Women and Jews have long shared a common experience: people telling them that what happened to them did not, in fact, happen. Denialism, in other words. People work extremely hard to see women and Jews as the privileged and never the oppressed, so they can justify their desires and prejudices to themselves.
Karenism in short. I don’t know of a karen-equivalent for Jews, although there used to be plenty of them. Karenism=working very hard to see women as privileged bitches.
It comes out in Holocaust denial, which is gaining in popularity around the world, and it came out during the Jeremy Corbyn era, when Jews who voiced their fears about antisemitism on the left were smeared by his supporters. And now we see it when Jews are accused of “weaponising the Holocaust” when they explain their terror of the genocidal maniacs, Hamas.
That stopped me for a second. Do people really say that? So I asked Google, and yes they do. Bloody hell. How does one go about “weaponizing” a genocide that genocided six million people??? It’s a weapon already, all by itself! What else would it be, a birthday card?
For a bright, brief moment people tended to care about [the prevalence of rape and failure to prosecute it] during the Me Too movement. But that changed like a fashion with the rise of the gender rights movement, which argues that a man who says he’s a woman magically becomes one. When women — including JK Rowling — explained that their experience of sexual assault made them anxious about the prospect of men having access to female-only spaces, they were accused of — yes — “weaponising their trauma.”
But men who claim to be women never weaponize what they claim is their trauma????
So when reports started to come out that Israeli women had been raped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 pogroms, I knew the reaction would be bad. But I didn’t know it would be this bad.
…It’s striking how many social justice warriors who loudly supported every passing minority over the past years have expressed scepticism about accounts of the rape of Israeli women, insisting this is just a “Zionist” and “fetishistic” story.
Karens are Zionists. Karens are privileged. Karens lie. Karens make it rain when you want to go on a picnic.
These denials have become more frantic since Israel released some of the GoPro footage from the Hamas terrorists. The Guardian’s most high profile journalist, Owen Jones, once promised to wage “an all-out war on antisemitism”, so I watched his Youtube review of the pogrom film to see how this war is going for him. Just like all the armchair sceptics on social media, he insists he’s just trying to establish the facts, all the while omitting facts that are inconvenient to his narrative. He begins by naming which other journalists were at the London screenings of the film: “LBC presenters, Rachel Johnson and Nick Ferrari” and “media organisations like the Sun” implying that this was some rabble-rousing, right-wing event. Strangely, he doesn’t mention that journalists from The Times, Reuters and Vice were invited too, as well as his friend Michael Walker from Novara. “If there was rape and sexual violence was committed, we don’t see that on camera,” Jones reports, apparently unaware the IDF have said that they only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed and their families. The body of a burned female corpse with no underwear on “is not what you would consider conclusive evidence of rape,” Jones insists…
When Jones was later asked why he is so sceptical about the multiple reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women – indeed, reports that they were specifically instructed to rape Jewish girls and women – he replied with a quote from a Washington Post article: “It’s unclear whether authorities have accounts directly from rape survivors.” That quote does indeed exist in that article, but it also makes clear that this is because Hamas almost certainly killed all the women they raped yet accidentally left many witnesses, including one who said a Hamas terrorist killed a woman while still raping her and a morgue worker who described female bodies so brutally assaulted they had shattered pelvises. But I guess he missed those details.
I guess he “missed” them because the shattered pelvises of Karens don’t matter.