Avi Benlolo: How Palestinians weaponized rape on October 7

People look at a photo exhibit prior to a memorial for the Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas titled, October 7: Marking One Year, in Toronto on Monday October 7, 2024. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

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Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the infamous phrase, the “banality of evil,” to describe her observation of Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She observed how ordinary Eichmann appeared, how disturbingly normal. A bureaucratic instrument in the killing of six million Jews, Eichmann was indeed evil, but he performed his part banally — like part of a machinery operating routinely. Killing was a strategy. There was no emotion.

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Similarly, what we learned this week with the timely release of Israel’s Civil Commission report on October 7 sexual violence, aptly titled “Silenced No More,” was eerily similar. The sexual crimes that were committed on that tragic day were implemented by fanatics and psychopaths but were pre-planned by Palestinian commanders much like the Nazi Eichmann. I refer to them as “Palestinian” and not as “Hamas” so as to strip away the mask we often use to pretend they are someone else — as we did by referring to “Germans” as “Nazis”.

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Shortly after that horrific day, I walked the grounds of the Nova music festival where over 360 young people were murdered and raped. The ground was soaked in blood. The grass was charred. Personal effects littered the landscape. Witnesses described scenes of horror. People mutilated. Dead. Bleeding out. The road nearby was still scorched. The trees that many of the rape victims had been tied to leaned toward the ground, as if they themselves had been violated.

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Silenced No More follows other critical reports on sexual violence including The Dinah Project. This latest report however is significantly more extensive. Its authors say it is the “first to systematically assemble, verify and analyze the evidence on sexual and gender-based violence during the attacks and in captivity.”

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As the report says, “what emerges is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and deliberate digital circulation of abuse.”

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In other words, the sexual crimes themselves were heinous beyond comprehension. But they were planned and then executed by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s henchmen, not dissimilarly to the banality of evil Arendt described. Nazi commanders in Berlin drew up plans and motivated the SS to commit mass murder. Palestinian commanders went one step further beyond cold murder: barbaric rape, torture, and humiliation to terrorize an entire nation.

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Israel’s detractors have tried to silence the rapes and heinous crimes that occurred on October 7. Feminist groups still refuse to condemn them. It took the United Nations months to acknowledge they even happened. Now this week, The New York Times published a controversial opinion piece that unleashed a firestorm by alleging rapes of Palestinian prisoners. This was done at the very same time the Silenced No More report was released. Coincidental? To the casual observer, it appears this was an attempt to distract and muddy the waters with controversy.