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The New York Times “investigative report” on Hamas’s “sexual violence” is a master class in crappy journalism
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I teach writing, not journalism, but once a semester I include a key style lesson on selection, slanting, and charged language, and why using words in these ways constitutes a poor substitute for solid evidence and reasoning. The New York Times December 28th “reporting,” if you can call it that, demonstrates all three. In “Screams without Words,” three reporters try and fail to paint a persuasive picture of sexual crimes by Hamas. Their work attests to the untrustworthiness of the Times to give its readers reliable reporting instead of being a shill for “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
The article is poorly written, but worse than that, it is manipulative, and manipulative writing isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. But it’s also dangerous and that’s why we need to know how to deconstruct it.
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Simply put, selection means highlighting some details and not others; what is left out is just as important as what is included. For example, if I say Ilhan Omar is a hijab-wearer but not a congressional representative, I am telling the world that her Muslim headscarf is more important than her work. I am reducing her to her faith, though that is a charitable interpretation. Most of the time, focus on a Muslim woman’s attire is one component of Islamophobic discrediting and bigotry.
Slanting constitutes using language that has a bias baked right in. If I say “war” instead of genocide or “terrorists” instead of the resistance, I am conveying my beliefs through word choice. If I call peace activists “militants,” I am suggesting that people demanding a cease-fire are a threat.
Charged language comprises words that made you go “ouch,” and they are typically deployed in an appeal to emotion, also a logical fallacy. Simply put, a writer uses language that arouses emotion in her reader to stir support rather than relying on evidence and reasoning. If I say Netanyahu is a Nazi, I am using a charged term to describe him rather than detailing his propensity for incitement and fascism. (Nazi is so popularly used in this way, I think it’s lost some of its power.)
I teach these elements in the broader context of a course that often includes critical discourse analysis (CDA). Simply put, CDA is a means to reveal the way words reinforce and reproduce inequality in service to control of a narrative. In my course, we use CDA to deconstruct racist medical texts that dehumanize Black people in a way linguist Martha Solomon describes as “maximizing differences” and “minimizing sameness.” In other words, if I want to make you, reader, believe that a group is Other or “less than” you and me, I will distort the ways they are unlike us and minimize the ways in which they are. For example: “Palestinians don’t love their children like we do; if they did, they wouldn’t use them as human shields.” A dehumanizing characterization that leaves us no choice but to bomb them, right?
Powerful stuff, these slippery manouevers. So much so that the reader won’t even know she is being hoodwinked. Taken for granted, duped, and treated like someone without critical thinking skills.
In short, manipulated.
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Let’s see how this all plays out in “Screams without Words,” longform journalism that purports to lay out a “pattern of sexual violence” inflicted by Hamas on Israeli women and girls. Later, I will compare it to an article on the children of Gaza to identify how Jewish and Arab victims and perpetrators are described very differently, with the clear intent to make Jewish victims more relatable, Hamas more animal-like, and Israeli perpetrators who bomb babies — well — the most moral army in the world.
First of all, you might think that the title comes from a victim, but it doesn’t: It comes from the statement of a witness who is also an Israeli soldier. I’ll come back to that, because all of the information in this ground-breaking story comes from the Israeli military, and if the debunked beheaded babies are any indication, we need more rigorous fact-finding. Shouldn’t there be an international investigation and verification of “the facts” by a neutral party in this story as well? Wouldn’t Israel want that kind of proof?
You’d think so, but Israel won’t allow that…because controlling the narrative is important when you are trying to jinn up support for a genocide (notice my word choice).
The next part of the article’s title asserts “new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality.” First, remember that it says details. Second, notice that the charged language in the title: mutilation and brutality committed against Israeli women. This is important, because it arouses the reader’s indignation. And that reader is hungry for details to justify that indignation, and rightly so.
