On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., why so many progressive women have been silent about the extensive reports of widespread rape and sexual assault carried out by Hamas against Israeli women during the massacres of Oct. 7.

What followed was a master class in evasion, both-sidesism and changing the subject from the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“I’ve condemned what Hamas has done,” Jayapal allowed, briefly, before moving immediately to condemn Israel. Bash persisted: “I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking about Hamas.”

“I’ve already answered your question, Dana,” Jayapal replied, adding that while rape was “horrific,” it “happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

A day after the CNN interview, I attended a conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, organized by the Israeli mission and Jewish groups, in which Hamas’ “tools,” to use Jayapal’s term, were described. Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand were among the headline speakers. But the important testimony came from Israelis who bore witness to what they had seen firsthand or heard from eyewitnesses of Oct. 7.

Here is some of what I heard, which people like Jayapal would do well to hear also. It’s extremely graphic.

Yael Richert, a chief superintendent with the Israeli national police, quoting a survivor of the Nova rave massacre:

“Everything was an apocalypse of corpses. Girls without any clothes on. Without tops. Without underwear. People cut in half. Butchered. Some were beheaded. There were girls with a broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart, in a split.”

An unidentified survivor of the rave, shown in a video with her face obscured:

“They laid a woman down, and I understood they were raping her. He was basically shifting her around and passing her to another person. She stood on her feet; she was bleeding from her back. He’s pulling her hair. She’s not dressed, and he cuts her breast, throws it on the road, and they are playing with it.”

Shari Mendes, an architect and army reservist who helped identify and prepare female corpses for burial as part of the Israeli military’s morgue staff, describing what she saw:

“It seems as if the mutilation of these women’s faces was an objective in their murders. Some heads were bashed in so badly that brains were spilling out.”

She added:

“Many young women arrived in bloody shredded rags or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody. Our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breasts. There seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”

Simcha Greinman, an emergency medical worker with ZAKA, Israel’s volunteer identification, extraction and rescue teams:

“I was called down on Oct. 7 to collect bodies and remains from the terror attack. On one of the days, I was called into a house, told there were a few bodies there, and I walked into the house. I saw in front of my eyes a woman; she was naked. She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we cannot identify her, from her head to her toes.”

He went on:

“On a different day, we got a mission to go into another house. I walked into this house, into the bedroom; there was a woman leaning on her bed. She was half-naked, from the waist down. She was shot in the back of her head. When we turned her around she had an open grenade in her hand. Thank God no one on our team got hurt.”

Following the testimonies, Yifat Bitton, an Israeli law professor, noted that the victims had been “silenced twice”— first by Hamas on Oct. 7, and then “by the silence of the very U.N. organizations that were entrusted with the mandate of protecting them.” There were clear signs of sexual abuse from the first moments of the attack, and by mid-November there were authoritative reports of Hamas’ widespread sexual assaults.

Yet it took U.N. Women, the agency that has that mandate to look out for women’s rights globally, eight weeks before issuing a perfunctory statement saying it was “alarmed” by accounts of gender-based atrocities during the attacks of Oct. 7.

As for other so-called human-rights organizations, the website of Human Rights Watch — which includes a page ostensibly devoted to women’s rights — has dozens of news releases about the war in Gaza. Not a word about the rapes. From Amnesty International: nothing that can be found on its website. The National Organization for Women denounced the Oct. 7 attacks on the day they occurred and last week issued a news release condemning “rape as a weapon of war.” But it contained no mention of Hamas.

Why not?

In a remarkable floor speech last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke of “the sting of the double standard,” which, he said, “is at the root of antisemitism.” He also recalled a talk he heard in college by Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, who confronted left-wing hecklers at an event at Harvard.

“We have lived with the double standard throughout the centuries,” Eban told the protesters, Schumer said. “There are always things the Jews couldn’t do. Everyone could be a farmer but not the Jew, everyone could be a carpenter but not the Jew, everyone could move to Moscow but not the Jew, and everyone could have their own state, but not the Jew.”

To which one can today add: Every victim of sexual violence should be heard; no condemnation of rape should ever come with qualifiers; “Silence Is Violence.”

But not when it comes to Jews.

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Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

The last Saturday in November this year marked Holodomor Memorial Day, the 90th anniversary of the Great Famine when Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s autocratic regime ruthlessly starved 4 million Ukrainians to death.

This horrific event is part of the historic backdrop shaping Ukraine’s response to Russia’s war. This experience is why, even as a stalemate sets in and winter approaches, the Ukrainian people oppose the idea of negotiating an end to this conflict.

Ukraine has good reason not to trust that its people would be safe under Russian rule. Russia has a long history with Ukraine, but that history is a far cry from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.”

Rather, Russia’s history with Ukraine is one of abuse, exploitation and horror.

This was true of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, and it remains so under Putin’s autocratic Russia today. But Holodomor is perhaps the starkest reminder.

‘Death by starvation’

Holodomor, in Ukrainian, means “death by starvation.” The specific intent of Stalin’s regime remains a point of debate, but the cruel and massive scale of suffering his policies caused the Ukrainian people, with full knowledge of the consequences, is undeniable.

