Victimhood is determined by the those who hold the power. In Palestine as in the US, despite fact and evidence, the media works at the behest of the capitalist class to construct the narrative. The perpetrators of horrible acts such as murder or sexual assault become the victims, and the victims become the perpetrators.
Originally published by Jon Jeter.
In the spring of 1931, a gaggle of nine Black teenage stowaways squared off against a cohort of white teenagers aboard a freight train headed towards Memphis. The ensuing brawl was brief with the African American youths heaving all but one of their white adversaries from the slow-moving train and onto the grassy embankment below.
Forty miles down the tracks, near the town of Paint Rock in northern Alabama, the train rolled to a stop; two uniformed sheriff's deputies and a phalanx of white men armed with rifles, pistols, and shotguns rushed towards the Black youths, and peppered them with questions. Unsatisfied with their answers, the posse arrested the teens on charges of vagrancy and assault, tied them to one another with a plow line, herded them onto the back of a flatbed truck, and drove them to the jail in the county seat of Scottsboro, 21 miles east of Paint Rock.
As they were led away, sheriff’s deputies stood on the depot platform interrogating two young white women dressed in overalls. Twenty-three-year-old Virginia Price and 18-year-old Ruby Bates were sex workers from Huntsville, Alabama, and when asked initially by sheriff’s deputies if the Negroes had “bothered them,” both Price and Bates denied flatly that the teens had made any contact with them. Already on probation for prostitution at the time, Price, the older and more confident of the two, did not welcome the police scrutiny, explaining that she and Bates had merely hitched a ride aboard the train to look for work at Chattanooga's textile mills, and finding none, were returning home. By most accounts, it was only under pressure from the solicitor who prodded the two women (“go ahead and say they did it, that boy attacked you didn’t he?”) that Price recalibrated the hand she’d been dealt and changed her story.
Why yes, Price said upon second thought, they had been raped, savagely so, by the Negroes who beat them, ripped off their clothes, and threatened them with guns and knives.
In an almost laughable story, Price repeatedly told police, reporters and jurors that as many as six of the Black vagrants had attacked her, while the other three violated Bates. Nineteen-year-old Olen Montgomery was the first, she said, penetrating her while 13-year- old Eugene Williams held a knife to her throat, 15-year-old Willie Roberson pried her legs apart and the others cheered fanatically: “Pour it to her, pour it to her.” What’s more, Price said, the dastardly Negroes’ plans extended far beyond one-time sexual gratification, forewarning the fair maidens of their plans to kidnap them, or failing that, to kill them. In Price’s version of events, 19-year- old Andy Wright seemed to have an almost theatrical penchant for exposition similar to the comedian Mike Meyers’ camp parody of cinematic villains in his Austin Powers franchise.
When I put this in you and pull it out you will have a Negro baby.
“When I saw them nab those Negroes,” Price would tell reporters the day following the arrests, “I sure was happy. Mister, I never had a break in my life. Those Negroes have ruined me and Ruby forever. The only thing I ask is that they give them all the law allows.”
Like Price’s cartoonish—and demonstrably false-- account, a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times alleging mass rapes by Hamas militants is only credible if the reader suspends disbelief. Entitled “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7, the 3500-word article reeks of fabulism and Orientalism, the term coined by the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said to describe settler colonialism’s efforts to qualify its own genocidal violence by pathologizing its racialized subjects.
Written by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, the article relies heavily on interviews with partisan sources such as the Israeli Defense Forces, police, and settlers who have a compelling interest in depicting as savages the Palestinians living under a brutal occupation.
Consider, as one example, the narrative provided by a 24-year-old accountant identified only as “Sapir” by the Times.
In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.
She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman ‘shredded into pieces.’ While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
‘One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,’ Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
That Hamas fighters would have taken the time to sexually assault multiple women during a running gun battle strikes me as rather unlikely, but whether the New York Times’ allegations are true, I cannot say with any degree of certainty. Journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate cite inconsistencies in the Times’ article, including an interview with a key witness that conflicted with earlier statements about what he witnessed on October 7, and detailed autopsies of the 1,200 victims that fail to mention a single decapitation.
