“Where’s the Women’s March? Feminist Majority? The National Women’s Studies Association?”
Those are the questions recently posed by Katha Pollitt, a feminist columnist for the far-left magazine the Nation. Pollitt was wondering why the Left was not loudly condemning the rape and murder of Israeli women during the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7.
Pollitt is a smart writer and knows well the answer: The Left is tyrannical and antisemitic. It only cares about power. Its religion is to embrace whatever “revolutionary” movement breeds resentment and hatred of the West, including terrorists. It will run anyone over to attain its goals. This includes women.
Still, Pollitt is incredulous at the silence of her comrades.“On October 7,” she wrote, “Hamas fighters raped Israeli women and girls. Whatever may have been unknown in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the rapes are by now as substantiated as anything ever can be in an ongoing war.” Yet her fellow liberals are silent. “This silence sits oddly with how quick our movement has been to credit much iffier claims and to raise consciousness around sexual misconduct that falls far short of rape. What happened to the clarion call to believe women? What happened to #MeToo?”
What happened is #MeToo got sacrificed to politics. Author Kat Rosenfield, like Pollitt, no conservative, was blunt in a post addressing this on X: “I’m struggling to understand how, in five short years, we went from ‘this reference to boofing in Brett Kavanaugh's HS yearbook proves he is an unrepentant rapist’ to ‘idk guys the half-naked corpse with grievous pelvic injuries could have been like that when Hamas got there.’”
I know how. As I explore in my book The Devil’s Triangle, I became the target of a political hit when women accused me and Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine, of sexual misconduct after he was nominated to the Supreme Court. This included the claim that, while teenagers, we had drugged and gang-raped multiple girls at parties. The outrage from feminists was fierce and deranged. The media “reporting” was insane.
Unlike with Hamas, the press believed every crazy story that people told about us. One woman alleged she had been gang-raped at a party we were at — this in an interview NBC aired without vetting — and even claimed that she had filed a police report about it.
Jackie Calmes, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, tried to find this report, which doesn’t exist because there were no rapes. Calmes is a leftist who wanted to destroy us, but when she paid to have the police report found, she was forced to retract the money because the woman, for the fourth or fifth time, changed her story. Buried near the end of her error-filled book about the Supreme Court, Calmes admitted this.
Now, five years later, Calmes has no similar enthusiasm for digging up the facts about Oct. 7 and the murder and rape of Jewish women by Hamas. Instead, she is blaming the terrorist attack on Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that because Netanyahu is involved in domestic politics, he left his country open for attack. Calmes makes her jaw-dropping case: “Whether Israel’s infighting contributed to the terrorists’ ability to spring a catastrophic attack is a question for another day, when the war somehow ends. What’s certain is that the nation’s polarization didn’t help its preparedness. As one Israeli columnist has already suggested, Netanyahu was too busy with his ‘war on democracy’ at home to see the actual war approaching from Gaza.”
This is vile. It’s the equivalent of saying that a woman was asking to be raped because she was out late in a competition with the debate club.
There is a continuum of thought that links Hamas and the Left. Both groups believe that individual persons don’t matter. People get in the way of seizing power. Especially worthless, and dangerous, are free-thinking women who question either fanatical religious or leftist political orthodoxy.
In his book about the origins of Islamic terrorism, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright explores the life of Sayyid Qutb. Qutb came to America from Egypt in 1948 to study at a teacher’s college in Greeley, Colorado. He was appalled by what he saw. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.” The boys had “wide, strapping chest[s]” and “ox muscles.”
A religious fanatic who hated women, Qutb believed that the only possible explanation for the dominance of America after World War II was that Muslims were not devout enough. According to Wright, his cowardly terror of the opposite sex was a major influence on Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers.
The Left is equally willing to obliterate free women who think for themselves. As Kavanaugh said at his hearing, the women who stood behind him and vouched for his character did so “knowing they would be vilified.” (To this day, many I know are afraid to speak out despite knowing what a sham the whole thing was.)
Or consider how the feminists and media reacted to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) being caught on tape in a club, as one recent headline put it, “dancing and waving her arms in the air.” There are two groups in this world who freak out at the thought of a woman with her own mind, and gun, dancing freely in a bar: jihadis and liberals.
A week before the October attack on Israel, journalist Helen Whittle reported that there were several German women calling for justice after being raped and abused under the East German communists during the Cold War. Whittle wrote, “The women and girls — never men or boys — who were targeted were considered different from mainstream society because they wanted to live their lives freely. That meant … they may have done something like skipping school or hitchhiking to get to the disco on Saturday night. Many were accused of being sex workers.” The women were taken to secure sexual health clinics where they were abused, including accounts of rape and torture. “It was the systematic abuse of power by a political system," said Florian Steger, chairman of the Institute of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine at Ulm University.
As with their Israeli sisters or their American conservative counterparts, to the Left, their lives didn’t matter.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
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