Stalin stole land, livestock and farming equipment from millions of Ukrainian farmers and forced them to labor on government farms as part of his collectivization policy launched in the late 1920s. The policy was meant to use grain exports, brought under the control of the Soviet state, to fuel the Soviet Union’s industrialization.

Most Ukrainians were small-scale farmers, and they cultivated the breadbasket of Europe, so Stalin used them to feed that transformation. But the famine wasn’t simply the unintended consequence of a cruel economic policy. Collectivization happened alongside mass political repression to intentionally crush Ukraine’s nationalist spirit.

Ukraine had declared independence in the wake of World War I but lost its bid in 1922 after a three-year war with the Bolshevik Red Army and was forced into the Soviet Union. The desire for independence, though, wasn’t defeated, and the Soviet regime knew it. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were arrested, executed or sent to labor camps in the years that followed. Those who opposed collectivization were declared enemies of the state and targeted for elimination.

The Great Famine affected millions across the Soviet Union, as Stalin imposed grain quotas elsewhere too, but he put impossibly high targets on Ukrainian communities specifically to wear them down. And it worked.

About 13% of the Ukrainian population perished in the 1932-33 government-made famine.

The world looked away

The breadbasket was starving to death. Farmers were prohibited from leaving their villages to seek work or food in cities. Villages that failed to meet their quotas were blockaded, leaving the inhabitants to die with no supplies or sustenance. Anyone caught taking produce from a collective field could be shot or imprisoned for stealing from the state.

Meanwhile, the Soviet government extracted millions of tons of grains and had enough in reserves in 1933 to feed 10 million people, according to Soviet records. The government exported and sold Ukrainian grain for cash, fully aware that millions of Ukrainians were dying of hunger as a result. The Soviet government denied the famine, rejected offers of outside assistance and prohibited any discussion of Holodomor for decades thereafter.

For this horrific crime, and many others, Stalin paid no price.

The rest of the world conveniently looked away, and more pressing geopolitical concerns soon made it expeditious for the West to form an alliance with his regime to defeat Germany in World War II.

Putin, like Stalin …

Ukrainians have taken lessons from this brutal history, and Putin has too.

Like Stalin, Putin seeks to violently exploit Ukraine to strengthen himself at home. He uses terror and repression to defeat political enemies. And he expects the rest of the world will ultimately let him get away with it, as he believes he cares more about defeating Ukraine than others care about liberating it.

He could be right. Ukraine is getting few breaks right now. Its military has made no real gains this year, as a bloody stalemate has set in. Military aid commitments from the United States, Ukraine’s biggest backer, are stuck in a dysfunctional Congress. Although most American lawmakers and citizens still support providing military assistance to Ukraine, the issue has become a lightning rod for the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, which retains just enough power to act as an obstacle, much to Putin’s delight. Meanwhile, the onset of another brutal war in the Middle East has made it easier for Ukraine to disappear from the headlines, even as its own war rages on.

History and its consequences

But whether the United States is with them or not, the Ukrainian people will continue the fight. They know this history well and its consequences. They also know what Putin’s military did to their people in massacres in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere across Ukraine in the past two years.

For Ukraine, this isn’t a question of territorial control, power or trade-offs. It’s a question of existence.

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Elizabeth Shackelford is a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

A Burnsville charter school will have to make internal reforms after the school’s founder and two ex-board members, who have also been charged in the “Feeding Our Future” scandal, allegedly misused nearly $300,000 in funds.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Friday announced a settlement with Gateway STEM Academy after an investigation by his office found former school leaders steered school money to companies they owned or controlled.

The attorney general said that wouldn’t have happened if the previous leadership had more oversight of school founder and former executive director Abdiaziz Shafii Farah and had policies in place to prevent conflicts of interest. Farah co-owned one of the companies that got money from the school.

“Nonprofit charter schools must use their resources to further their educational mission, not to benefit insiders,” Ellison said in a news release announcing the settlement.

Farah stopped leading the school he helped found after his indictment for wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit those offenses in the “Feeding Our Future” scandal. He took a leave of absence after his involvement became public in January 2022, and the school hired a replacement, the attorney general’s office said.

Sixty people have been indicted in the “Feeding Our Future” scandal, though many of the cases are yet to be resolved, including Farah’s.

In the Gateway school case, investigators from the attorney general’s office found the school paid more than $173,000 to a company headed by Mahad Ibrahim and more than $117,000 to a company headed by Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff while they served on the school’s board in 2021 and 2022.

Ibrahim and Sharif also were charged in the same federal food funds case as Farah, the attorney general’s office said. None serve on the Gateway board anymore.

Under the settlement announced by the attorney general’s office on Friday, Gateway STEM Academy will have to investigate how the improper transactions occurred, provide “sufficient training” for school leadership on their duties under state and federal law, and not work with Farah, Ibrahim or Shariff.

Ellison said he was encouraged by the school’s new leadership’s cooperation with his office. Leaders with Gateway STEM Academy did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

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