Why did everyone believe the Hamas racist rape porn story?

Racism.

When I was a kid, my great-aunt would somberly talk about the atrocities committed against Bulgarians under the Ottoman Empire. “The boys and men, they’d slice in half with their swords. And to the girls … they did much … worse,” she’d say, leaving me to wonder with my 5-year-old brain what was “much worse” than being sliced in half (thanks Baba Leoni!). Like all empires, the Ottoman empire was oppressive and loathed. They executed a lot of resistance fighters. But, you know… by hanging, not slicing them in half. The latter is a lot of work! And I think hanging gets the message across pretty well too. Whenever there’s people around, there’s rape, but as far as I know, not what she implied, which was every girl in every village they passed was raped.

Bulgaria was under Ottoman rule for 500 years. The resistance fighters are the national heroes. So Baba Leoni can be forgiven for absorbing, and passing down, Islamaphobic porn propaganda. What’s our excuse in 2024?

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A report in the Intercept by Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim; and Daniel Boguslaw, found that the New York Times story “Screams without Words,” reporting widespread mass rape on October 7th, is basically made up.

They detail how the “reporting” took shape. In a sense, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella—who had no prior reporting experience—did their due diligence, under the guidance of lead author Jeffrey Gettleman. They went to organization after organization looking for rape victims or any other proof of rape. They found none. So then they went to the known fabulists of Zaka and other utterly unreliable witnesses (like, they of “40 beheaded babies” debunked claims) and the New York Times went “ta-da!” and hit publish, top story, front page, instant virality.

The Zionist ghouls gloated and yelled at the U.N. for not decrying mass gang rape “as a weapon of war” sooner, claiming they didn’t care because the victims were Jewish. Most progressives I know landed on the position, “Mass gang rape is horrific, but doesn’t justify genocide.” It’s widely believed the story revitalized international support for Israel’s war after it had faltered.

Regardless of politics, people largely bought the story. Now I will gloat. The first time I read it, I too, was horrified. But then something stuck out at me: they claim there’s no physical evidence because Jewish tradition requires immediate burial. But I remembered another story, a few weeks after October 7th, that claimed the death toll had been so high bodies were still languishing in warehouse freezers, with traumatized M.Es struggling to inspect and process the victims.

After that, I went back with a critical eye. The story offers no proof beyond second accounts by mostly anonymous eye witnesses. Also, it is fucking insane: