UMass Boston's CGSHR Speaker: Israeli Women Get Off On Thinking About Bombing Gaza

Sarah Ihmoud has dirty, dirty thoughts about Israeli sexual violence

The UMass Boston Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights Gaslighting, Shitposting and Hamas Rapists (CGSHR) invites a well known human rights expert, Dr. Sarah Ihmoud from the College of the Holy Cross, to lecture us about “Countering Reproductive Genocide in Gaza: Palestinian Women’s Testimonies” on November 5. No abstract is available as of writing this post, so we pulled the following word salad from a lecture by the same title she gave last month in the UK (emphasis ours).

'This talk centres the stories of Palestinian women surviving the ongoing genocide in Gaza to understand the matrix of settler colonial violence and its gendered effects - from starvation to the violation of women’s bodies during the time of birth, to witnessing mass killings and experiences of multiple forced displacements, to the intimacies of caretaking, grief and mourning—an indictment of the cruel world that has resigned Palestinian women as killable and expendable subjects. In their telling, women denounced gendered violence - that which Israel has inflicted through physical and psychological acts of pain, humiliation, and degradation onto the gendered Palestinian body - as closely linked to acts of dehumanisation, territorial dispossession, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of being in the world. Amidst this tapestry of grief, Palestinian women’s stories narrate a collectively forged vocabulary of survival in the midst of unending genocidal terror. I think with women’s analysis of their own lived experiences of genocide and their collectively forged survival to theorize a Palestinian feminist analysis of reproductive genocide. I argue that we need to strive for a reproductive justice politics that is not only anti-Zionist but is also anti-imperialist and abolitionist and led by the fierce power and wisdom of Indigenous and people of color communities across the globe who have been responsible for the labor of mothering and caregiving in the face of many interconnected systems of U.S. and European empire building.'

If you survived so far - thank you! we appreciate the sacrifice. It mustn’t have been easy.

Who is Sarah Ihmoud?

Sarah Ihmoud is an assistant Professor at Holy Cross. She has a PhD in Social/Activist Anthropology (is that a thing?). Her fields of study are - Surprise! Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism, Violence, Militarization, Occupation, Intimacy, Borderlands, Palestine, Diaspora, Transnational Black, Indigenous and Decolonial Feminisms. She was almost hired by Boston University, but the hiring was blocked when it turned out her favorite pastime is concocting dirty, dirty stories about how Israelis rape and murder Palestinian women for fun, with very few or no evidence to back these stories up.

Sarah Loves to Talk About Sexual Violence

Yes, Sarah seems to have a weird obsession with Israelis and their sexual activities. She claims that rape and sexual abuse are and have always been central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres. Other than a number of horrific but anecdotal cases, she shows no proof that this is indeed a widespread, systematic behavior. As a matter of fact, there is overwhelming evidence that the rape of Palestinian women by Israeli male soldiers is rare, including by some researchers who desperately wanted to prove the opposite.

But this is not going to stop Sarah. In order to make her twisted point, she defines any violent interaction between Israeli police forces and Palestinian women as “sexual or gendered violence” even if no sexual assaults are involved. If we redefine terms like “indigenous”, “colonialism” and “women” we can definitely redefine rape, right?

What About Sexual Violence Against Israeli Women?

The above raises an interesting question - if we treat anecdotal evidence as a proof of systematic, ongoing sexual violence, and if we “believe all women”, we must use the same judgment when it comes to the claims of mass rape on October 7, for which there is more than just anecdotal evidence, right?

WRONG!

In her paper published by a heavily biased website, Jadaliyya, Sarah claims there is no actual evidence for mass rape of Israeli women, despite the fact that even the UN, not known for its sympathy towards Israel, concluded that there is a “clear and convincing evidence” of mass rape. Sarah’s undeniable proof is another article on the same heavily biased website. That article reverses the “believe all women” narrative and claims that there is an urgent need for actual, meticulous, irrefutable, persuasive documentation in order to claim mass rape had happened on October 7 and in captivity. Video evidence is not enough because they can be doctored or manufactured. The only evidence, the article posits, comes from pro-Israel sources and you should never believe Zionists because they lie all the time. Notice the twisted Kafka-trap logic? Any evidence of mass rape from “Zionist” sources only serves as a proof that there was no mass rape. Believe all women? Ha. When it comes to Israeli women, the threshold suddenly becomes impossibly high.

That same article says:

“Depicting one’s perceived enemy as a sexual predator is an age-old strategy to distract from, or justify, one’s own violence”.

Pot, kettle, black etc.

Do Israeli Women Dream of Electric Bombs?

Based on one comment made in a Facebook post, Sarah Ihmoud goes on to claim that Israeli women orgasm while thinking of bombs dropped on Gaza. Hear that, Israeli men? Now you know what to do to get some fun time tonight. You’re welcome.

We couldn’t find that orgasmic Facebook post. The link provided in the article was broken.

Decolonize Peace

What is Sarah’s solution to the conflict? Decolonizing peace. Just like we decolonized competence, rigor and even the spirit itself, so we should decolonize peace. According to her, the language of “liberal peace” is the language of the oppressor, which reproduces the dominant cultural order. Keep in mind that radicals like her use the word “liberal” to mean something quite different than the rest of us.

Instead, she offers the following word salad:

To imagine peace from a decolonial perspective is an invitation to imagine Palestinian futures otherwise, towards the possibility that instead of continuing to invest in the colonial trajectory of Indigenous displacement, disappearance, and death, in the tearing apart and destruction of our sacred kinships, in and through the language of colonial containment, we might instead insist on presence, on the affirmation of Palestinian life and belonging. Decolonizing peace implies the rethinking of the nation outside the constraints of the nation state. It insists on an attunement to counter-hegemonic practices of feminist worldmaking and subordinated knowledges nested within and against the edifice of the colonial state that extend beyond the universality of the modern and its civilizing discourses, of which gendered inclusion is a part. Such a project is by definition intersectional, anti-imperialist, and built on the alliances of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and other historically oppressed peoples struggling for freedom across the globe.

Translated into English: Jewish nation state - out. Palestinian nation state - in. Long live Queers for Palestine! How exactly is it going to happen? Dunno. Don’t care. I live a comfortable life in America.

Oh wait… There is footnote 13:

I thank Anthony Dest for suggesting that decolonizing peace necessarily means embracing struggle; a struggle that asserts autonomy and self-determination as an aspect of a broader disruption of the global order of modernity.

Struggle, disruption of the global order… Sounds like “decolonizing peace”, according to Sarah, means breaking through the fence and massacring hundreds of innocent civilians in their beds or at a dance party. Decolonization is not a metaphor, after all.

We can’t help but wonder: If Israeli women LOVE to think of bombs dropped on Gaza, what does Sarah feel when she thinks of October 7?