Has humanity been 'cancelled'?

Weaponising victims

So I was browsing Instagram today and I saw a story post from Australian self proclaimed ‘feminist’ and author Constance Hall (@mrsconstancehall) with a repost from @celebrities4palestine and @nida_aljazeera showing a photo of Noa Argamani with big capital letters in a red box claiming “FORMER ISRAELI CAPTIVE NOA ARGAMANI DENIES HAMAS MISTREATMENT”. Hall has added her own commentary with “I have often wondered how Noa felt with the way her story was changed by all the insta hero’s obsession with (gun emoji) Arabs. And now we know”.

I would like to say that I was shocked, but sadly I was not. What started months ago as shock has painfully turned to disgust, disappointment and a deep seated sadness for how normalised the dehumanisation of Israelis has become. In reference to the above quote Noa stated “As a victim of October 7, I will not allow myself to be victimised once again by the media”. And as she should, she is telling her story her way, and the truth was she survived the partial collapse of a building she was in due to an Israeli air strike.

But lets make this crystal clear. Noa should never have been there in the first place. She was violently taken from her boyfriend and friends on October 7, forced on to the back of a bike and paraded through Gaza, then held captive, against her will for 245 days. There is no reality where this is ok. I don’t care whether she was fed grapes by the angels and slept in satin sheets – a prison is a prison, and any suggestion that being held hostage in hostile territory by terrorists is ok, as long as you weren’t beaten, is abhorrent.

What Argamani did say at a meeting in Tokyo was “Every night, I was falling asleep and thinking, this may be the last night of my life… Until the moment I was [rescued]… I just did not believe that I’m still surviving.” During the time that Noa was being held, her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and Noa lost valuable months with her. She was able to spend mere moments with her mother in a compromised state of health before she died. Adding to Noas ongoing trauma is of course that her boyfriend Avinatan is still being held captive in Gaza, and considering six hostages have just been found dead in tunnels in Gaza, it beggars belief that anyone with a moral compass would proudly gloat on Instagram that Israeli hostages are being treated well.

So what makes a person, who has built a platform on feminist values stand with the terrorist captors of a 26 year old woman? Hall also denied that any rape or sexual violence occurred on October 7, even going as far as to post a ‘fake’ UN meme saying as much. With so much as stake, and 377k followers that rarely question anything their ‘Queen’ says, the very least she could have done was actually read the real UN report – too hard I guess. The common denominator in both these examples is the victims are Israeli, or Jews.

The only possible explanation that explains such a shift in perspective from feminist to ‘don’t believe women, even when its GoPro’s in real time’ is dehumanisation. The mental loophole that allows people to minimise the abuse of others and still feel good about themselves. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ that needed to be cleared out. When we dehumanise people, we give ourselves a moral ‘free pass’ to accept the unacceptable. If you think of kidnapping, murder, rape and torture is evil, then dehumanisation of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify them.

I can’t imagine the horror and life long trauma of surviving October 7, only to then have to live through 245 days in captivity. But to then be used as a pawn and to have your words weaponised against you, and the remaining hostages, is to me unfathomable. To Noa, to the surviver’s of October 7, the family members of those lost, and to the victims that are still being held captive, your stories matter. I see you, and I hear you. I will never forget.