The article then tells of a video depicting the burned body of a woman, “vagina exposed.” After a few lines about the October “massacre” by Hamas “terrorists” (and Hamas is always described this way), we are told that “Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush (the deceased) was raped.” They believe it because there is no evidence. But remember that what you leave out is as important as what you include. What is left out — for now — is that they have zero evidence. But the reporters don’t say that. Instead, they let the reader sit with the mental picture of an exposed vagina on a burned body in a paragraph about terrorists, while we overlook the source — the Israeli police.
The woman, Ms. Abdush, the reporters tell us, “has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls” by Hamas, who “brutalized” them.
So far, we have selection and slanting: Women were brutalized, though we don’t yet know what that means; further, we are told to believe it based on stirring adjectives and — again — on the word of “Israeli officials.” But writing that respects you is writing that offers facts and reasons and lets you use your good brain to decide what you think.
That doesn’t happen here. We are told that “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” They identify “at least seven locations where Israeli girls and women appear to have been sexually assaulted.” Describing the details as painful is an example of slanting; who feels the pain of the details? The reader. If they had instead written about uncovering new details of the crime, we could decide, as the reader, whether we feel pain, rage, doubt, or grief based on the evidence. But they are already telling us how to feel.
(Note to self: The first publication of this article was on November 18th, which wasn’t “two months” after the Hamas attack: It was six weeks. Something to ponder.)
We are told that four witnesses described in “graphic detail” seeing women raped and killed in locations where Ms. Abdush’s “half-naked body was found sprawled on the ground” (selection and slanting here to paint a mental picture of her) and that the 30 victims had “signs of abuse in their genital areas.” What signs? I worked on violence against women for years, and I never heard rape described this way. Physical evidence of rape includes tears, bruising, finger marks, scratches, and redness, to name a few, but we don’t get these kinds of investigative terms. So what are the signs?
Instead the Israeli police provided the reporters with photographs of one corpse with “dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin” and two other dead Israel soldiers “at a base near Gaza who appeared were shot directly into their vaginas.”
Wait, a base near Gaza? That’s not part of the October 7th music festival location, is it? Oh, I get it; this is the “larger pattern.” But when did these crimes happen? There is no context, nothing to help us understand this grab-bag of “horrors.” I’m confused.
Let’s keep going.
The Israeli police admit “shock and confusion” on the “deadliest day” in Israeli history. They weren’t focused on collecting “semen samples” or requesting autopsies. They didn’t closely examine crime scenes. They can’t say how many women were rapedbecause “most are dead” and “no survivors have spoken publicly.”
“A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties” means that the “slaughtered” bodies are now in the ground, their bodies having been “hauled away by the truckload.”
More charged language — is it to distract from the non-existence of evidence? There is no interim description of the process by which the bodies were collected and buried, just the “truckload” reference, which is itself crude.
Then come a few quotations by an “expert” who says that rape can be prosecuted based on witness testimony when forensics aren’t available. No reference to Hamas, no connection to the story other than that his asserting — for the reporters, I suspect — that we don’t need direct evidence to know who did what to whom.
We need simply to trust the same guys who gave us the beheaded babies.
On to the witnesses.
The first, a young woman who doesn’t want to be identified “because she would be hounded for the rest of her life,” alleges that she hid under a bush. From that spot, bleeding and faint from a gunshot wound in the back, she saw — at a distance of almost 50 feet — “about 100 men.” This strikes me as an unusually specific number, especially from that distance. The men were in “military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits,” she says, and they passed around “badly wounded women.”
She can count about 100 men, but she doesn’t tell us how many women. She does tell us of a woman being bent over, raped, and not just stabbed but having a knife “plunged into her back” (slanted language again) every time the victims “flinches” (which she can see from that same distance).
Then — again from 50 feet — she sees a woman “shredded into pieces,” whatever that means, and the “box cutter” that a “terrorist” uses to “slice” off the woman’s breast which he then tosses to someone else. She sees them “slice” the woman’s face, followed by three more rapes and “severed heads of three more women.”
