Daniel Brown’s My Turn “Why are feminists silent about Oct. 7?” [Recorder, Jan. 4] accuses feminist activists, including those who stand for peace on the Greenfield Common and publish editorials in the Recorder, for not speaking out against the reported rape of Israeli women by Hamas soldiers on Oct. 7. The reason is that reports by Israeli sources, as repeated in mainstream U.S. media, have been challenged as wrongly published or fake news by investigations that have found that the data has been provided by questionable sources. The Israeli paper Haaretz has reported no evidence of rape found by Israeli police. The same is true of the fabricated Israeli charge of Hamas beheading Israel babies, repeated by President Joe Biden.

One of the most horrific and misogynist consequences of war is the vengeful rape of women by the male enemy and the post-war violence against their own wives and partners by male soldiers returning from war. All anti-war feminists know and deplore this. And if we had honest, thorough reporting, we would carry signs protesting rape of Israeli women side by side with signs calling for a cease-fire and a free Palestine.

A further violence against women is the reproductive consequences of war on pregnant women, women giving birth in Gaza hospitals, health centers and UN refuge centers unscrupulously bombed as Israel is doing in Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Gaza is among the most intensive bombing of civilians in war history. We hate war because the majority of victims of war are civilians, especially women and children, and because war is a patriarchal response to acute differences rather than taking on the arduous human challenge of using (difficult) dialogue and diplomacy. Violence only begets violence, which is why we and most feminists oppose war as a response to political conflicts.

Pat Hynes

Traprock Center for Peace and Justice