Their faces are bewildered and bloody. It’s chaos.
A voice shouts at them, five terrified young girls, aged 18 and 19: “You dogs! We will step on you. Our brothers died because of you; we will shoot you all.”
One of the girls, her face covered in blood, bravely and calmly tries to bargain. “I have friends in Palestine,” she says. “Someone who speaks English.”
“Quiet! I want you quiet,” her captor shouts back.
Hands bound behind their backs, they’re told to sit down against a wall. It’s hard to tell but there are about two dozen armed terrorists surrounding them.
Then, out of nowhere, the worst of it. A person (he is not a man, he’s not even human) looks at them and says to those around him: “These are the women who can get pregnant. These are the Zionists.”
Then to the girls, he says this: “You are very beautiful.”
Naama Levy believed that by telling them “I have friends in Palestine†they would show mercy. She didn't realize that those radical Islamists have no mercy in their hearts.
— Loay Alshareef لؤي الشري٠(@lalshareef) May 22, 2024
Imagine those demons running a state! It would be disastrous to the region! pic.twitter.com/TYA9SQWyyI
As I’m forcing myself to watch this recording filmed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 last year, I realise I’ve slumped down in my chair. My body is tense, jaw clenched. There’s a scream in my brain and in my belly but no sound is coming out. They’re the same age as my niece. As many of my friends’ daughters.
They’re bound, bloodied and surrounded by terrorists discussing getting them pregnant. Because these girls are Jewish, they know what they’re facing. They know this is not a game. Karina, Naama, Liri, Agam and Daniella. Say their names, I dare you.
This footage is part of what the UN and the rest of the West’s useful morons don’t want you to know about. This is what countries such as Australia would prefer not to have to acknowledge or discuss.
This is deliberate, planned horrific sexual violence and it’s what the Australian Greens and the worst of academia are responding to with “yeah but” or, worse, “it’s not rape, it’s resistance”.
Let me make a couple of things clear. First, none of this is a surprise to our government or any other. They cannot claim ignorance. For months Israel has been sharing the truth, all of it documented and captured by Hamas’s own macabre videos, with politicians and journalists around the world.
Second, the irrefutable truth is the political left in Australia has staked its claim on the side of the men in this video. By refusing to take a side, they’ve taken it. By voting for Palestinian statehood while the hostages remain captive, by refusing to draw a line and by continued moral failure, they stand with the terrorists in this footage.
It made me wonder what our government’s response would have been if there were Australian hostages being held in Gaza.
It barely stopped to take a breath when Australian-Israeli grandmother Galit Carbone, who was born and raised in Sydney, was shot to death with Kalashnikov rifles in her home at Be’eri kibbutz on the morning of October 7 last year. If there were Australian girls being held in the tunnels of Gaza, I honestly believe they’d be hung out to dry by our government, as much as it shames me to say so. It’s so easy to sit on the fence when you’ve got no skin in the game.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Naama, Karina, Liri, Agam and Daniella.
In January Hamas released a video of them, and it’s now clear that footage was also from the day of their abduction. Confronting as that was, the edit released in January was tame by comparison to what we have now seen.
The highly graphic, traumatic footage was released by the parents of these young girls. I can’t imagine how desperate they must feel to allow the world to see their children dehumanised. Beaten to a point that their faces are covered with blood, mouths swollen, surrounded by men who are openly discussing raping them to get them pregnant.
Of all the things I’ve forced myself to watch in the past eight months, to bear witness, I thought I’d reached my breaking point, but here I am again.
To some degree, October 7 shocked me out of my naivety in the sense I never really believed in the existence of pure evil. Innately, I believe in the power of redemption. I don’t support the death penalty. But if one of those girls were my niece I would pull the trigger on those monsters myself to get her back.
So much of the past week has given me cause to believe the world of political elites still uses women, treats women, as a commodity. That the fate of women still will rise and fall on the political tide.
The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi proved this. The Butcher of Tehran, the brutaliser-in-chief of women, the person who ordered tens of thousands to be hanged was honoured with a minute’s silence at the UN. They should have been popping champagne corks.
What an obscene insult to the women who under his direction were beaten, blinded, whipped, hanged and disappeared for things like dancing, letting their hair loose to flow in a summer breeze.
What an insult to the memory of women such as Atefeh Rajabi Ahalaaleh. I’d never heard of her until this week, when in the aftermath of Raisi’s death her story landed in one of my social media feeds. I couldn’t help but read further.
Atefeh was 16 when she was hanged from a crane in a slow, terrifying, public execution in the regional town of Neka. She was killed for crimes against chastity. Depending on what version of her story you read, it was consensual sex or she was raped. Both “crimes” are punishable by death under sharia law. Records were altered to make her 22 rather than legally underage at 16. I supposed even savages don’t want the world to see them hanging children.
Author Salman Rushdie knows a thing or two about extremism. A long-time, well-known supporter of a two-state solution, Rushdie said in an interview with a German podcast this week that rushing a Palestinian state now would facilitate a new Taliban government and a client state of Iran: “Is this what the progressive movements of the Western left wish to create, another Taliban-like state?”
Useful idiots, running headfirst off a cliff and trying to force the rest of us to go with them. I won’t do it.
And what will be the UN’s response to the footage of Karina, Naama, Daniella, Liri and Agam released this week? What will our government say? Will they even watch? Where are the feminist voices demanding that no deals are done until these girls and all the hostages are freed? Where are the Greens and the strong voices in the Labor movement, the female leadership in the Australian government?
I’ll tell you where – they’re busy trading basic values for votes. Propping up their electoral future. Well, let me tell you one thing you can go to the bank on: what a person compromises to keep, they will always end up losing.
Like melting ice on a warm spring morning, the “two sides to this story” narrative is unravelling. It’s getting harder to justify sitting on the fence. After all, as our Prime Minister likes to remind us, it’s about the standard you walk past. I will not walk past this and stay silent.
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