| New in Telos Insights
by Daniel Burston
On March 20, 2024, California State University, Long Beach sponsored an event entitled “Weaponizing Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones,” featuring Nada Elia, a visiting associate professor of Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University, and Tina Beyene, an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge. The first speaker, Elia, alleged that Israel invented claims of Hamas’s sexual assault on Israeli women on October 7, 2023, to justify genocide, despite the fact that many of Hamas’s crimes were filmed by the perpetrators themselves and the videos were later sent to many of the parents and families of victims in the aftermath of the pogrom. Indeed, for several weeks after October 7, Hamas and its supporters gleefully celebrated their mind-boggling brutality as the first installment in a renewed effort to “liberate Palestine.” Then, in a baffling reversal, many of these same people denied that these events occurred in the first place, though the evidence was abundant and incontrovertible.
Elia’s talk was sponsored by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach. A more recent event with a similar message, entitled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine,” featuring three speakers and moderated by Paola Bacchetta from the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at University of California, Berkeley, took place on February 11, although this event convened off campus and over Zoom. Finally, Elia was reportedly scheduled to speak again, this time at the University of Ottawa on February 25, however the event listing for her talk, entitled “Weaponizing Feminism in the Service of Genocide” and sponsored by the university’s Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, has since been removed.
If these were isolated incidents, they would be depressing enough. But deplorable events and statements like these are now commonplace in activist circles, making it distressingly obvious that much of mainstream feminism has been severely compromised (if not completely captured) by ostensibly “progressive” voices that embrace and espouse a toxic blend of postmodern and pro-Islamist (anti-Western) ideologies. The activists’ claim that feminism is incompatible with Zionism nullifies the courageous efforts and accomplishments of thousands of Jewish women who worked to defend and promote the welfare, dignity, and rights of women at home and around the world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This tragic and shameful chapter in the history of the women’s movement merits careful documentation and analysis elsewhere. Meanwhile, note that this pseudo-scholarly propaganda shares the same well-worn playbook with Holocaust denialism and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this scenario, victims of mass murder (or their lineal descendants) are charged with fabricating or grossly exaggerating the extent of the crimes committed against them, with a view to extorting some unfair advantage and justifying (or covering up) their own dishonest agenda. In the process, the perpetrators of these crimes are recast as the victims of a Jewish or Zionist conspiracy to mislead and manipulate a credulous (non-Jewish) public in the service of a nebulous but sinister worldwide conspiracy.
Continue reading at Telos Insights → |
academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
Regan
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X Humectress
