At her Blacklisted site, Eve Barlow has posted a subtitled video of the full interview with released Israeli hostage Romi Gonen here. The interview appeared on Israel’s Channel 12. I posted a clip from the interview last week along with an excerpt from this Times of Israel story on what Gonen had to say.
With the full interview now out, Barlow brings her brand of righteous fury to Romi’s story. She calls out the mainstream media outlets that have covered up the story. I note that the Daily Mail has posted Imogen Garfinkel’s account of Romi’s ordeal in “My rape hell in Gaza.” This is most of what Barlow has to say:
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Thus far, Gonen’s incendiary and heartbreaking story has not been picked up by the BBC, or Sky News, or New York Times, nor Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, the Guardian…. Nobody has shared the testimony of a then 23-year-old innocent young woman who was kidnapped from a music festival, after witnessing her friend be shot and killed in front of her, only to then spend more than one year in captivity in Gaza, during which time she experienced sexual assault by four different men. They included one “nurse” at the now infamous Al Shifa hospital, and one “journalist” (ie the Hamas militants that human rights “feminist” lawyers of the West advocate for, while turning a blind eye to Gonen, and her fellow victims).
Let’s not forget that the cosplaying humanitarians of the West tore down Gonen’s hostage poster. They rolled their eyes as her sister Yarden stood before the United Nations while Romi was still held captive. Yarden spoke of exactly these sexual atrocities happening to Israeli women – and men – during and post October 7 at the hands of Palestinians in Gaza. Romi and Yarden’s critics claimed that rape was a form of resistance, not a war crime. They had the audacity to make baseless accusations instead towards the IDF; alleging that soldiers were molesting Palestinians in Gaza. They inverted the truth, turning the victim into the oppressor.
So yes it’s been four days [since clips of the interview were first released].
Where are all the journalists who rushed instantly to publish stories on Palestinians being abused sexually by the IDF without evidence? All the journalists who claim without proof that Israeli prisons are torturing their inmates? All the non-profits who rushed to scream that Israel was abusing Greta Thunberg’s Instagram-posing amateur fellow sailors when they were intercepted this summer – again with no basis? All the celebrities insisting that there was no rape on or after October 7 but who enthusiastically came to the defense of hate-baiting artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan and political agitators such as Mahmoud Khalil? Where are all the voters who insisted they couldn’t in good faith hit the ballot box for alleged sex pest Andrew Cuomo in the New York Mayoral Election, so chose Jihad-loving Mamdani instead? Where are their voices now? Did their brains fall down a toilet?
Prominent Hollywood voices denied that reports of sexual abuse, such as Gonen’s, would ever exist. Rosie O’Donnell, Indya Moore, Sara Ramirez, Saul Williams and John Cusack, among many others, have spread rape denial to their millions of followers. In the name of social justice. They owe Gonen an apology. They owe women an apology. They owe everyone who has ever been sexually abused an apology. That’s how this goes, no?
Where are they all now that the lioness Romi Gonen has bravely spoken up in front of millions? A young Jewish woman who survived a year-plus in captivity, held by Islamic radicals who took advantage of her whenever they could. She’s not a public figure. She’s not a celebrity embroiled in a controversy. She never asked to be on a world stage. She was just a young girl dancing at a music festival. She’s just a young girl today, rolling a cigarette at home, between takes, doing an unimaginably bold thing: speaking the truth in the public square of today’s online media against a tidal wave of hostility.
Where are you all now? Times Up? Me Too? What’s the matter with you? How dare you to talk about feminism, about surviving, about abuse, about sexual assault, about silencing. How dare you, while with the same mouth spreads lies and disinformation about women who have always fought for all of you – because we’re Jewish, because we won’t apologize, because we’re strong. How dare you erase us. We stood up for non-Jewish survivors and in response we were pitchfork mobbed out of the picture. How can you be a survivor and remain quiet? It is impossible. Progressives and social justice warriors have actively perpetrated the silencing and erasure of Jewish women from the spaces we fought for and built. Defamed us. Libeled us. Abandoned us. We have been silenced for continuing to do the right thing. For consistent advocacy. While they move in with terrorists and justifications for the most intimate forms of violence that they so insist they’re fighting against.
The inversion of truth about Israel and the Jewish people is the great moral crime of my lifetime.
And what of our smug and rightoues Western media? How can you call yourselves journalists? CNN, where are you? Where are the prize-winning women who broke the Harvey Weinstein story? Where is Ronan Farrow? Where is Michelle Obama? Oprah, did you get a new number?
