Why the Left Won’t Condemn the October 7 Rapes

[Valin]

First Things

Kari Jenson Gold
3 . 26 . 24

In 2015, Columbia University was in an uproar over Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was, at the time, required reading for the freshman class. The classic Roman myths include tales of rape and sexual assault, material that students deemed “triggering and offensive,” marginalizing “student identities in the classroom.” Students felt “unsafe,” and demanded trigger warnings for the text. Nine years later, the campus is again awash in protest, but this time, students are denying, defending, or even celebrating the actual rape and sexual torture of Israeli women.

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What can possibly account for the willingness to justify the October 7 rapes and the continued torture of hostages? Why, now, is rape seen as a tool of lawful “resistance”? 

The first answer is that anti-Semitism always trumps everything else. Our front yard signs may boast that “Hate Has No Home Here,” but the one hate that always has a home is hatred of Jews. God’s chosen people have always been, and seemingly always will be, reviled by those not chosen. 

But there is an additional explanation for why the left has found it so hard to condemn these attacks. Whether or not they realize it, the feminist logic of the past seventy years has been laid bare and exposed. 

When women insist that they are no different from men, and that casual sex with no expectation of intimacy or procreation is an absolute good, then sex and womanhood are demystified and devalued. The feminism of hook-ups and abortion rights maintains that sex is meaningless, just another form of pleasurable exercise, no more significant than Zumba class. 

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