This is a lot of detail for a person who is faint, hiding under a bush, and 50 feet from the scene. Frankly, it begs credulity. But let’s keep going:
The witness then confesses that she “became an animal.” She told herself not to forget details, “to remember everything.” She has “struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso” — a seemingly random detail. Is the rash related to October 7th, and if so, how? Because anyone can get a rash. But no connection is made.
What is so puzzling about this woman’s story is how some details are so very detailed and others, not so much. One hundred terrorist men but no head count on the victims; the ability to identify a box cutter from 50 feet; the committing details to memory, yet not one licence plate for the “motorcycles, cars and trucks” she saw? And an unwillingness to attest to the details she worked so hard to memorize in an investigation, which is what should happen when there are such atrocities; otherwise, why memorize them?
Doesn’t she want justice for the women Hamas “sliced and shredded”?
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Next there is the “screams without words” witness who is also an Israeli soldier. He witnessed five men “in civilian clothes” who dragged a “naked and screaming” young woman from a van then raped “and…slaughtered” her.
A friend corroborates the testimony, saying the men were “literally butchering her.”
If the rapists were in civilian clothes, how do the witnesses know they were Hamas “terrorists”? How do we know anything about the rapists? Did the witnesses get the license plate or any details that would identify the perpetrators as Hamas? This question is especially pertinent to the witness described as having “trained Congolese soldiers; wouldn’t memorizing these details have occurred to him?
Apparently, no.
Finally we are told about a paramedic in the Israeli commando unit who found the naked corpse of a girl with “semen smeared on her back.” However, “he did not document the scene.” Further, he was not identified in the story because “he serves in an elite unit.”
My first question is, can you identify semen on a body hours after an attack, just by looking at it?
Second, why didn’t he document the scene, particularly if he is from “an elite unit”?
Several paragraphs that follow are murky in structure and implication. Some of the dead bodies from the Hamas attack were brought to one “Shura military base,” where they showed “signs of sexual violence.” But these are among the military dead, it seems: bodies of soldiers from Gaza observation posts that also bear the vague “signs of sexual violence,” which is still not explicitly defined. Ten bodies, to be exact, one with “fingernails…pulled out,” which is violent but not sexual. Who did what to whom, and when? Is it even possible, from this information, for the reader to make a sound inference?
Up to this point, the “detailed patterns” of Hamas’s sexual violence have not emerged. What the article presents is the testimony of IDF or Israeli police witnesses whose recollection strains credulity. But the “brutalization” and “mutilation,” the woman who is “a symbol of horrors,” and the ruination of young women (like us, American readers!) tell us that even without better evidence and reasoning, we can and must conclude that Hamas are not only terrorists, they are vicious sexual predators.
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Hamas admits killing and kidnapping civilians, but they deny the charges of rape.
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The final section of the article is on the reporters’ “investigation,” where we are told that even though the Israeli police have a ton of footage from Hamas cameras and “many images of mutilated bodies,” the national police have “zero autopsies, zero.”
Zero forensic evidence and no survivor testimony.
None. (I can almost hear the SVU ba-dump-bump.)
But lest we doubt, we are once again reminded by a spokesman for the Israeli national police, of the “two soldiers shot in the vagina,” a photograph of which his casually pulls up on his Iphone while sitting “at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem” (more random details that add nothing to the story. ) What I know from my time working on victims’ issues is that having graphic photographs of a mutilated victim on his Iphone is not only weird, it would — in any law enforcement office worth its salt — be prohibited. Pictures of victims are evidence, and revictimizing families and victims themselves is too big a risk to share the images on smart phones.
In any case, if we still aren’t persuaded, his colleague is going to tell us what we are supposed to believe after reading this whole piece of absurdly sophomoric journalism:
Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
Yes, reader, you don’t need evidence! Don’t ask why Israel won’t allow international investigators to question survivors and review the footage of tapes. Don’t doubt the sketchy tales spun by witnesses or the charged language that bangs into your brain the brutality and sexual depravity of Hamas. You can trust the work of a random woman who tells you whom to hate! After all, the writers tell us, “the corpses tell the story,” and sadly, they are all in the ground. To ask anyone who survived to come forward and testify is undue “pressure.”
