Selective Outrage and the Silence Around Weaponized Rape |
This week, Arbel Yehud spoke publicly about her experience in Hamas captivity. She described relentless sexual abuse—from the very beginning of her captivity until the very end. Hundreds of days of sexual torture.
It is unstomachable. It is unimaginable. The level of cruelty and disregard for human dignity stretches beyond what most of us in the world can truly comprehend.
And yet—no sustained global outcry.
In the weeks following October 7, many Jewish women said bitterly: “Me too—unless you’re a Jew.” It was not simply rhetoric. It reflected a visible hesitation in parts of the international women’s rights community to immediately and unequivocally address documented sexual violence committed during the attacks.
Multiple hostages who returned have independently described abuse, humiliation, and sexual violence in Hamas captivity, just as detainees in Iranian detention centers have reported similar methods of degradation. These accounts are consistent. They are not isolated anecdotes; they form a recognizable pattern.
Arbel Yehud was not attacked randomly. She was targeted because she was Jewish. Because she was Israeli. The abuse was not incidental—it carried antisemitic intent. She was seen not as a human being, but as the enemy.
Under the Iranian regime, individuals labeled dissidents are imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to sexual violence in detention centers. There are mounting reports of disappearances, of bodies not returned, of executions carried out in silence.
Same ideology. Same playbook. Same dehumanization.
Once a regime or a movement decides that certain people do not qualify to live freely unless they conform to its worldview, cruelty becomes justified. Once you are labeled the “other”—the Jew, the Israeli, the dissident, the protester—your suffering becomes permissible.
And when earlier abuses in detention centers or in Hamas captivity are met with hesitation, when documented rape does not mobilize the world, when verified testimonies are filtered through political lenses, cruelty does not diminish—it escalates. There is no natural ceiling to brutality. There is only the limit imposed by consequences.
If there are none, the cruelty expands.
The systematic use of rape as a weapon is strategic. It is humiliating. It terrorizes. It fractures families. It leaves permanent scars.
The victims may differ. The ideology does not.
Two different contexts. The same weapon. The same worldview. The same logic of erasing humanity.
Women’s organizations—largely restrained in their response. Parts of the political left—cautious or divided. International institutions—slow to act.
Hamas and the Iranian regime have demonstrated strikingly similar operational methods: stripping inocents of humanity, using sexual violence as intimidation, silencing through imprisonment and disappearance, and weaponizing fear to maintain power or to fight their war.
All of this is connected.
The deeper issue is not only the brutality of those who commit these acts. It is the refusal to understand what we are confronting. It is the denial that the same ideological current produces the same cruelty wherever it takes root.
The question is no longer only about those who commit these atrocities. Their worldview is clear. The deeper question is about us.
Why the silence? Why the paralysis? Why do some victims mobilize the world while others vanish into the background?
Silence is not neutral. It signals which victims matter.
Where extremist ideologies take root, this pattern follows. We now know that. So the real question is this:
Now that we know—what are we prepared to do as members of the free world? This question is also directed to our leaders. Because denial does not prevent cruelty.
And that may be the most dangerous silence of all.