‘Screams Before Silence’

On October 7, more than 1,200 Israeli citizens were brutally murdered, and 250 were taken hostage. The carnage of the attack was apocalyptic. The videos — many taken by the Hamas terrorists themselves — are horrific and terrible to watch. There were countless rapes. Children were burned alive in ovens. Bodies were mutilated and torn apart.

And yet, fairly quickly, Hamas and an ever-growing radical contingent in the West were quick to change the narrative. Hamas jihadis positioned themselves not only as the victims but as the resistance fighters. What they did on October 7 — an ethnic cleansing — is the real outrage and the actual violation of human rights, not the so-called “war crimes” Israel is ostensibly committing against Gaza.

Sheryl Sandberg, former Facebook COO, has been fighting to bring justice and witness to the suffering and atrocities committed against the Israelis, particularly the mass rape of women. She has created and recently released a documentary called “Screams Before Silence,” in which she interviews victims, witnesses, and released hostages. The documentary includes footage of captured Hamas operatives admitting to their crimes.

In an interview with Fox News, Sandberg got right to the point, saying, “If you believe that October 7 was resistance — and I do not believe that; I don’t believe terror is resistance — but if you believe that, sexual violence doesn’t fit into that narrative because rape is never resistance.”

It’s also not politically correct to point out that rape is a common weapon used by men against women of that culture. In an interview with Jordan Peterson, Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father was a Hamas leader, describes his own experiences living in Gaza, where rape is a way to insult your enemies and killing the victim is a way to hide your shame.

Sandberg also declared that this should be a nonpartisan issue. We all should be able to agree that rape is a human rights violation. Sandberg laments what is occurring on college campuses: “University is a time where you go to college. You can talk about any issue, open dialogue. The truth is, the disorder on campus — having places where people don’t feel safe — that doesn’t lend itself to real dialogue about hard issues. That stops the honest conversations we need to have.”

Aside from the fact that colleges enforce diktats against certain types of speech all the time, it’s worth pointing out that a former Facebook COO saying she is a free speech advocate is interesting because of how guilty the social media platform is of censorship and stifling free speech.

What is happening on college campuses is about so much more than misguided college idiots and zealots causing chaos. Many who are instigating these “protests” are bused-in professional activists bought and paid for by interests such as George Soros who benefit from this sort of social turmoil.

By dismissing the rapes and the brutal murders and by flippantly claiming that Gaza’s damages go all the way back to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 trivializes a complex conflict that is far older than that. These atrocities should horrify and sober any sane person. Sandberg is doing her part to wake up the complacent, propagandized West in the hopes of bearing witness to the tragedy and calling attention to the severe blind spot in the discourse regarding the Israel-Hamas war.