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(LifeSiteNews) — With the reality of Israeli torture, rape and sodomizing of Palestinian detainees being now publicly confirmed in the Israeli and Western press, Catholic commentator Candace Owens has called out her “fellow Christian podcasters and politicians to condemn [it]” believing that she is “going to be waiting a very long time” for this to happen.
Owens, who’s very popular broadcasting role at the Daily Wire ended last March after she opposed U.S. support for Israel’s attack on Gaza, was referring to late July reports in the Israeli press that a detainee was admitted to the hospital after he “suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs.”
A second report in Hebrew from a self-identified Israeli broadcaster states the Israeli torturers inserted “a telephone device” into the rectum of the victim along with “additional accessories” and called it.
READ: Israeli soldiers celebrate the ‘torturing, humiliating, and mocking’ of Palestinians on social media
Owens emphasized in her August 1 podcast that these are Palestinian detainees, which means “people that have not been arrested or tried or gone through the court system. They’re simply being held, presumably for questioning.”
Apparent video footage of such abuse at the Sde Teiman detention center, located in the Negev desert, was released last Tuesday by Israeli Channel 12 showing a Palestinian being selected from around thirty others who were all lying on the floor with their hands bound and eyes covered and taken behind riot shields where the apparent abuse occurred.
Reports of such torture have been common for quite a long time, though given very little attention. In June, the New York Times reported how a medical professional was detained by the Israelis in Gaza, stripped to his underwear, blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to Sde Teiman. During his imprisonment, Israeli soldiers penetrated his rectum with a metal stick, causing tremendous bleeding and leaving him in “unbearable pain.”
A UN report issued on July 31 found that at least 53 Palestinians have died in Israeli detention since last October 7 with no investigations or charges being filed. A total of around 9,440 Palestinian prisoners have been detained from Gaza, the West Bank and even Israel, in a “prolonged secret and incommunicado detention” with torture and abuse taking place at all of Israel’s detention centers, including beatings, waterboarding, and electrocution.
The report found “forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers.”
Additionally, there remains “consistent reports” of Israeli soldiers “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses.”
Sodomizing Palestinian prisoners a popular practice in Israel
According to Owens, following the publicity of the first case mentioned above, an investigation was launched only “after enough pressure was mounted on the outside, [and] not because [the Israeli authorities] thought this was the morally wrong thing to be happening to a detainee.”
As a result, nine Israeli soldiers were arrested for the apparent brutal rape sparking a backlash in Israel with a far-right mob storming the detention center and a military court in protest against the arrests.
It also involved an exchange in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) where Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was asked if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum?”
Milwidsky emphatically replied, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”
Following the publicity from the brutal rape, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded accountability, not from the assailants, but from the person who recorded and released the video. He demanded, “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”
And according to University of Chicago professor and author Dr. John Mearsheimer, such attitudes are not outliers among the population of Israel.
“It’s quite remarkable how much support there is for this behavior,” he said in a Thursday interview. “Channel 12 in Israel recently ran a survey asking Israelis whether they thought it was okay for an Israeli person to rape a ‘terrorist.’ 47% of Israelis said it’s okay, and 42% said it’s not okay.”
“And since all Palestinians are effectively ‘terrorists’ in the minds of many Israelis, this is hardly surprising that they’re doing things like this,” the best-selling author observed. “What does this say about Israeli society? This is horrible. But that’s what you’re dealing with.”
Many Israelis openly support ‘raping male Palestinian prisoners in concentration camps’
“I’ve long argued, Israel is an apartheid state,” the professor continued. “And to run an apartheid state, you have to turn the Palestinians into sub-humans” and treat them like “they’re animals.”
“When you run an apartheid state, you end up brutalizing in the most horrible ways the victims, the second class or third-class people who live in your society. And this has been happening inside of Israel for a long time,” he recalled.
“The Israelis have been torturing prisoners, doing terrible things to the Palestinians for a long, long time. And what happened on October 7th is that those terrible practices that the Israelis employ against the Palestinians were ramped up,” the foreign policy expert explained. “Never lose sight of the fact that those prisoners were being treated in the most brutal ways before October 7th as well.”
Max Blumenthal confirmed that many Israelis openly support “raping male Palestinian prisoners in concentration camps” like Sde Teiman, which “Israel set up after October 7th for men kidnapped from Gaza.”
“The Israeli public is told that everyone there is from the ‘Nukhba,’ [the] Hamas special forces unit that ‘butchered babies’ and ‘raped women’ on October 7th. Most Israelis, Jewish Israelis, believe this hoax,” he said. “The fact is many of those there are just common innocent Palestinians.”
