sexual violence
Video: Israeli Knesset member mocked and called liar by UN-linked parliament gathering
Hard right advocate of ‘levelling’ Gaza derided for repeating debunked atrocity propaganda to 148th Assembly of Inter-Parliamentary Union
Danny Danon, a hard-right Likud member of Israel’s Knesset, has been derided as a liar and jeered by attendees at the 148th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a UN-linked gathering of the world’s parliaments, which is taking place in Geneva.
Danon, who advocated for the ‘levelling’ of Gaza almost ten years before the Hamas raid on 7 October last year, blamed Hamas for Israel’s actions in Gaza, ignored the seventy-five years of illegal occupation and slaughter by Israel and regurgitated atrocity propaganda about child rapes and murders, which has been discredited for months – and was booed by delegates and angrily confronted by the Palestinian delegate, before being carpeted by Ireland’s representative for his ‘lots of lies’ on behalf of a ‘failed’ regime:
In 2013, Danon, an opponent of immigration from Africa to Israel – where discrimination against Black Jews is rife – advocated for punishment attacks against Palestinian civilians and infrastructure, including a suggestion that Israel “delete” one whole neighbourhood in Gaza in response for every rocket launched by the Palestinian resistance, an act of collective punishment that is a clear war crime under international law.
A year later, Danon advocated cutting off all electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza, prefiguring the blockade by Israel that has pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into famine. A month later, Danon said that Israel should respond to the kidnapping of an IDF soldier by “levelling Gaza”. Since the resistance raid, he has been a prominent advocate for the ‘voluntary’ removal of all Palestinians from Gaza to other countries, yet he clearly thinks he has the right to demand obedience and belief from the global community.
The IDF has admitted that the number of its own people that it killed during the Hamas raid was ‘immense’ – an admission ignored entirely by the UK media. Israel has murdered over 40,000 Palestinians since 7 October and wounded double that amount in its levelling of Gaza, mostly women and children. It is using starvation as a weapon of war and has killed dozens of Israeli hostages while taking thousands of Palestinian hostages and, according to the UN, carrying out summary executions of civilians and raping and abusing Palestinian women and girls.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Video: ‘unfounded, unverified’ – what UN really said about Israel’s ‘Hamas rape’ claims
Pro-Israel spin and complicit mainstream media claim UN report upheld Israel’s claims – it didn’t and even the UN’s political collusion collapses under scrutiny
Israel’s supporters, compliant ‘mainstream’ media and a host of professional and unpaid amplifier accounts have spent the past few days trumpeting the supposed ‘confirmation’ by the United Nations of Israel’s claims of rapes, mutilations and sexual violence by Hamas during the 7 October raid.
In reality, while they claimed ‘evidence’ was ‘clear and convincing’ of sexual violence ‘committed against captives’, this evidence appears to be purely the claims of captives, since there was no mention of – and no realistic possibility of collecting – forensic evidence from the period and locations of captivity.
Such claims are, of course, at odds with the testimony of female captives that they were treated well and even ‘like queens’. And Pramila Patten added her finding that even if such violence was occurring, it in fact delegitimises Israel’s use of violence, which is preventing the return of captives.
Patten then claimed there were ‘reasonable grounds’ to think that sexual violence took place at the Nova rave and on the road back toward Gaza – already demonstrably farcical when Israeli helicopter gunships are well known to have been firing constantly and repeatedly at anything that moved. And Patten even linked her claim of reasonableness to the mass killing and burning of bodies – killings and burnings which have been firmly linked to the mass chain-gun and missile ‘friendly fire’ of Israeli helicopters known to have fired indiscriminately at Israeli and Palestinian alike under the ‘Hannibal directive‘.
So extensive was this ‘friendly fire’ that hundreds of Palestinian bodies were originally misidentified by Israel as Israelis, proving that the fire came from Israeli sources. In fact, the Israeli military knew – and has admitted to Israeli media – that it killed an ‘immense’ number of its own people on the day of the raid. Patten either ignored, or was ignorant of, this admission.
