Yaniv Voller at Tablet on the contrast between the universal condemnation of the sexual violence perpetrated against Yazidi women by Islamic State, and the efforts to deny it in the case of Hamas and the October 7 pogrom.
This week marks a decade since one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century: the Yazidi genocide and the sexual enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women and girls by the Islamic State terrorist organization. A direct line connects this onslaught on Yazidi women and the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. In both events, the captors of Yazidi and Israeli women were documented referring to their captives as sabaya, an Arabic term that dates back to medieval times to describe the taking of occupied populations as spoils of war or, in a more contemporary context, slavery, including sexual slavery.
In one of the blood-chilling Islamic State videos from Iraq in 2014, cheerful commanders discussed the prices of Yazidi female captives, explicitly referring to them as sabaya. Similarly, on Oct. 7, an armed Hamas militant was documented sitting in the occupied Nahal Oz military base, referring, in the same gleeful manner, to captured female Israeli soldiers as sabaya. As the captives were sitting bleeding, beaten, and surrounded by the bodies of their dead colleagues, a Hamas gunman was recorded telling his comrades: “These are the sabaya (which the IDF, when circulating the video, translated as “women who can get pregnant”), these are the Zionists,” before telling one of the captives in English “you are beautiful.”
Although the use of the term sabaya in both contexts sheds light on the prevalence of sexual violence during conflict, the international attitude toward the term, and toward the use of sexual violence, was entirely different....
Briefly put, there was no debate about the meaning of sabaya in the Yazidi context. In fact, as recently as December 2023, a report by the U.N. Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) mentioned the term 30 times and included a section titled “Sexual slavery—the sabaya system.”
This established consensus, however, did not carry over to Hamas and its Jewish victims. Instead, once the Hamas video from Oct. 7 was made public by the Israeli authorities, it triggered a heated linguistic debate and a semantic relitigation of the term sabaya and even its use. It was not only Iran’s and Hamas’ propagandists who fiercely denied the term’s sexual connotation, but also reputable commentators, public intellectuals, and scholars. Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group, appealed to phonology, pedantically insisting that the Hamas gunman used a different word in Levantine Arabic, with a similar pronunciation but a different sibilant, which simply means “young women.” Meanwhile, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, who characterized the IDF video as an “Islamophobic” mistranslation, denied the sexual connotation of the term, insisting that the word means merely prisoners or captives. Other commentators maintained that associating the term with sexual enslavement meant “regurgitating Israeli propaganda” and constituted “absolutely racist drivel.”...
Why, despite the clear evidence of the Islamic State’s use of sabaya to justify sexual slavery, have commentators rushed to deny the term’s sexual connotation in the context of the Palestinian terror group and Israel? And more broadly, why, in the case of Jewish victims, have so many been eager to undermine evidence about the use of sexual violence by Palestinians?
The answer is that the purpose of denying the sexual connotation of the word sabaya is to sanction Oct. 7 as a legitimate military operation under the laws of war, rather than an orgiastic human rights massacre.
In other words it's all part of the determination on the part of "anti-Zionists" in the west to portray Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement against imperialism, like the Vietcong say, rather than what it is: an Islamist terror group bent on the killing of Jews, the destruction of Israel, and ultimately the triumph of Islam worldwide.
Whereas al-Qaida and IS are understood to represent wanton cruelty and inhumanity, in pursuit of a utopian ideology, the violence groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad resort to is deemed understandable—for some, even justifiable—since its context is a struggle for national liberation. Without this fictional distinction, Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorism would have to be regarded as legitimate.
And that can never be admitted.
Comments