Just when it seems that the moral inversion around Israel cannot get any worse, someone finds another shovel and starts digging.
In recent weeks, a major report documenting the sexual violence committed by Hamas on, and after, October 7, was released. The findings are grotesque, hideous and almost impossible to read without feeling physically sick. They describe sexual violence as terror, humiliation as strategy, and the destruction of bodies and families as part of the point.
The report, Silenced No More, draws on more than 430 testimonies and interviews, more than 10,000 media files, over 1,800 hours of visual analysis and thirteen documented patterns of violence. Its conclusion was direct: sexual and gender-based violence was “systematic, widespread, and integral” to the October 7 attack and its aftermath.
None of this should have surprised anyone who has followed the issue honestly. We knew sexual violence took place. We knew Hamas butchered, raped, mutilated, burned, tortured, kidnapped and murdered civilians. We knew women and girls were targeted. We knew bodies were found in conditions that told their own terrible story. Survivors, witnesses, first responders and released hostages had already pointed to acts of sexual barbarity.
That should have been the story. The world should have been forced to look squarely at what Hamas did, at how long so many institutions took to acknowledge it, and why Israeli victims had to fight so hard for moral recognition.
Instead, almost immediately, the machinery of equivalence started turning – again. Media either didn’t cover it or attempted to manufacture claims designed to give the impression of equivalent acts by the IDF. At the very moment Hamas’s documented sexual barbarism should have commanded undiluted moral attention, the audience was invited to look away from Hamas and back toward Israel.
And that is the tried-and-true trick. When the evidence against Hamas becomes too ugly to ignore, change the subject. Blunt the horror. Introduce claims against Israel. Then manipulate the public to believe that both sides belong in the same moral category.
That very claim is disgusting. Israel is a functioning democratic state with institutions, courts, military discipline, public accountability and a real capacity for self-correction. When Israeli soldiers do wrong, the Israeli system investigates and, if there is a finding of guilt, punishes and removes them. Hamas, by contrast, films atrocities, glorifies its murderers, hides behind civilians, lies about casualties, exploits hospitals and schools, and then watches as much of the Western media launders its propaganda into headlines.
And now we’re seeing it again with the latest flotilla stunt. Activists involved in the Global Sumud Flotilla, having attempted to breach Israel’s Gaza blockade, claim they have been severely abused after being detained by Israeli authorities. The claims included beatings, tasering, humiliation, strip searches, sexual assault and rape. Reuters – hardly a friend of Israel – immediately reported the activists’ claims but also stated that it could not independently verify the claims.
The whole thing has the unmistakable smell of a jack-up. These were not neutral observers swept up in an unfortunate misunderstanding. They were activists engaged in a political operation against Israel. Their claims emerged from a contaminated conflict-information environment in which anti-Israel accusations are routinely amplified long before they are tested.
The evidence for the claims themselves is weak – but that doesn’t matter to the activists. They don’t need to be proven. They just need to create a counter-accusation that can be thrown back whenever October 7 is mentioned, and that is the real purpose.
Israel has unequivocally rejected the claims of mistreatment. According to the Israeli Embassy in New Zealand, the relevant Israeli services and medical professionals ensured that flotilla participants underwent a structured and professional intake process in accordance with humanitarian law. Participants were given medical assessments, hygiene supplies, clean clothing and meals to ensure the protection of their human rights.
That matters, because the claim being pushed is not merely that the activists were briefly inconvenienced. The claim is that Israel brutalised them. But those claims don’t stack up. Images quickly circulated of German activist Nesrin Zeaiter lying on a stretcher with a neck brace after being deported to Turkey, only to be later seen standing in Germany flashing a victory sign. Within days, other similar images of ‘victims’ were circulating on social media demonstrating that the entire thing was stage-managed for propaganda purposes.
Nor should anyone pretend that the flotilla was about humanitarian aid. In fact, the flotilla carried no substantial humanitarian cargo and refused to use established channels to deliver aid.
