Marking this year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the NGO CyberWell released a report on the widespread online denial of Hamas’s October 7 sexual violence.
CyberWell charged that, despite the overwhelming evidence that Hamas terrorists willingly uploaded online, the denial narrative spread by extremists online is spreading at a rapid rate. “The denial of rape is an attempt to rewrite history – to obfuscate the deliberate crimes committed against women and redirect sympathy away from the victims and toward justification and celebration of their attackers,” CyberWell explained.
“Hamas deliberately used sexual violence and rape as a weapon to torture, terrorize, and humiliate women and girls,” the NGO asserted.
October 7 denial on social media
CyberWell claimed to have identified five different narratives used to deny sexual violence was committed on October 7 – when Hamas invaded Israeli borders and murdered some 1200 people and kidnapped over 250 more.
The first narrative claimed that no survivor has personally come forward, a narrative which is untrue. Released Gaza hostage Amit Soussana gave her personal testimony of the sexual violence and physical abuse she endured in Hamas captivity in an eight-hour interview with The New York Times that was published in March. Soussana disclosed that she had been forced to commit sexual acts on her captors.
Additionally, while they are not alive to share their testimonies, the bodies of October 7 victims have shown signs of sexual violence. As reported in February, some families were forced at gunpoint to watch their loved ones experience sexual assault.
Accusations that witnesses are lying
The second narrative to deny sexual violence was committed by Hamas is the claim that witnesses are lying.
“Survivors of the terrorist attack and first responders testifying to acts of sexual violence that they witnessed or identified are lying, and news outlets that report on this issue are spreading fake news,” the report detailed in an explanation of the narrative.
While the motive to lying is not mentioned in this counter-narrative, it also fails to address Hamas terrorists admitting to committing rape and filming acts of sexual violence.
The IDF in March put out a video of a Unit 504 interrogation of an Islamic Jihad terrorist named Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Qasem in which he explicitly confesses to and describes his rape of an Israeli woman on October 7.
Accusations that Israel is manufacturing a reason to invade Gaza
The third narrative, which again does not explain the above evidence, claimed that Israel is falsely accusing Hamas of rape for its own gain – to justify invading Gaza and to demonize the “Palestinian resistance.”
The fourth narrative charges that, as Hamas members are driven by Islamic ideology, they would not rape a woman.
There are countless examples of religious figures from every religion committing sexual crimes. There is also substantial evidence that ISIS, a fellow terror group based in fundamentalist Islam, committed acts of sexual violence against Yazidi women and girls.
Accusations that Israel committed sexual violence
The final narrative identified by CyberWell is that Hamas didn’t rape civilians, Israelis sexually their own people.
CyberWell added the note that “In an interview frequently cited by rape deniers, an Israeli officer says that ‘civilians did it (rape).’ In the original Hebrew video, the officer refers to Gazan civilians who crossed into Israel after Hamas, but rape deniers mistranslate his words and claim he refers to Israeli civilians as the rapists.”
Platforming October 7 rape denial
Nearly half (49.6%) of the denial occurred on Elon Musk’s X platform. A further 27.4% was published on Meta’s Facebook. TikTok hosted 13.3% of the denials and YouTube was the source of 3.7%. It is unclear if CyberWell looked at Reddit or other social media sites.
Broken down by language, 34% of the denial posts were in Arabic and 66% were in English.
How denying October 7 reinforces rape culture and the oppression of women, according to CyberWell
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, the founder and executive director of CyberWell, described how denying the atrocities of Hamas’s violent terrorist attacks reinforced rape culture and the oppression of women globally.
“As the world marks Sexual Assault Awareness Month, it’s unthinkable that mainstream social media platforms continue to allow the mass promulgation of rape denial for the victims of Oct. 7 sexual assault and the ongoing sexual violence that no doubt continues being committed against the female and male hostages that Hamas has now held for almost 6 months,” Montemayor said. “By refusing to moderate and remove posts denying sexual assault, these platforms are illustrating that their objective policies surrounding rape denial will only be subjectively enforced. This phenomenon carries its own weight — the reinforcement of rape culture and the oppression of women everywhere.
“Oct. 7 rape denial content removal rates by the platforms have barely scratched the surface only reaching 11.6%. Instagram produced the lowest removal rate of this rape denial content with a zero percent action rate, despite the content being reported to the platform via user accounts.
“Sexual violence is always abhorrent, never acceptable, and has been weaponized against women and girls as a tool of war for centuries. Systematic rape is a crime against humanity that perpetuates lifelong trauma and widespread rejection and disempowerment of rape survivors long after the end of armed conflict. As we grapple with the efficacy and legitimacy of the humanitarian and international legal institutions that the collective international community set up after World War II, we should be careful not to discard this crucial understanding. Moreover, we should apply this principle to the same platforms that self-govern through digital policies created in the image of humanitarian law.
“Society must demand better of our social media apps and platforms when it comes to moderating rape denial and posts that promote sexual violence.”
Jacob Laznik and Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.
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