More UN Lies about Israel By Brendan is spiked’s chief political writer

A new UN report on Israel’s ‘gender-based violence’ against Palestinians is full of hogwash

Spiked : The United Nations is hardly known for fair or cool commentary on Israel. But its latest report really takes the biscuit. It comes from its Human Rights Council. It is titled ‘More Than a Human Can Bear’.

It is a breathless account of all the ‘gender-based violence’ Israel has apparently visited on Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. ‘Gender persecution’ and ‘sexual violence’ have been rife courtesy of those monsters in the Israel Defence Forces, the report says. Guess what? It’s hogwash. This is without question one of the most dishonest official documents I have ever read.

The report made waves in the global media this week. And in the Israelophobic cesspit of social media, where there’s a voracious appetite for tales of Israeli evil. ‘UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and “genocidal acts” in Gaza’, said a BBC headline. The Washington Post wrung its hands over Israel’s use of ‘sexual humiliation’ as a weapon of war. These people should have read the report. They’d have discovered that many of the things these ‘experts’ refer to as ‘sexual humiliation’ and ‘gender-based violence’ are in fact normal wartime events, common to virtually every conflict in history.

Consider the report’s analysis of the IDF’s treatment of ‘men and boys’ in Gaza. There’s a whole chapter on ‘sexual violence against men and boys’. Apparently, men and boys were frequently ‘subjected to acts of a sexual nature’. It sounds awful, until you realise that the ‘experts’ include within this definition such run-of-the-mill activities as searching fighting-age males for weapons. The IDF, conscious that suicide bombings are a favoured military tactic of Hamas, sometimes requires arrested men to undress to their underwear. And the report refers to this as ‘forced public stripping’, violence with ‘sexual characteristics’. There’s no other way to put it: this is insane.

The idea that the IDF gets a kick from compelling fighting-age males to undress is at best misinformation, and at worst yet another defamation against the Jewish State, which is always seen as having uniquely nefarious motives. The report laments the ‘forced public nudity’ experienced by ‘men and boys’ in Gaza, as if the IDF were a gang of porn-sick voyeurs. Making fighting-age men remove their outer clothing is not ‘sexual violence’, you loons – it’s a means for the IDF to search for suicide belts. Hundreds of Israelis have been butchered by Hamas ‘men and boys’ wearing bombs under their shirts. To demonise Israel’s hunt for such weaponry as a perversion, as the sick thrill of ‘forced nudity’, is bad faith on steroids.

The usual double standards are at play. There are countless incidents from history of fighting-age men being rounded up in warzones to be thoroughly searched. Was that also violence with sexual characteristics, or is it only when the army of the Jewish nation does it that we’re encouraged to think, ‘What a bunch of degenerates’? Shockingly, the report describes the IDF’s very separation of young men from the rest of the population as ‘gender persecution’. Yes, you heard that right: to isolate fighting-age men for interrogation is oppression on the basis of maleness.

Read it all here....