Feminists for Genocide
It turns out that #MeToo is a very exclusive club
Some questions are hard to answer, for instance: Was President Truman right to authorize the use of atomic bombs against Japan? I believe so—but I also believe it’s not a question that can be disposed of with a flat yes or no.
Representative Pramila Jayapa, Democrat of Washington and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had the good fortune to get a simple question when she sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash: Could she unequivocally condemn Hamas’s employment of rape and sexual violence against Israeli women?
But Jayapa’s answer was a botch: Yes, but…
After some pro forma tut-tutting about Hamas, she swerved into a critique of Israel, intimating that the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza is committing war crimes. “We cannot say that one war crime deserves another,” Jayapa intoned. Ms. Bash, to her credit, pushed back against this dodge, reminding the Congresswoman that her question was about Hamas and sexual violence, not about Israel. Jayapa’s response: “We have to be balanced.” Bash seemed taken aback by this and she replied that “We don’t see Israeli soldiers raping woman.” But Jayapa just went on with her rant against Israel. Not once did she indicate that Hamas might bear some responsibility for what’s happening in Gaza. And though she insisted, that we shouldn’t be talking about a “hierarchy of oppression,” it was clear that she had one in mind, on which she believes that the Israeli women who were raped and murdered on October 7 occupy a low position.
October 7 and its aftermath have demonstrated with crystal clarity that American progressivism is shot through with antisemitism of the crudest and most virulent kind, and nowhere is this more obvious than among feminists. We see now that all the rhetoric about “believing women” and the horrors of the patriarchy, from Anita Hill to #MeToo, is nothing but hypocritical cant. How else to account for the fact that many of the feminists who, on the flimsiest evidence, denounced Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh as monsters of evil, can’t bring themselves to condemn the horrifying atrocities inflicted on Jewish women by an Islamofascist death cult?
But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinski got no help from feminists, who considered it far more important to defend Bill Clinton than it was to call him out as a sexual predator. Teddy Kennedy, the horndog “Lion of the Senate,” got a decades-long free ride from feminists—this despite the fact that he actually killed one of his victims! And more recently, feminists have been far more concerned with toeing the line on transgender ideology than with defending the rights of women and girls whose very identity is being mocked and dismissed, and whose safety is menaced, by trans activists.
More recently, the feminist response to Joe Biden’s Afghanistan skedaddle—which left the women of Afghanistan to be re-enslaved by the Taliban in the name of sharia law—was nonexistent. A good case can be made that the plight of women in numerous countries is the world’s number-one human rights problem. But the activist class that might have been expected to be leading the charge against the oppressors of women are not even to be found in the rear ranks. On the contrary, in a reversal of reality almost comical in its absurdity, progressive feminist groups are championing “Justice for Palestine” by demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and the stoppage of US military aid to Israel. That is to say, they’re supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization that stands against every single thing that feminism purports to stand for.
Take the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which describes itself and its mission as follows:
The Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) is a US-based body of Palestinian and Arab women and feminists committed to Palestinian social and political liberation by way of confronting systemic gendered and colonial violence, oppression and dispossession. Through a collective process of radical envisioning and co-creation, the PFC’s praxis is guided by two frameworks: anti-colonialism and life-affirming decolonization.
Our anti-colonial approach centers the political urgency of the Palestinian struggle and works to resist the normalization of Zionist violence, oppression and hegemony in all aspects of US public life, especially within feminist and women's spaces. Our decolonial approach centers a life-affirming set of principles and practices to redefine movement cultures through a feminist approach rooted in transformative justice and Indigenous Knowledge. We are inspired by past and present Palestinian, Arab, Black, Indigenous, and Third World Women’s Movements and life-sustaining practices to do this work.
Let’s just say that a “life-affirming set of principles” that skates past the atrocities of Hamas and overlooks the genocidal character of Palestinian nationalism is…problematical. A Palestinian state, if it ever comes into being, is not likely to reflect any of the progressive principles for which the PFC purports to stand.
Nor is the PFC an outlier. Nowadays there are innumerable organizations of a feminist character that purport to stand for the rights of women. National Review has been tracking their various responses to the Hamas atrocities, and the record so far is dismal. Here’s an example.
Sad to say, but as far as today’s feminists are concerned all women are equal, but some women are more equal than others. Any woman who happens to inhabit some space outside the circle of progressive virtue isn’t embraced as a sister—she’s reviled as a thought criminal.
Because the ideology of postmodern progressivism is an all or nothing proposition, feminists are totally on board with its anti-Zionism. Israel is held to be a fascist, apartheid state, and the Jews of Israel are dehumanized with the label “settler colonialist”: Interlopers who need to be swept away, “from the river to the sea.” And that’s all that Hamas was trying to do, right? Its bloody pogrom was a heroic act of resistance; therefore, those female Jewish settler colonialists got what was coming. They deserved to be brutally murdered, raped, abused, taken hostage.
In the eyes of feminists, “Justice for Palestine” prevails over Jewish women’s basic human rights. That’s the deep meaning of Pramila Jayapa’s Yes, but… That’s why she couldn’t bring herself to give Dana Bash a straight answer to a simple question.
The progressive response to October 7 has shown that anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism. The feminist response to October 7 has shown something more: that anti-Zionism is also a form of misogyny. So here’s a new hashtag for use by the Sisterhood, one that gives expression to Pramila Jayapa’s “hierarchy of oppression”:
#MeTooButNotYouJew.
Total moral bankruptcy.
"Believe all women as long as it advances the leftist political agenda."