Instead, the flotilla did what all anti-Israel propaganda repeatedly does. It traded on staged suffering, recycled imagery, selective framing and the emotional power of the first photograph. By the time a correction appears, if it appears at all, the original image has already travelled the world and lodged itself in public memory.
So the claims don’t have to be true to be useful. They only need to create a fog of uncertainty. Which gives context to the latest actions of the UN which has added Israeli armed and security forces to its conflict-related sexual violence blacklist for the first time, based on claims of rape against Palestinians between 2023 and 2024. That sounds damning but Israel has utterly rejected the claims and has responded to each, in detail. It has also invited UN representatives to visit and examine the situation. They have chosen not to do so and has, instead, rushed Israel onto a blacklist beside Hamas – treating a small body of fiercely contested claims from one of the most polluted information environments on earth as ‘evidence’ without examination.
The purpose is obvious. Hamas’s sexual crimes on October 7 were documented, deliberate and monstrous. They left a stain that Israel’s enemies desperately needed to shift. So the propaganda machine has produced a counter-claim against Israel, built on a flimsy framework of contested allegations, activist networks, UN bureaucracy and hostile diplomatic theatre.
And once that lie has been cleaned up and handed back under the badge of institutional respectability, the next step becomes easy. The moral distinction between Israel and Hamas begins to collapse. Terror becomes resistance. Self-defence becomes genocide. Hostage rescue becomes aggression. And now, the documented sexual crimes of Hamas can be turned into accusations against Israel.
That is not justice. It is laundering. Taking the filthy and depraved actions of Hamas, passing them through a series of respectable-looking institutions, and presenting them to the public as clean or ‘justified’ within a fictitious context that it has created. Likewise, the claims of sexual assault against Israel. They are manufactured by activists, picked up by sympathetic media, echoed by hostile governments, then stamped by the United Nations and handed back to the world as if they were established fact.
Let’s be clear. The Hamas atrocities of October 7 were not morally complicated. They were the deliberate acts of a terrorist movement that invaded Israel and committed barbarism against civilians.
But rather than face that reality, the world seems determined to wash it away, because that is what this is really all about.
Not justice for victims. Not truth. Not women. Not human rights.
Equivalence.
When you can no longer excuse your heroes of their crimes and depravity, the next best approach is to claim that the other guy is doing the same thing.
Ashley Church is former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and is an active social commentator. This article was sourced HERE
None of this should have surprised anyone who has followed the issue honestly. We knew sexual violence took place. We knew Hamas butchered, raped, mutilated, burned, tortured, kidnapped and murdered civilians. We knew women and girls were targeted. We knew bodies were found in conditions that told their own terrible story. Survivors, witnesses, first responders and released hostages had already pointed to acts of sexual barbarity.
That should have been the story. The world should have been forced to look squarely at what Hamas did, at how long so many institutions took to acknowledge it, and why Israeli victims had to fight so hard for moral recognition.
Instead, almost immediately, the machinery of equivalence started turning – again. Media either didn’t cover it or attempted to manufacture claims designed to give the impression of equivalent acts by the IDF. At the very moment Hamas’s documented sexual barbarism should have commanded undiluted moral attention, the audience was invited to look away from Hamas and back toward Israel.
And that is the tried-and-true trick. When the evidence against Hamas becomes too ugly to ignore, change the subject. Blunt the horror. Introduce claims against Israel. Then manipulate the public to believe that both sides belong in the same moral category.
That very claim is disgusting. Israel is a functioning democratic state with institutions, courts, military discipline, public accountability and a real capacity for self-correction. When Israeli soldiers do wrong, the Israeli system investigates and, if there is a finding of guilt, punishes and removes them. Hamas, by contrast, films atrocities, glorifies its murderers, hides behind civilians, lies about casualties, exploits hospitals and schools, and then watches as much of the Western media launders its propaganda into headlines.
