Campus Feminists Have Rebranded Rape As ‘Resistance’

At Goldsmiths, University of London, the Feminist Library has really outdone itself. It has decided to mark the two year anniversary of the 7 October pogrom – the day, that is, when Hamas militants tortured, murdered and raped their way through southern Israel – with a film night celebrating the ‘Palestinian resistance’.

‘Join us for a night of remembrance’, reads the library’s Instagram page, as if approaching the anniversary of a favourite Disney classic. Another post followed, stating that the library stands ‘unequivocally’ with the Palestinian cause. Feminism is a ‘framework that demands people struggle for their freedom’, it told its followers, reminding them that real feminists don’t organise ‘because we may identify as women’, but to fight ‘white supremacy, Western empire and patriarchy’.

In other words, sticking up for women comes pretty low down on the list of priorities. So low, in fact, that when presented with a choice between solidarity with women who were beaten, raped and murdered, and the men that did this, these tote-bag feminists are more than happy to side with the latter.

A glance at the Feminist Library’s ‘statements’ page reveals that it rather likes making them. Its social-justice catalogue is not just limited to support for ‘Palestinian resistance’ – it also includes the entire range of middle-class left causes, from transgenderism to immigration. It remains rather silent on anti-Semitism, however – which is curious considering Goldsmiths admits it has an anti-Semitism problem, for which it has apologised. Due to the pro-Palestine ‘occupation’ of campus last academic year, members of Goldsmiths’ Jewish Society were too afraid to hold any events and effectively had to disband the society. With graffiti across campus featuring swastikas and the phrase ‘gas the Jews’, it’s not difficult to see why. An independent inquiry into anti-Semitism at Goldsmiths published in May provides a damning indictment of the prevalent campus culture.

Goldsmiths is not the only university whose best and brightest will this week don their keffiyehs on the anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Not a week after the Yom Kippur terror attack on a Manchester synagogue, students from Queen Mary, King’s College London, Strathclyde and Sheffield will partake in pro-Palestine rallies, marches and lectures.

It seems we are now seeing the culmination of years of ideological capture – and the results are sick-making. Students now issue calls to ‘globalise the intifada’, celebrate ‘Palestinian resistance’ on the anniversary of Hamas’s atrocities in Israel, and suggest that rape is sometimes, in some places, just a teensy bit justified.

In a statement issued after the Southport stabbings last year, the Feminist Library claimed that ‘we understand how fascists use faux concern for the “safety of women and girls” as cover for white-supremacist violence’. Perhaps it’s this faux anti-fascism that salves the conscience of these putative feminists as they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of women who, on 7 October 2023, were hunted, tortured and sexually humiliated, before being thrown into the backs of vans like cattle. One victim was raped by a Hamas militant who then passed her on to a friend. Together they sliced off her breast, threw it into the street and played with it. Another militant then raped her again, shooting her in the head as he ejaculated. This is the ‘resistance’ the Feminist Library and others will be proudly ‘remembering’ tomorrow.