By Phyllis Chesler

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the Progressive Caucus chair, should not be reelected to Congress. She is both heartless as well as out of touch with reality, morality, and evidence-based truth. 

Like the members of the infamous Squad, the smooth-talking and rather arrogant Jayapal continues to demand a meaningless “ceasefire” in Gaza, speaks passionately about the “displaced” Gazan civilians, but does not say a word about the displaced Israelis who had to be moved away both from the northern and southern borders and who remain in limbo.

She demands evenhandedness when she herself is hardly capable of it.

Jayapal and her congressional comrades are in complete denial about what Hamas, trained and funded by Iran, did on Oct. 7 in southern Israel. And blind to what Iran has in mind for America.

In a recent interview on CNN with Dana Bash, Jayapal refused to focus on what Hamas did to Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. She denied that “progressive” women failed to respond to the mass gang rapes and torture of Israeli girls and women.

“I don’t know that (they did so),” she claimed disingenuously before instantly pivoting to her tired talking points accusing Israel of committing “international humanitarian crimes.” 

To her credit, Dana Bash pushed back. “With respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking you about Hamas.”

Jayapal claimed that she’d answered the question, insisting, “We have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

Hamas’ terrorist fiends murdered more than 1,200 civilians and engaged in a pogrom on steroids, one which they excitedly filmed. Hamas kept careful, Nazi-like records of their atrocities, which included gang rapes so violent that the women’s pelvises were broken, after which they mutilated their broken bodies. After raping these women, they shot them in their vaginal areas, and breasts; they also shot or blew up their faces. Clearly, they wanted to wipe out both their womanhood and their humanity. 

These savages then took other unlucky civilians as hostages back with them into Gaza. We now know that they hid them in tunnels, kept many in cages, and forced children to view the Oct. 7 footage over and over again. They did not feed them adequately or allow them to take showers. These hostages were kept in cold tunnels located beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques, far beneath the earth.

One psychologist who interviewed some of the rescued children described them as “shadows of children” who spoke only in whispers and asked for permission to look out the window, open the door, take a shower.

Jayapal is a woman who grew up in Chennai, India, where sexual harassment and rape are rampant, so how can she not understand what rape is and what rape does to a woman? In war, it is a form of gender cleansing. It is meant to drive the victim out of her mind and destroy her with shame that is not hers to bear.

Is Jayapal living underground in a tunnel herself? If not, how can she not know all this? For that matter, why no concern for what life is like for Muslim women in Gaza under Hamas?

Jayapal seems purposely ignorant about how Muslim women, gays, and dissidents are treated in Gaza and in the West Bank. They are subjected to forced veiling, child marriage, polygamy, physical abuse, and honor killing, “practices” that do not exist in Israel. I call this Islamic gender apartheid.

Jayapal implies that the Oct. 7 rapes were perhaps justified or understandable, given the alleged “occupation.” How many times does one have to remind an American congresswoman that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005?

More importantly, Jayapal dismisses what Hamas did as a routine part of war. That may be so in some cases – think Bosnia, Nigeria, and ISIS – but it is still a war crime.

What can possibly explain Jayapal’s disinterest in, even disdain for, questions about the gang rape of women, especially Jewish women?

Antisemitism might be part of the answer. The more likely culprit is her adherence to the cult of  “intersectionalism.”

Based on academic gobbledygook, the “intersectional” feminist focus is on gender identity, not sex-based identity; on anti-black or anti-brown racism, prison abolition, Western imperialism, “queerness,” and the normalization of transgenderism. Class and race trump sex.

White, Western feminists are slandered as “colonial feminists” for daring to call out Islamic gender and religious apartheid. Intersectional feminists like Jayapal are always fervently pro-immigration, pro-Islam, anti-Judaism, anti-Israel, and anti-America. They peddle the false analogy between African Americans and Arabs who live in Gaza and the West Bank.

This way of thinking is precisely what accounts for the long and awkward silence among so-called “feminists” about the mass rape and torture of Israeli civilian girls and women. Reality is distorted or denied because the perpetrators are Muslim men “of color.”

I call on the Democratic Party in Washington’s 7th Congressional District to hold Rep. Jayapal’s feet to the fire on Aug. 6, 2024, the next primary election, and vote her out.