on October 7th, and said how he was haunted by her face which he described as “the face of an angel”.

One of the better points feminists made repeatedly over the years was that victims of rape, and victims of other violent crimes, do not always react in ways that make them the type of witness who sways juries. Sometimes they cope with the horror of what they experienced by distancing themselves from it, which makes their account come across as lacking appropriate emotion. Sometimes the opposite happens and when the time comes to give their testimony their memories come spurting out as series of flash images, vivid but unstructured. Perhaps their vocabulary choice is not as good as Briahna Joy Gray’s would be in like circumstances, which, because I don’t wish to sink to her level, I pray she never experiences. Astonishing as it may seem to her, all these factors can apply to males as well. Astonishing as it may seem to her, for a man to watch, powerless to stop it, the rape and murder of a woman is a traumatic experience. Gray has has spent years denouncing the type of juror who dismisses a woman’s testimony because of superficial factors such as these, and then turns round and says that she can deduce in mere seconds that a man is lying – and that he is a “fetishist” – because the image that stuck in his head was the horrifying contrast between the woman’s beauty and the horrible thing being done to her.

7 comments to No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe

  • Kirk

    There is almost always something really, really wrong with people that treat rape and rape victims as though they weren’t really human beings who were put through something horrible. Rape isn’t the only thing they can’t manifest empathy for, either…

    The lack of empathy is the tell; actual normal human beings will react to such a thing having happened to someone else with at least an attempt at understanding and sympathy. They may not get it right, they may not know the right thing to say in such circumstances, but they’ll usually react in such a way that you can at least look at them and see another human being dealing with something out of the abyss.

    I mean, I’ve been around people I found truly loathsome souls, just nasty people. They had bad things happen to them, and I was at least able to find the grace to extend some empathy and try to help them through it. Didn’t change anything, but I could still see them as other human beings in pain, suffering from it. I couldn’t take any joy from that, at all. If I could have stopped what happened, I would have, and not for their sakes or mine, just out of common decency.

    These people, on the other hand? Purely demonic. They don’t see the victims of October 7 as other human beings, they see them as projections, caricatures, objects… Anything but other human beings like themselves. They do, however, empathize deeply with the demons that did the rapes, because they see themselves in that mirror.

    I’m not a nice person. Meeting someone like this, in person? And, if I knew I’d never suffer the consequences? I really wouldn’t trust myself around them. I don’t know that I’d be able to restrain myself, hearing those words in person. Too tempting to deliver an object lesson, you see…

    Some people are monsters, and some monsters only live because they’ve managed to eke out an existence such that nobody has reached the conclusion that the world would be a better place if they were dead, or found a justification to make it happen.

  • John

    I’m not sure if it has been mentioned on here but there was a loathsome “reaction video” by Owen Jones effectively questioning whether or not the events of October 7 were actual rape or simply “rape-rape” as the equally loathsome Whoopi Goldberg has referred to cases over the years involving the likes of Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby and the once notorious now completely forgotten Steubenville high school footballers with the subsequent establishment cover up, none of which accorded with her warped world view.

    However, in this particular instance David Baddiel nailed it, Jews don’t count.

  • Blackwing1

    It’s really quite simple:

    They. Are. Evil.

  • Ed Snider

    She’s the perfect spokesman for the execrable Sanders, an antisemite who hates Jews even more than her bossdoes.BTW, Sanders who, of course, is Jewish is not a self-hater. He adores himself. It is all other Jews race he wishes the worst for.

  • Jim

    “They. Are. Evil.”

    I’ve always said that the Left are evil, but that conclusion was always a rather dry and intellectual one, based on a philosophical and historical analysis rather than in your face evidence. It is good to now know (I wish it had not taken the events of Oct 7th to prove it) that my conclusions were correct, we have had it confirmed in spades over the last 8 weeks. Its now incontrovertible – they are condemned by their own words and actions.

  • Paul Marks

    Third Wave Feminism is from Marxism – no one else has stated that, so (yet again) I have to point out that “Woke” doctrine is from Marxism. They could not care less about rape as such – they care about rape only-in-so-far as it can be used to destroy “capitalist” society, and they (rightly or wrongly) see the forces of Islam as allies in the destruction of the West.

    It really is that simple, that brutally simple.

    So lots of women and girls raped and murdered – means nothing to the left if it does not help destroy the West. Those who expect the Third Wave Feminists to denounce the sexual violence fail to understand that the doctrine is from Marxism – and could not care less about women, other than as tools to use against “capitalist” society.

    Not “just” in Israel, but also in Britain (the “Grooming Gangs” are really rape gangs), Germany and other Western lands – the rapes, and the murders, are not useful for the cause of the left – so they are ignored.

    To denounce these attacks is to be “Islamophobic” although the word “racist” will also be used.

  • JoshB

    This horrible, evil, b*tch is a news anchor/commentator for The Hill’s youtube site. I guess in 2023 America it is ok to have an apologist for war criminals and rapists, whose comment is avowedly anti-Jewish. I swear I went to sleep and have woken up in clown world.