You have to just believe it! Because
Jewish voices are always credible…because Israelis are like us, and those Arabs aren’t. They hate women!
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The last part of the story isn’t worth recounting except to say that it is another appeal to emotion, though less offensive than the previous ones. Descriptions of grief, loss, and anguish. Yes — killing civilians inflicts trauma.
Isn’t that what Palestinians have been saying for decades?
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In sum, “Screams without Words” is a chowder of slanted and charged language, selection of some details and omission of others that are equally important (including questions that apparently were not asked of witnesses, like “How did you count 100 men but not get a licence plate?” or “How do you know men in civilian clothing were Hamas?”) — all in service to controlling a narrative of sexual crimes that — if they do exist — merit an independent, verifiable investigation by a neutral party.
That is what Israel should be demanding of the world’s governing bodies, if it really cares about justice for the victims, particularly the deceased who cannot speak for themselves.
I think back to what I teach, the history of race and medicine. More generally, the history of extra-judicial killings of Black men by hanging or shooting, often after torture. They were considered rape-crazed beasts, presumed guilty, a trope that gave us “Birth of a Nation” and the KKK. Many Black bodies have been killed because of this monster myth, killing that goes on to this day.
My point is this: A story thin on evidence and heavily reliant on vague witness testimony, that elides corpses at a music festival and with mutilated bodies of soldiers on a base without a clear demarcation or thesis, is not only sloppy and lazy, it is dangerous.
It’s a story that hopes we, the reader, will rely on the arousal of our emotional brains by images of sexual depravity and overlook the fundamental bottom line : There’s not much to report.
It’s a story that hopes that we will hate Palestinians. And that it has convinced us that genocide is warranted.
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I am not an apologist for violence against any civilian population anywhere. I lived in a shelter for battered women for one year during college, as a night manager; I worked on violence against women programs in the US Department of Justice for eight years; and I am myself a survivor. For that last reason in particular, accurate reporting is important to me.
The article’s stated subtitle about “the weaponization of sexual violence” is misleading, because the report is actually about the weaponization of tropes, in this case, the dehumanizing image of Arab men as beast-rapists, just like the image of the so-called “Black-beast rapist” in white supremacist discourse. It is a manipulative betrayal of actual victims of sexual assault everywhere, and it is an appeal to our basest prejudices.
It is grotesque rape theater, exploiting even the known reticence of sexual assault victims in service to the argument that we shouldn’t need evidence. That we should take it all on face value.
Kind of like the jury did in the case of Emmet Till.
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I have seen countless IDF soldiers proudly admitting — on camera — that they shot Palestinian babies and children, that they threatened to rape Palestinian women, men, and children. I have seen clips of Arab men and boys in the freezing winter wind stripped and paraded (“but not independently verified,” because though we should believe Israelis, we definitely should not believe Gazans). I have seen IDF soldiers smashing Gazan houses and rifling through the clothing of Palestinian women, saying they are sluts and whores. I have read about the Palestinian boy raped by in an Israeli prison and how a State Department employee took the report seriously — where is that report? I have heard Palestinian men, women, and children tell of sexual assaults in Israeli prisons, where they are stripped, beaten, threatened, starved, and deprived of counsel, most of them having committed no crime other than to be Palestinian.
Where is the “detailed narrative” of the Israeli “weaponization of sexual violence,” New York Times?
I looked hard, but I couldn’t find it.
Shame on the New York Times and shame on the editor that green-lit such salacious writing as “investigative reporting.”
A final note: the “reporters” interviewed over 150 people for this story, and that’s the best they could do? If they wrote it for my class, they wouldn’t pass.
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For a better analysis, watch “Debunking Israel’s ‘mass rape’ propaganda” on the Electronic Intifada at
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-debunking-israels-mass-rape-propaganda.