With regard to the day of the raid, the UN panel said that of all Israel’s claims, three were positively disproven – and all the rest were unverified, with many based on the ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unreliable’ claims of a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. This was not hinted at by the UN panel, but stated flatly and unequivocally – with the two UN women concluding that they had been unable to verify any sexual violence:
And Pramila Patten went on to admit that:
- there was no forensic evidence of rape – or ‘very very little’, with no specification of any evidence that was found
- there was no evidence of ‘systematic’ sexual violence, despite a team of scientists taking part in the UN visit
- she had not tied any sexual violence anywhere to Hamas or any group
Despite this, Israel’s mouthpieces and propagandists have stridently insisted the opposite of the women’s findings, including the political padding and leaving out the inconvenient – but very clearly expressed – reality of what Patten and her colleague said they found, or more accurately did not find.
As with every other claim by Israel so far since its genocide in Gaza began, the claim to have been vindicated by the UN findings falls apart under scrutiny. In contrast, rape, torture and sexual violence toward Palestinian women by Israeli troops and security personnel is credible and widespread.
But even if Israel’s claims didn’t collapse under scrutiny, they would be no excuse for the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza – and Patten and her colleague were absolutely clear about that.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
NYT ‘journalist’ who co-wrote ‘Hamas rape’ piece is IDF propagandist with ‘no journalism experience’
Anat Schwartz found to have liked racist and violent posts about Palestinians
Image: Wikipedia
A huge scandal has broken out in the US after the New York Times (NYT), one of the United States’ leading newspapers, was found to have run a major front-page story smearing Palestinian resistance fighters as using ‘systematic’ use of sexual violence co-written by an Israeli film-maker with no journalism background who served as a in Israeli military intelligence – and had ‘liked’ social media posts featuring racism and violence toward Palestinians.
Anat Schwartz co-wrote the already-discredited article titled ‘Screams without words’, which made lurid, unevidenced claims about rape and mutilation by Palestinians during the 7 October raid – claims that have already been furiously denied by the family of the victim who took up around a third of the piece, who further claimed that the authors had misled them about the purpose of their article and never mentioned supposed the rape of their daughter, which they say did not take place and for which there is no evidence.
Scrutiny of Schwartz’s record revealed shocking facts about her background and that of her second co-author, who is her nephew by marriage:
Quick bio I found: pic.twitter.com/WWMZqRh1py
— Esha K (@eshaLegal) February 24, 2024
Now let's get to her co-author, who also didn't write beforehand Oct 2023… pic.twitter.com/x9gkZwIlv7
— Esha K (@eshaLegal) February 24, 2024
It is her nephew!
This is a post from her husband. pic.twitter.com/Sgtz4B6wlL— Esha K (@eshaLegal) February 24, 2024
Lead author Jeffrey Gettelman fares little better under scrutiny:
He admitted to it. pic.twitter.com/zibbbEby31
— Esha K (@eshaLegal) February 24, 2024
Schwartz, for her part, Schwartz reportedly ‘liked’ a post that talked about turning Gaza ‘into a slaughterhouse’ including the summary execution of prisoners and ‘violat[ing] any norm’:
Schwartz also ‘liked’ a post about the quickly-debunked ’40 beheaded babies’ claim – and the woman who took the photo of the ‘woman in the black dress’ that the article claimed falsely had been raped, said that the NYT’s authors had told her they needed to speak to her because it was ‘important for Israeli advocacy’, not for accurate journalism:
Lead author Gettelman said it was ‘not his job to gather evidence’ for the claims his article made:
Mondoweiss reported that Schwartz had served in Israeli military intelligence. The NYT has ‘launched an investigation’ and the paper’s staff are said to be split, with many outraged at the abandonment of journalistic standards.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
UN human rights office ‘appalled’ at rape and execution of women and girls in Gaza
‘Credible’ reports of war crimes against Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers detailed in UN OHCHR statement – yet ignored by western ‘msm’
The horrific treatment of women and girls by Israeli soldiers – including rape and execution – has been condemned by the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights in a damning statement today from the ‘Special Procedures’ group of human rights experts, saying that the actions of the IDF are likely to amount to prosecutable war crimes.
The statement says that the group:
expressed alarm over credible allegations of egregious human rights violations to which Palestinian women and girls continue to be subjected in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Palestinian women and girls have reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children, according to information received.
“We are shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the experts said.
The experts expressed serious concern about the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian women and girls, including human rights defenders, journalists and humanitarian workers, in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October. Many have reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in the rain and cold, without food.
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said. They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.
The experts expressed concern that an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza. “There are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown,” they said.
