Women and Jews
Women and Jews have long shared a common experience: people telling them that what happened to them did not, in fact, happen. Denialism, in other words. People work extremely hard to see women and Jews as the privileged and never the oppressed, so they can justify their desires and prejudices to themselves.
Karenism in short. I don’t know of a karen-equivalent for Jews, although there used to be plenty of them. Karenism=working very hard to see women as privileged bitches.
It comes out in Holocaust denial, which is gaining in popularity around the world, and it came out during the Jeremy Corbyn era, when Jews who voiced their fears about antisemitism on the left were smeared by his supporters. And now we see it when Jews are accused of “weaponising the Holocaust” when they explain their terror of the genocidal maniacs, Hamas.
That stopped me for a second. Do people really say that? So I asked Google, and yes they do. Bloody hell. How does one go about “weaponizing” a genocide that genocided six million people??? It’s a weapon already, all by itself! What else would it be, a birthday card?
For a bright, brief moment people tended to care about [the prevalence of rape and failure to prosecute it] during the Me Too movement. But that changed like a fashion with the rise of the gender rights movement, which argues that a man who says he’s a woman magically becomes one. When women — including JK Rowling — explained that their experience of sexual assault made them anxious about the prospect of men having access to female-only spaces, they were accused of — yes — “weaponising their trauma.”
But men who claim to be women never weaponize what they claim is their trauma????
So when reports started to come out that Israeli women had been raped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 pogroms, I knew the reaction would be bad. But I didn’t know it would be this bad.
…It’s striking how many social justice warriors who loudly supported every passing minority over the past years have expressed scepticism about accounts of the rape of Israeli women, insisting this is just a “Zionist” and “fetishistic” story.
Karens are Zionists. Karens are privileged. Karens lie. Karens make it rain when you want to go on a picnic.
These denials have become more frantic since Israel released some of the GoPro footage from the Hamas terrorists. The Guardian’s most high profile journalist, Owen Jones, once promised to wage “an all-out war on antisemitism”, so I watched his Youtube review of the pogrom film to see how this war is going for him. Just like all the armchair sceptics on social media, he insists he’s just trying to establish the facts, all the while omitting facts that are inconvenient to his narrative. He begins by naming which other journalists were at the London screenings of the film: “LBC presenters, Rachel Johnson and Nick Ferrari” and “media organisations like the Sun” implying that this was some rabble-rousing, right-wing event. Strangely, he doesn’t mention that journalists from The Times, Reuters and Vice were invited too, as well as his friend Michael Walker from Novara. “If there was rape and sexual violence was committed, we don’t see that on camera,” Jones reports, apparently unaware the IDF have said that they only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed and their families. The body of a burned female corpse with no underwear on “is not what you would consider conclusive evidence of rape,” Jones insists…
When Jones was later asked why he is so sceptical about the multiple reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women – indeed, reports that they were specifically instructed to rape Jewish girls and women – he replied with a quote from a Washington Post article: “It’s unclear whether authorities have accounts directly from rape survivors.” That quote does indeed exist in that article, but it also makes clear that this is because Hamas almost certainly killed all the women they raped yet accidentally left many witnesses, including one who said a Hamas terrorist killed a woman while still raping her and a morgue worker who described female bodies so brutally assaulted they had shattered pelvises. But I guess he missed those details.
I guess he “missed” them because the shattered pelvises of Karens don’t matter.
I’m unclear what’s new to you. Weaponizing past trauma? Weaponizing the Holocaust? Accusing people of weaponizing these things?
I do think there are instances that might be reasonably described as weaponizing the Holocaust. The phrase is kind of glib, though, and it gets trotted out by anybody disagreeing with something demanded or stated by Jews or the Israeli government. It’s overused in the way “cancelled” or “oppressed” or “religious freedom” or “free speech” might be. But the basic concept is sound, that you don’t get to do everything you want just because you or your ancestors were treated extremely badly.
In the case of Rowling and others, it’s “You don’t get to mistreat those poor maligned transpeople just because you were raped and abused!”, which is, of course, missing the whole point. While “You, a rapist, do not get to go into a women’s prison just because a couple of people made you sad by ‘misgendering’ you!” is not missing the point.
It’s impossible to follow the twisted mind of Julian Vigo, whose podcast I listened to regularly at one time until her rants about how “Biden is even worse than Trump because he’s a neoliberal” infested every episode. I think she’s an example of the horseshoe theory of political ideology. Here she is on the same issue, that the Hamas rapes and murders are propaganda from the mainstream media to justify the Palestinian Genocide. I think she’s veered into incoherence, honestly.
Later she commented that she’s not saying it didn’t happen, but it was a result of the Palestinian Genocide
I found her “mass formation psychosis” episode quite sufficient…
Hamas has no problem generating media-friendly images of wrecked buildings, bandaged children (even if the pics turn out to be of Syrian kids) wailing crowds etc. etc. Meanwhile, even the most appalling footage of Hamas atrocities is censored for ‘dignity’ purposes. I don’t get how the Big Media outlets can’t perceive the way their filtering generates managed outrage.