Anyone who doubts that “Israel” is an asylum for the criminally insane, and that the lunatics are in charge, must not be following news about the Sde Taiman torture facility. That is where a scandal erupted in early August following the arrest of nine Israeli reservist soldiers on charges of gang-raping a Palestinian hostage with a stick. (They were only charged because their crime was caught on camera, so the US pushed the Israeli authorities to go through the motions of a pro forma prosecution.)
In the world’s eyes, the scandal was that only nine of the torturers at Sde Taiman had been arrested. Israel’s most notorious torture camp, Sde Taiman had long been the site of regular and systematic infliction of the most depraved forms of torture imaginable. Human rights lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, one of the few outside observers who has managed to get inside the torture prison, said: “The treatment is more horrifying than anything we have heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, more than 30 Palestinian hostages have been tortured to death at Sde Taiman since last fall.
But in “Israel,” the scandal was that the nine gang-rapists had been arrested! Immediately a “right to rape” movement broke out, supported by a chorus of voices throughout much of the Israeli media, and featuring pro-rape protesters gathering to show their rabid support for sexual violence at many locations around the country.
Almost as soon as word of the arrests leaked, a crowd of pro-rape protesters, led by parliamentarian Zvi Sukkot and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, gathered outside the gates of Sde Taiman. The two dignitaries incited the crowd to attack the guards, storm the torture camp, and free the rapists. A melee broke out as the right-to-rape rioters overcame the torture camp guards, helped by stand-down orders issued to police by supremacist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and ran wild inside the camp. But they discovered that the rapists, their heroes, had been transferred to Beit Lid in the Occupied West Bank.
That evening, throngs of rape-loving rioters descended on Beit Lid, invading a military court building and later a detention center. According to Le Monde:
Among them were masked, armed men in uniform, some wearing the insignia of Force 100, a unit accused of multiple acts of violence against detainees. Tally Gotliv, a member of parliament from Likud, the ruling far-right party, cheered on the rioters outside, along with two other far-right Mps.
The rioters were unable to immediately free the rapists. But shortly after the nationwide outbreak of pro-rape protests and riots, accompanied by a groundswell of pro-rape opinion in Israeli television and print media, five of the ten accused rapists were freed pending trial.
Since the initial protests and riots, the “right to rape” has been vociferously defended at the highest levels of Israeli politics and society. According to al-Jazeera:
On being asked by Ahmad Tibi, one of the Arab MPs within the Israeli Knesset last week if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum”, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”
The United States government, in its dozens of unjust wars on almost every continent, has probably committed even more war crimes than “Israel” has. But Americans, for the most part, don’t vaunt their worst crimes. US officials were embarrassed by incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and some have worked hard to make such horrors the exception rather than the rule.
But in Israel, the worst forms of abuse are the rule, not the exception, and much if not most of the population, as well as its leaders, enthusiastically embrace systematic rape, torture, and the murder of defenseless women and children. As Robert Inkalesh writes: “The mere fact that Israeli elected officials supported the gang-rapists, who so badly sodomised their victim that he died of his wounds, tells you everything you need to know about Israel’s government.”
An Aberration?
Is Israel’s right-to-rape frenzy an aberration? Unfortunately it is not. The Zionist occupation has spent 76 years systematically committing a long-term slow-motion genocide against the people of Palestine, and its morals have degraded to the point that comparing Israelis to the people of Sodom (ahl lut) might be an insult to Sodom.
The Israeli right-to-rape protests are not the settler colony’s first mass movement to exhibit almost unbelievable depravity. Huge mobs of Israeli protesters and rioters have been regularly blocking food trucks, and this at a time when UN officials declare that more than a million Palestinians are in imminent danger of starvation. And when the food trucks do get through, Israeli soldiers, steeped in the same genocidal mentality, wait till the starving Palestinians have crowded around the trucks, and then shoot them dead, sometimes over 100 at a time.
Many of the Zionists’ worst crimes explicitly target helpless women and children. Israel systematically murders children by various methods, including:
*Deliberately blowing up their houses, using an AI tracking system sadistically named “Where’s Daddy” designed to hold back on bombing until “suspected Hamas members” return home so their women and children can also be murdered.
*Routinely shooting children and babies with sniper rifles, often putting two bullets, one through the head and one through the heart, into the same small body. (This has been going on regularly for decades as a matter of de facto national policy, as reported by Chris Hedges in 2003.)
*Bragging about shooting pregnant women in the belly: One of the Israeli Defense Forces’ most popular T-shirts shows a visibly pregnant Palestinian woman with a target on her belly above the legend: “One shot two kills.”
*Regularly and systematically using bulldozers to bury large numbers of Palestinian civilians alive.
*Unleashing killer dogs to rip apart both living and dead bodies, and filming, posting, and celebrating such actions.
*Systematically murdering journalists; the total number killed since October, as of this writing, is 169.
Thanks to the peculiar form of criminal insanity afflicting Israel, Zionists of all stripes, at both the popular and leadership levels, brag about their horrifically depraved behavior rather than denying it, denouncing it, or at least feeling ashamed of it, as would normal people in a normal society (meaning virtually every other society on Earth.) Israelis are the only people who crowd hilltops and throw barbecue parties to celebrate watching Palestinian women and children being blown to bits, crushed under rubble, and burned to death with white phosophorus.