“We remind the Government of Israel of its obligation to uphold the right to life, safety, health, and dignity of Palestinian women and girls and to ensure that no one is subjected to violence, torture, ill-treatment or degrading treatment, including sexual violence,” the experts said.
They called for an independent, impartial, prompt, thorough and effective investigation into the allegations and for Israel to cooperate with such investigations.
“Taken together, these alleged acts may constitute grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and amount to serious crimes under international criminal law that could be prosecuted under the Rome Statute,” the experts said. “Those responsible for these apparent crimes must be held accountable and victims and their families are entitled to full redress and justice,
While Israel’s atrocity propaganda claiming ‘systematic’ use of rape as a weapon of war have been characterised by an absence of evidence and a demand to be believed regardless how lurid and unfeasible the claims have been, and have quickly collapsed under scrutiny – yet have been propagated by western media and governments anyway – the UN experts’ sober claims carry weight and a call for serious investigation, but has been entirely ignored so far by the UK and US ‘mainstream’ media:
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt – review
In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins examine how a turn to media culture and the development of an “economy of believability” shape the processes wherein women seek justice for sexual violence committed against them. Banet-Weiser and Higgins’s timely book presents a powerful feminist analysis of the interacting forces of belief, media and sexual violence in the post-truth era, writes Olumide Adisa.
Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins. Polity. 2023.
Find this book: 
Netflix’s 2020 fascinating true crime docuseries Trial by Media examines the most gripping trials in US history (including the “Big Dan’s case” about the rape of a woman in a bar) by considering how the media may have influenced the verdicts. With the visibility of hashtags like #MeToo, many accounts of sexual violence by women that never resulted in criminal trials have come to light and are playing out through the media. What happens when rape allegations come to light in this way, and what does this mean for sexual justice in a post-truth era of “fake news” and “alternative facts”? In their new book, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins position the thought-provoking concept “economy of believability” in arguing for a “turn to media culture” as a way to achieve sexual justice in a society where the default positions disbelieves women and their accounts of sexual violence. The authors define their “economy of believability” as a term that involves “representations, ideologies, labour, products, resources, and intersecting power hierarchies” (5) within a sexual violence and media culture context.
This book showcases sexual violence as a culturally mediated phenomena, which interconnects with post-truth, power, historical constructions of doubtful subjects, and the authors’ concept of economy of believability
In the text, the authors consider the manifestations of subjectivity and performance as dependent on media culture. This book showcases sexual violence as a culturally mediated phenomena which interconnects with post-truth, power, and historical constructions of doubtful subjects, and the authors’ concept of economy of believability.
Banet-Weiser and Higgins’ text offers a complex feminist analysis of the interacting forces of post-truth, belief, media, and sexual violence. This text is arguably a transdisciplinary masterpiece that is likely to engage the informed public, students, feminists and media scholars on sexual violence. It is written in an accessible style that does not assume insider knowledge. The text’s complexified notion of believability disentangles the ways these subject areas overlap and connect (3). The authors invoke their innovative concept, of the “economy of believability” throughout the text and take the reader through the text’s discursive engagement with feminist theory and praxis to underpin the constructions of believability. Multiplicity and the “dynamism of believability” are also conceptualised as complex terms, but in a metaphorical sense. The dynamism of believability (198) is made up of two components – the capability of being believed and the quality of being convincing. Sexual violence is considered as “multiply factual”, and testimonies as “multiply believable/doubtable.” Believability is further considered to be made up of three registers in accounts of sexual violence: personal experience, harms, and structural phenomena (24).
Women’s believability is dictated by subjectivity (rooted in women’s voices) and performance, which overlap and may then be considered as informing each other
This book has four key chapters as well as an introductory and concluding chapter. The first chapter focuses on the authors’ construction of their concept of believability, using various useful examples and case studies from the media sphere. Women’s believability is dictated by subjectivity (rooted in women’s voices) and performance, which overlap and may then be considered as informing each other. The well-publicised Heard/Depp trial is referenced briefly by the authors in the introductory chapter (and also in Chapter three) to illustrate these points. Noteworthy is the role of powerful media actors, concentrated among a small group of organisations who stand with the accused to keep the accusations out of the public eye. The text describes these silencing practices (used by powerful men) as “forms of believability work“ (55). The text goes on to characterise this ‘believability work’ as the significant money and time resources marshalled by powerful actors to protect powerful men (who have harmed women), solely for the purpose of diminishing women’s believability.
