An Open Letter to University Presidents
5 min read
The video of an Islamic Jihad terrorist’s confession of rape on October 7 is a window into the machinations of evil.
Reader discretion is advised.
The IDF interrogation of 28-year-old Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Qasem is chilling. He relates how he entered a home on a kibbutz and found a girl (we don’t know her age) cowering in a room. She asked him for help. “I took her and threw her on the couch,” he says. “The devil overcame me. I laid her down, started undressing her, and did what I did.”
The interrogator asks, “What did you do?”
Qasem answers, “I slept with her.”
The interrogator calls him on the euphemism, saying, “You did not sleep with her. Sleep is to sleep. So what did you do?”
Qasem finally admits, “I raped her.”
“The devil overcame me.”
“I did what I did.”
“I slept with her.”
Why did it take three evasions before this rapist could admit the atrocity he committed?
The Torah’s declaration that human beings were created, “in the image of God” means that they have free will to choose between good and evil. This implies that humans are responsible for their choices. Yet, taking responsibility for their actions is one of a person’s hardest feats.
Judaism delineates three steps in the process of teshuva, repentance:
If another person is harmed, the fourth step is to ask for forgiveness.
The process of change can only begin with admitting, without rationalizations, justifications, or euphemisms, that one did something grievously wrong. That first step is the hardest.
The process of change can only begin with admitting, without rationalizations, justifications, or euphemisms, that one did something grievously wrong. That first step is the hardest.
Take, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX cryptocurrency, who was sentenced last week to 25 years imprisonment for defrauding his customers, investors, and lenders of $8 billion. In his final statement before the judge, Bankman-Fried said, “I’m sorry about what happened at every stage. At the end of the day, I failed everyone I cared about.”
But he did not admit to the crimes he committed, which robbed many people of their life savings. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos told the court, “What we did not hear is accepting responsibility for lying, for stealing and for fraud.”
Evil’s biggest backer is the rejection and denial of truth. After October 7, despite evidence and eye-witness testimonies of first responders, Hamas proclaimed that none of their “fighters” had raped any women, because Islam forbids rape. Israel’s attempt to preserve what was left of the dignity of the victims had to face repeated denials of the atrocities, such as U.S. Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s November 17 claim at a White Plains rally that reports of rape and child murders were “a lie.”
Evil’s biggest backer is the rejection and denial of truth.
Reluctantly, Israel produced a video of the atrocities, mostly taken by the terrorists themselves, from their body cameras and their proud pictures sent to their parents back in Gaza showing how they had murdered and raped Jews. In the face of this incontrovertible evidence and its own investigation, the NY Times, after sitting on the story for weeks due to some of its editorial staff’s opposition to publishing the truth about Hamas, finally on December 28 published a front-page expose of the shocking sexual atrocities that Israel had been claiming for almost three months.
It took until early March, five months after the massacre, for the United Nation’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict to issue a report verifying that “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October.” Hamas promptly rejected the report.
In the current conflict, truth is a major casualty. The ubiquitous accusation that the Jews are “colonists,” denies the reality, obvious to anyone who has read the Bible, that Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. Abundant historical and archeological evidence shows a continuous presence in Israel of Hebrew-speaking Jews from at least 1000 B.C.E. until the Arab Conquest of 634 C.E. Even after the Romans exiled many Jews in 70 C.E. and 135 C.E., and although Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem, Jewish life thrived in the north of Israel, the Galilee and the Golan Heights. Archeologists have discovered remains of many synagogues in those areas from the 6th century C.E. After the Muslim armies from Arabia conquered northern Israel in 636 C.E., Jewish communities began to diminish.
Every week during this war new lies are issued by Hamas in Gaza: that Israeli troops fired on an aid convoy, that Israeli soldiers raped nurses in Shifa hospital, the unreliable numbers of dead in Gaza, ad nauseum. Respected news outlets in the West obligingly quote the “Gaza Health Ministry” while failing to mention that it is a branch of the Hamas government.
In this lie-laden milieu, one terrorist’s confession that he raped a Jewish girl on October 7, as horrid as it is, is a gasp of oxygen in a world being asphyxiated by lies.
AM YISRAEL CHAI
Has his confession appeared in any US mainstream media? Well written Sara Yoheved.
when did this news come out?
Last Friday
As always, Rebbitzen Rigler writes a perfect essay, sad and atrocious as it is.
Since I watched that video when it came out I've had his words going round in my head and I've been feeling nauseous imagining what all those tortured,killed,captured and tormented souls have and Are currently going through.
There's no words.
We better clean out hamas/Amalek.
As the author so accurately writes, "the world is being asphyxiated by lies" but that's only because anti-Semites and the pro-Arab terrorist population want to believe them.
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This is nothing new, as malicious slandering of Jews by (jealous!) Jew-haters has always been part and parcel of Jewish history -- but no matter because we have our Creator's assurance that we will outlive our enemies. And any thinking person can see the truth in this: we defy historical odds!