Human Rights Groups' Hypocrisy on Hamas Rape

 Rafael Medoff - The Lid (lidblog.com)

"There was a time when self-described human rights advocates such as Samantha Power, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International earned the international community’s respect for their defense of the innocent and the oppressed. But they have forfeited that respect by failing to defend the human right of Jewish women to not be raped."

"Rape during the Rwanda genocide? Outrageous. Rape during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia? Abhorrent. Rape by Hamas terrorists? Not worthy of comment.

   " That’s the troubling position taken by Samantha Power, a senior official in the Obama and Biden administrations who has built her career on her concern for victims of genocide, sexual atrocities, and other human rights abuses." . . .

"Reuters, it happens, has also done some important reporting on Hamas rapes of Israeli Jewish women. As early as October 15—eight days after the pogrom—Reuters reported that Israeli forensic experts “found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities” among the victims of Hamas. 

    "Two days later, Reuters quoted Israeli first responders describing evidence of rape on some of the bodies they found. Subsequent Reuters dispatches cited a senior Israeli police official describing eyewitness and forensic evidence of “sexual assaults” (Nov.14) and “evidence about sexual violence” with the sentence, “Reuters has seen photos corroborating some of those accounts” (November 28 and November 30). But for some reason, Power did not regard those Reuters reports as “important” enough for her to recommend.

   "Power’s silence on Hamas’s rapes is glaring because she presents herself as a champion of human rights. But she is not alone in turning a blind eye to the sexual violence of October 7. Sadly, she is typical of the painfully slow, in some cases non-existent, response of the human rights community on this issue.

   " Human Rights Watch issued fifty-one press releases about Gaza in the first eight weeks following the Hamas invasion. They were loaded with accusations about Israeli “war crimes,” with just brief, passing references to the Hamas massacres. " . . .