By Phyllis Chesler and Miriam Greenspan

Re: #MsMag's belated and benighted coverage of 10/7, please read what Miriam Greenspan, psychotherapist and author, writes: #"Rape as a weapon of war is a terrible misnomer for what #Hamas did to women in Israel. Hamas did not declare war on 10/7. It engaged in a savage abhorrent #pogrom. Women were not raped, in the ordinary sense. They were tortured, mutilated and butchered—left dead with nails in their vaginas, with their breasts and faces lopped off, and shot dead in their genitals. Now these rapes are doubted because most of the women victims were murdered! This is not ‘rape as a weapon of war’—it is in a league of its own, reserved for #Jewish women savagely attacked by a death cult of #mass murderers, perpetrated by the most virulent #antisemites in the world—not your usual wartime combatants."

Ms's writing about what happened on 10/7 misses this point and in so doing, almost "normalizes" rape in a war zone and mis-identifies what happened on 10/7 to Israeli girls and women. On 10/13, and again on 10/18, I sent what I'd published about Hamas's pogrom on steroids to leading Jewish and non-Jewish feminists. I was met with silence, some hostility, and some praise. When I asked feminists to "help" get online sites such as Ms, Feminist Currents, Nation, etc., to write about it, I was told that others, new people were in charge over there. And now, as Miriam Greenspan, above, writes, Ms has finally, more than two months later, published something. Given that Sheryl Sandberg spoke about 10/7 on Dec 4 at the event sponsored by the Israel Mission to the UN, and given that @BretStephen_NYT published a strong piece condemning Hamas's pogrom-style gang-rapes at the NYT (Dec 6), I guess it was safe enough for some feminists to publish items in their private Newsletters (Dec 5) and for Ms to speak out, however mutedly, also on Dec 6th.