But as a former foreign correspondent for the legacy media, and the author of an upcoming book on how European settler elites divide and conquer the working class by racializing certain groups, I hear in Sapir’s account the unmistakable echoes of Victoria Price’s fanciful, Orientalist polemic nearly a century ago.
Especially telling is the use of language that is intended to inflame the reader. The Times' article repeatedly references gunshots and cuts to the vagina rather than the less graphic phrasing of sexual mutilations that has traditionally been preferred by major newspapers such as the Times and Washington Post. Moreover, the Times article makes no pretense of objectivity, identifying the Hamas fighters as “terrorists” even though international law recognizes the group as a resistance movement and Israel’s unlawful occupation as an apartheid state.
And lastly, there is an almost stunning absence of Palestinian or Arab voices, leaving the oppressor free reign to describe the oppressed, which is the hallmark of Orientalist and postcolonial studies. At one point, the Times article quotes a police chief superintendent, Mirit Ben Mayor, who ascribes the apocryphal sexual assaults to Palestinians’ “hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
This speaks to the authors’ motivation. The Holocaust culminated more than a century of pogroms that targeted Jews living in Europe, forcing many Jewish families to flee to Palestine where they were always welcomed with open arms by the Palestinians. The conflict began to emerge only after the 1917 Balfour Declaration when some Jews began to assume a Zionist identity, entitling them to the Palestinians’ land and resources. Similar to the Black Panthers’ famous assertion that “we don’t hate white people, we hate our oppressors, Palestinians could claim that they don’t hate Jews, they hate Zionists.
Moreover, while rape is indeed a product of war, the world has never seen anything resembling the European settlers’ 500-year-old crime spree. Virtually from the moment they alighted in Africa, Asia, the Arab world and the Americas, European expatriates set upon indigenous women, creating, from whole cloth, a language of sexual defilement - -mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons, mestizos, coloreds, and so forth - and giving birth, quite literally to a New World.
The Times article does not add any meaningful context because its objective was not to produce journalism to inform democratic decision-making, but to justify Israel’s genocide. In this way, the legacy media’s breathless, hysterical reportage of mass rapes, headless infants, and babies cooked in ovens is reminiscent not only of the Scottsboro Boys but also the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, when the Raleigh News and Observer turned whites against a popular and progressive interracial political movement by conjuring up a ring of Black serial rapists who preyed upon the virginal white damsels, one could assume, like a cabal of dusky Snidely Whiplashes.
“Lynch a thousand Negroes a week,” as one white woman urged white men to defend the honor of the village maidens.
The Times’ account devoted much energy to explaining the lack of any physical evidence, which suggests that the reporters and editors responsible for the article were keenly aware that the article doesn’t meet journalistic standards. As a radical, Black, foreign correspondent at the Washington Post nearly 20 years ago, I knew that any controversial story required a high evidentiary standard to pass muster both with my conservative, mostly white editors, and a broader white readership that was skeptical of narratives that did not center its primacy. On a practical level, that meant covering all the reporting bases, including reliable data and ample first-hand accounts from people on the ground.
The Times story had neither, which leads me to conclude that it was the product of magical thinking rather than any exhaustive reporting. This article should never have been published in this form.
In the Scottsboro case, Ruby Bates would recant after testifying in the first trial that she was raped; Price would maintain her version of events until the day she died in 1982. You needn’t be a postcolonial scholar to understand why.
Much as the New York Times needs Palestinians to be savages, or sand n!$$ers, to justify Israel’s genocide, Price—castigated by her own as “white trash” for her entire life before the Scottsboro incident-- could only be saved from penury and disrepute if she was violated by the young Blacks who were merely looking for work. Her sense of worth, her whiteness, depended on her victimhood, just as Zionist’s material advantage turns on the politics of aggrievement. Or, to put it another way, the calculus of racial capitalism dictates that the white settler can only accumulate wealth by dispossessing a Black or brown subject class, of their land, liberty, dignity and even lives.
This system of political economy cannot be easily reconciled with modernity, however, without vilifying the very act of resistance, explaining Malcolm X’s oft-quoted admonition:
If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the ones who are doing the oppressing.
A former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media .
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