Israel’s obstruction of investigation into 7 October rape allegations risks truth never being found, advocates warn
middleeastmonitor.com
Israel’s leadership is pushing the allegations that Hamas fighters raped Israeli women during the October 7 attacks for its own political objectives while the government’s ongoing refusal to allow the United Nations to conduct a full investigation into the matter threatens to hinder any evidence, advocates have warned.
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I said I wasn't going to indefinitely play the game of you saying total bullshit and me citing sources for why it's wrong, because going back and forth with it too many times usually isn't a good use of time, but for some reason this one irritated me all afresh.
I(17) from the report, page 5: "With respect to hostages, the mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing."
Tell me what that information is. Surely you have evidence to present.
Since I already cited a few entries out of the UN report to you, I'm gonna make this one into one of those "exercise for the reader" type of things. Like teaching a man to fish. In what entry in the table of contents to the report do you think the answer to this question might be contained?
I realize you will have to read most of the whole first page of the document to find it, but I believe in you. Hold your focus. Persevere.
You didn't cite any evidence you just posted the summary.
What information is used to come to those conclusions in the summary? It's in the report surely you've read it right?
I sent you a link to the full report. Maybe that needs to be the first part of your challenge then: Finding the link to the report, and then finding the table of contents, and then identifying which entry in the table of contents might contain the answer to your question.
Do you really not want to take on the challenge of finding it? I am trying to help you become more capable with sources and verification procedures. I wasn't expecting finding the report that I sent the link to to be the hard part, but I honestly don't think any part of it should be altogether super-challenging.
I already read the report and stated what is in it. You are the person claiming differently so link the part where they had anything other than witnesses to present.
What page of the report did you read that dealt with hostages?
Not that I don't believe you; I just have forgotten, and I want you to remind me so I can reference it really quick so we can continue the conversation.
Can you cite the evidence or are you going to keep asking questions about page numbers?
I'm gonna quit being a sarcastic dickhead for a second to take this question seriously.
I already gave citations of evidence -- a link to the report with some criticisms of what the article was saying was literally my first comment here, and then after that, I responded to questions usually with page numbers or section citations or quotations (examples here, here, and here).
But that made absolutely no difference to how you reacted. You continued to make 100% wrong claims about what was in the report, and didn't react substantively to the demonstrations that what you were already saying were wrong.
As I said, I don't feel like simply continuing that cycle of me providing citations and you continuing to blandly argue wildly wrong things like this. I decided to try a different tactic of asking you about the citations, providing enough hints that you should easily be able to find them in the report you claim to have read. I'm actually pretty happy with it, since it breaks the cycle of "duck season" "rabbit season" "duck season" and so on, and throws it into sharp relief when you're pointedly ignoring some kind of evidence that disproves your case.
Honestly, I'm happy with the result so far. I think it's a lot more effective at highlighting the fact that you're not actually interested in looking up information, or checking these wild claims you're making against some kind of objective basis.
So. Are you sure you don't feel like looking in the table of contents of the link I sent you, and locating the specific section which might possibly contain the answer to your question? There is, really, only one entry that qualifies. It should be very easy.
Of course, you could also pretend that someone me sending you the link and telling you to look in the table of contents near the bottom of the first page and you will probably find the information you seek, represents me not giving you a citation. You can claim that. It is your right. I will not stop you.
Once again a wall of text without evidence. I am wondering why I am taking the time to even read this.
You seem to be unable to discern between a conclusion and the evidence for said conclusion. One cannot come to a conclusion without evidence for it.
What information is used to come to the conclusion in the UN paragraphs you are linking?
Yeah, sure, my lack of posting documents with detailed explanations of what the evidence was, and pointing to where within those documents you can find that information -- that's the problem here. How could I not have seen it 🙂. I can only hope to do better in the future.
(Pages 8-11 cover the standards of proof and methodology employed in general, and of course each subsection discusses briefly what specific evidence was employed in reaching the conclusions of that section.)
Here's the link to the report. I sent it to you already, but maybe it was eaten by a bear in transit.
Hey, quick question -- you seemed to say that the report covered only the festival itself, as part of an argument where it would be impossible for rape to even have occurred because apparently attacking the festival was an active firefight and not a terrorist attack on a helpless and terrified civilian population. What are the five subsections of III(c)1 that come after the first one (festival and surroundings), please? I am testing your reading comprehension and ability to follow links to evidence, since you seem to be having a great deal of difficulty in doing so.
I did not ask you which factors were taken into consideration I asked you which factors were used as evidence for the conclusion of the report. Which the UN refuses to use as evidence that Hamas committed rape.
Consider reading https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/pramila-pattens-rape-fantasies instead of the UN report. Legalese proves too difficult for some.
Hey, quick question -- you seemed to say that the report covered only the festival itself, as part of an argument where it would be impossible for rape to even have occurred because apparently attacking the festival was an active firefight and not a terrorist attack on a helpless and terrified civilian population. What are the five subsections of III(c)1 that come after the first one (festival and surroundings), please? I am testing your reading comprehension and ability to follow links to evidence, since you seem to be having a great deal of difficulty in doing so.
Actually, I got curious and read a bit of your link, and I have some comments:
II(7) claims that the team was purely guided and fed information by the Israeli government, and didn't offer "any dissent, even a peep, from the official 'narrative'". This is verifiably false; Patten debunked some of the Israeli government's more outlandish claims by analyzing evidence, and also among other things visited the West Bank and called for a corresponding investigation into IDF and settler sexual violence (section IV(81) in the UN report.)
III(10) wildly mischaracterizes the scale of the abuse that the UN report alleges; adding up various selected numbers from the report to arrive at a lower bound of 5 on the number of instances of sexual abuse, which is so wildly out of line with what the report actually says that it only be explained by someone who read the UN report, but cherry-picked some things out of it and presented them with the assumption that people would read the dishonest summary and not compare it to the original report.
I stopped reading at that point. As with a lot of these things, it's not possible for me to verify anything directly about what actually happened on the ground in Israel or Gaza. I can only read reports. But, I can definitely say that when one report is being grossly dishonest in its summary of what is contained in a different report, which I can also obtain and read for myself, then that first report is clearly lying.