And now we’re seeing it again with the latest flotilla stunt. Activists involved in the Global Sumud Flotilla, having attempted to breach Israel’s Gaza blockade, claim they have been severely abused after being detained by Israeli authorities. The claims included beatings, tasering, humiliation, strip searches, sexual assault and rape. Reuters – hardly a friend of Israel – immediately reported the activists’ claims but also stated that it could not independently verify the claims.
The whole thing has the unmistakable smell of a jack-up. These were not neutral observers swept up in an unfortunate misunderstanding. They were activists engaged in a political operation against Israel. Their claims emerged from a contaminated conflict-information environment in which anti-Israel accusations are routinely amplified long before they are tested.
The evidence for the claims themselves is weak – but that doesn’t matter to the activists. They don’t need to be proven. They just need to create a counter-accusation that can be thrown back whenever October 7 is mentioned, and that is the real purpose.
Israel has unequivocally rejected the claims of mistreatment. According to the Israeli Embassy in New Zealand, the relevant Israeli services and medical professionals ensured that flotilla participants underwent a structured and professional intake process in accordance with humanitarian law. Participants were given medical assessments, hygiene supplies, clean clothing and meals to ensure the protection of their human rights.
That matters, because the claim being pushed is not merely that the activists were briefly inconvenienced. The claim is that Israel brutalised them. But those claims don’t stack up. Images quickly circulated of German activist Nesrin Zeaiter lying on a stretcher with a neck brace after being deported to Turkey, only to be later seen standing in Germany flashing a victory sign. Within days, other similar images of ‘victims’ were circulating on social media demonstrating that the entire thing was stage-managed for propaganda purposes.
Nor should anyone pretend that the flotilla was about humanitarian aid. In fact, the flotilla carried no substantial humanitarian cargo and refused to use established channels to deliver aid.
Instead, the flotilla did what all anti-Israel propaganda repeatedly does. It traded on staged suffering, recycled imagery, selective framing and the emotional power of the first photograph. By the time a correction appears, if it appears at all, the original image has already travelled the world and lodged itself in public memory.
So the claims don’t have to be true to be useful. They only need to create a fog of uncertainty. Which gives context to the latest actions of the UN which has added Israeli armed and security forces to its conflict-related sexual violence blacklist for the first time, based on claims of rape against Palestinians between 2023 and 2024. That sounds damning but Israel has utterly rejected the claims and has responded to each, in detail. It has also invited UN representatives to visit and examine the situation. They have chosen not to do so and has, instead, rushed Israel onto a blacklist beside Hamas – treating a small body of fiercely contested claims from one of the most polluted information environments on earth as ‘evidence’ without examination.
The purpose is obvious. Hamas’s sexual crimes on October 7 were documented, deliberate and monstrous. They left a stain that Israel’s enemies desperately needed to shift. So the propaganda machine has produced a counter-claim against Israel, built on a flimsy framework of contested allegations, activist networks, UN bureaucracy and hostile diplomatic theatre.
And once that lie has been cleaned up and handed back under the badge of institutional respectability, the next step becomes easy. The moral distinction between Israel and Hamas begins to collapse. Terror becomes resistance. Self-defence becomes genocide. Hostage rescue becomes aggression. And now, the documented sexual crimes of Hamas can be turned into accusations against Israel.
That is not justice. It is laundering. Taking the filthy and depraved actions of Hamas, passing them through a series of respectable-looking institutions, and presenting them to the public as clean or ‘justified’ within a fictitious context that it has created. Likewise, the claims of sexual assault against Israel. They are manufactured by activists, picked up by sympathetic media, echoed by hostile governments, then stamped by the United Nations and handed back to the world as if they were established fact.
Let’s be clear. The Hamas atrocities of October 7 were not morally complicated. They were the deliberate acts of a terrorist movement that invaded Israel and committed barbarism against civilians.
But rather than face that reality, the world seems determined to wash it away, because that is what this is really all about.
Not justice for victims. Not truth. Not women. Not human rights.
Equivalence.
When you can no longer excuse your heroes of their crimes and depravity, the next best approach is to claim that the other guy is doing the same thing.
Ashley Church is former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and is an active social commentator. This article was sourced HERE
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