A social media account called metoo_washu, created to help survivors of sexual violence at Washington University in St. Louis, claimed falsely on Tuesday that the Israeli government is guilty of “sexual violence inflicted upon Palestinians.”
There are, rather infamously, very few documented cases of sexual misconduct against Palestinians by the Israeli military, which critics have tried to attribute to racism rather than the morality of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as Hen Mazzig wrote in 2016:
The claims go beyond being absurd – in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many Palestinians have been raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew, none. She triumphantly responded that I was right, because, she said, “You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won’t touch them.”
Such irrational accusations are symptomatic of dangerous anti-Semitism.
The metoo_washu post makes the accusations against Israel without providing links or evidence to its claims:
In a different post, the metoo_washu account condemned allegations of sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis, though in the context of a post describing Israel as an imperialist project that should be eliminated in favor of a Palestinian state.
Breitbart News reached out to officials at Washington University at St. Louis to comment on whether metoo_washu was an officially recognized group. It appears to be what media coverage calls an “anonymous survivor Instagram account.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.