By Pillar Rahola

The world changed on October 7^th. Or perhaps it had changed before and the terrifying Hamas pogrom showed its worst wretchedness.  Be it as it may, October 7 started with a double tragedy that shocked humanity hearts: the tragedy of entire families, young people, children, ordinary people slaughtered, plus the rapes, the torture and the kidnapping of hundreds of people; and the other tragedy of an insensitive world, incapable of reacting in solidarity to pain, and trapped by dogmatic stories that trivializes evil.

Out of the many lessons October 7 taught us, the first one was the solidarity breakdown, the victims divided by ideological patterns which separated them according to their identities.  It is basically important also to understand what happened afterwards: the anti-Semitic background that had been growing exponentially for decades-fueled by the radical left and fundamentalist Islam- exploded with all its hatred just because the victims were Jewish. Being Jewish was the fact that overruled their tragedy and neglected their pain. Everything that happened next, the distortion of the truth, the brutal criminalization of Israel, the creation of authentic anti-Jewish libels and the imposition of a Manichaean story that trivialized the massacre executioner’s terrorism, everything has to do with the fact that the victims were Jews and if they were Jews, they could only be guilty. That is the great success of modern anti-Semitism, mostly camouflaged under the comfortable disguise of anti-Zionism: denying the possibility that Jews have the right to be considered victims.

If the denial of murder, torture, kidnapping happens at all levels, it is especially painful in the case of women, the victims of the brutal gender violence perpetrated on October 7, and goes on against women – girls, young people, older people – who are still kidnapped. Never, would we have imagined experiencing in the 21st century a day of gender violence so savage, so massive, so public, so visualized, as what hundreds of women suffered during the pogrom, and never, in the 21st century, would we have imagined that the world could be so indifferent.  The silence, the lack of compassion, the denial of all empathy, the rejection of solidarity to the Jewish women so brutally raped, is an unimaginable shame that leaves feminism naked, stripped of dignity, devoid of any hint of credibility.

On October 7 feminism broke up, destroyed by the betrayal against Jewish women. Neither “Me Too”, nor organized feminism, nor the left-wing women’s groups, nor the institutions fighting for women, not a single feminist organization has been up to the task, to the point that their silence made them active allies of mass rape.  The horror of the sexual attacks against Jewish women on 10/7, reaching unimaginable limits of violence and perversion – to the point of breaking hips, destroying female organs and getting girls pregnant – can be compared to the horror of its silence, to its trivialization, and to the very denial of its existence. With its silence and indifference, feminism has strengthened the executioners, has reinforced their evil and has sent a message of impunity leaving Jewish women forsaken to their fate without any protection. Feminism told rapists, aggressors and terrorists that they can exert any gender violence on women, if they are Jewish, because, if they are Jewish, it doesn’t matter…

How will feminism dare to raise its voice for women after 10/7, if they failed in the most extreme and massive moment of gender violence? How will they raise their voices for any cause, if they have remained silent in the face of the pain of hundreds of attacked Jewish women? How will they preach against gender violence, if they have trivialized and denied it in the most serious attack? It is not the same feminism that raised its voice for the suffragettes in the 19th century, or that fought in modern times to achieve rights for women, or for the advancement of legal changes in order to condemn gender violence.  Quite the contrary, this feminism that emerged in recent times is dogmatic, ideologic, woke, clearly anti-Semitic and therefore, incapable of exercising the only possible solidarity: which defends the victim without nuances instead of deserting them. Raped Jewish women continue to be women and raped, but feminism has reduced them to their Jewish condition and rejected them. By doing so, it died. Today feminism does not exist, but only a hyper-ideological monstrosity that, in its dogmatic derivative, has ended up being complicit in evil. October 7 tore off feminism’s mask: what was underneath was hideous.

Pillar Rahola is a non-Jewish Spanish writer and journalist, who has traveled the world with her lectures in favor of Israel and against anti-Semitism.