READ: Uncovering the truth behind Israel’s justification for its war in Gaza
Comparing the evidence for grave sexual crimes in the conflict, the Jewish journalist observed, “There’s no videotape from October 7th showing Hamas militants sexually assaulting Jewish Israeli women. There’s no testimony. There’s nothing. There’s no evidence. But we have clear evidence here” for Israelis sodomizing Palestinian detainees.
Jewish Zionist podcaster, ‘today, I realized how much I was lied to’ by Israel, media
In addressing her fellow western Christian politicians and pundits who are not speaking out against such atrocities, Owens held up the example of “extremely pro-Israel” Jewish Zionist podcaster Shaiel Ben-Ephraim who she said “got to the moment where he couldn’t do the thing anymore.”
“And the thing that I’m talking about is continually lying or pretending that you’re blind to what is happening,” she said moving on to read an extensive tweet from Ben-Ephraim, who came to realize he had been subjected to grave lies his whole life from his fellow Zionists.
He posted on July 29:
I feel stupid and ashamed. In May, an expose came out on CNN detailing the abuses in Sde Taiman. Then, the NYT released their own article on it. Both were backed up with Israeli sources, crossed with Palestinian ones.
I dismissed them because my government sources and Israeli media denied them. My whole life I was told that the international media was out to get Israel. That they were all antisemites.
But today, I realized how much I was lied to. By my country. By my friends. By my media. Today, many of the people I talked to who denied these allegations admitted they were true.
And the worst part? None of this is coming to light because the IDF and government have changed their hearts about it. Its coming out because the pressure from the UK, ICC and ICJ was getting too great to ignore. This would get Netanyahu, Gallant and the Chief of Staff in serious trouble. So they finally said the truth. That Israel is routinely torturing inmates. That sexual abuse is fairly common there. That people have been tortured to death.
Worst of all, many of the people in this facility were innocent. Rounded up by accident. But there was no real verification process before they were subjected to this hell on earth.
This can’t go on.
I feel stupid and ashamed. In May, an expose came out on CNN detailing the abuses in Sde Taiman. Then, the NYT released their own article on it. Both were backed up with Israeli sources, crossed with Palestinian ones.
I dismissed them because my government sources and Israeli…
— Shaiel Ben-Ephraim (@academic_la) July 29, 2024
“How does that make you feel?” Candace asked. “For me, it lets me know that there is of course a level which can be reached where some people decide, ‘I’m no longer going to abandon my humanity. I’m no longer going to see this as whether or not this is an Israeli or a Palestinian. I’m just going to say that wrong is wrong is wrong.’”
“I don’t care what religion you practice. I don’t care what race you are. I don’t care what your ethnicity is. It is wrong for people that are being detained to be raped, to be sodomized. And that is exactly what is happening,” she said.
Owens: Christian pols & podcasters afraid to condemn even sodomy torture if committed by Israel
As reported in many places, Owens separated from the The Daily Wire after “feuding” with Zionist cofounder Ben Shapiro. She shared the platform with other shows hosted by Christians including Catholics such as Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.
“So I’m just wondering, where’s the Christian crowd?” she asked. “It’s a problem for me when I look up and I see people who I know are wonderful people, who I know love the Lord, who will argue pro-life all day, but will stop themselves if the matter pertains to Israel.”
READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?
“We have so much national sovereignty that you have people who have platforms, people that are earning millions of dollars per year, who refuse to condemn something as morally outrageous as sodomizing people who have not even had charges brought against them. They can’t do it, because they’re cowards,” she said.
Owens encourages leaders ‘to be a real Christian’ and defend the human dignity of Palestinians
“I’m not for that anymore, because I want to be a real Christian,” Owens continued. “I don’t want to be a fake Christian. I don’t want to be a ‘Christian until…’”
Thus, Owens explained that because of these commitments she doesn’t serve politicians, AIPAC, or financial excess challenging her fellow Christian politicians and podcasters saying, “it is a sin to have that perspective, to be fearful of bad headlines.”
“And it makes me call into question, do you really believe in Christianity? Do you really submit yourself to Christ? If all you care about is the moment now, the money, the good headlines, if all you care about is the job and the career, then it sounds to me like all you believe in is this life,” she concluded.
#Infographic| Statistics on the Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip (07 October 2023-12 July 2024) pic.twitter.com/t1vTTsn0iW
— Euro-Med Monitor (@EuroMedHR) July 13, 2024
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