Chapter two focuses on the commodification of believability, something the authors term “the buying and selling of belief”. This characterisation of belief as something transactional is further positioned within the emerging feminist marketplace of “well-intentioned” products such as wearable tech and surveillance. In the text, the buying and selling of these wearable products aimed at women places the responsibility of preventing of sexual violence on women, and normalises sexual violence as part of their everyday lives (109).
Chapter three grapples with the contested notions of believability funnelled through the intersection of the cultural notion of women as doubtful subjects, and a digitisation process described in the text as ‘the digitisation of doubt’ (121). The chapter discusses how well-publicised calls for belief in a digital age is mediated through three aspects: access/amplification, democratisation, and platformisation of truth (149). The authors draw on these concepts by heavily relying on the literature, which have been studied in other disciplines.
The authors discuss how believability is conditional on “felt” believability, which follows historical patterns of anti-Black racism, the subordination of Black women as lesser in being believed
In the fourth chapter, the authors discuss how believability is conditional on “felt” believability, which follows historical patterns of anti-Black racism, the subordination of Black women as lesser in being believed (as seen from R. Kelly and Bill Cosby’s crimes), and negative tropes about Black women in media culture, stemming from the adultification of Black girls. This is in contrast to a history of greater validity attached to white women’s stories, and as seen in the false rape accusations of Black men weaponised by white women (as evidenced by the false claims made by Carolyn Bryant against Emmet Till, which led to his brutal murder), and in the “felt” believability as seen in the case of Amy Cooper who called the police and made a false charge against a Black man in Central Park.
Banet-Weiser and Higgins highlight the role of believability in these well-known, tragic examples which gained spectacular visibility in media culture. The authors use these examples sensitively to buttress their points on the struggle of victimhood in their economy of believability. In this retelling and analysis, they perhaps (consciously or unconsciously) reveal themselves as potentially white allies in the struggle of Black women, whom society routinely places as undeserving of being visible in any continuum of believability.
Banet-Weiser and Higgins’ economy of believability contains gendered, class and racial dimensions, but the text does not explain the subjectivities which determine these. Rather they choose to focus solely on “a set of historical conditions that form the context for struggles over believability’ and by extension struggles over truth”(13). While the entangled complexified nature of belief and intersectionality is acknowledged, it could be considered a limitation that the text fails to substantively discuss these important dimensions in tandem.
Believability plays out in media domains and in silencing practices which lend themselves to the commodified silencing of women’s voices through Nondisclosure Agreements (NDAs) and confidentiality agreements.
Another criticism that could be levied against the text is the ways in which Banet-Weiser and Higgins’ delineation of “credibility” (in a context of criminal trials) differs from their concept of believability. The authors themselves may already have anticipated this criticism, as they position their text clearly as one that calls for “a shift from credibility to believability” and one that “adds to these conversations on criminal trials” (7). The authors want readers to understand that many aspects relating to seeking justice for sexual violence are decided outside of the courtrooms, decentring the state as the ultimate decider of believability. For example, believability plays out in media domains and in silencing practices which lend themselves to the commodified silencing of women’s voices through Nondisclosure Agreements (NDAs) and confidentiality agreements. Yet, because the notion of doubt features in concepts of credibility, as well as the authors’ concept of believability, the demarcation of both concepts are not clearly defined. Banet-Weiser and Higgins go on to say that, “in a mediated economy of believability, doubt often works in a similar way” to credibility (25). As a result, this may suggest to readers that credibility and believability can be used synonymously – at least in relation to doubt and doubtful subjects.
The text […] makes immense contributions to an understanding of how women’s accounts of sexual harassment and violence are framed and positioned as unbelievable by the media.
Despite these shortcomings, the text as a whole makes immense contributions to an understanding of how women’s accounts of sexual harassment and violence are framed and positioned as unbelievable by the media. The authors convincingly suggest how their concept of an economy of believability offers a more radical and comprehensive account of why women (and their accounts of sexual violence) are cast in disbelief and doubt in media culture, contributing to a timely and ongoing conversation on sexual justice beyond simplified notions of truth and testimony.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Sundry Photography on Shutterstock.