In the past several days, the IDF has released information about the acts of rape and sexual sadism Hamas members committed against both women and children on October 7. Nicole Lampert examines how Western feminists have reacted:

The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars,” to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to “colonial feminism.”

Here in the UK, this approach is perhaps best embodied in the work of Sisters Uncut, a charity that boasts its own “Feministo” committed to “taking direct action for domestic-violence services.” [After holding a massive anti-Israel protest], the charity issued a 600-word statement, filled with references to “apartheid,” “genocide,” and disproved reports that the IDF had bombed Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital. There was no mention, however, of the 239 abducted Israelis, roughly 100 of whom are believed to be women, or the sexual assaults that took place on October 7.

When the journalist Hadley Freeman pointed out this wasn’t terribly feminist of them, the group responded by claiming reports of Hamas’s sex attacks amounted to “the Islamophobic and racist weaponization of sexual violence.” Towards the end of their rambling statement, they concluded: “no people would ever accept being murdered, humiliated, dispossessed, racially targeted, oppressed, cleansed, exiled, and colonized without resisting.”

In fact, the only [such] charity in the UK to call out Hamas’s sexual violence was Jewish Women’s Aid.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.