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The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Sheryl Sandberg Releases Screams Before Silence, A Free Documentary About the Sexual Violence on October 7" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The war in Gaza and the resulting college campus protests have spurred an endless series of threads, many of which have been among the most active topics that I've discussed in this blog. This thread is one more of the genre. As the title makes clear, this thread is about the documentary "Screams Before Silence" which was led by Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook/Meta fame. The film is about sexual violence allegedly used by Hamas during and after its October 7 attack on Israel. My use of the word "alleged" will likely be controversial because a significant number of DCUM users do not think that there is anything "alleged" about this and that Hamas' sexual violence is beyond question. To be clear, I abhor sexual violence whoever it is committed by. Those who commit such crimes should be exposed and punished. Unfortunately, like so much else involved with the the Israel-Gaza war, sexual violence has been caught in the fog of war and the endless propaganda surrounding events. It is undeniable that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, Israel and some of its supporters engaged in spreading manufactured accounts of atrocities. Many of these accounts made it into the Western media and become accepted as fact. Chief among these stories was the allegation of 40 beheaded Israeli babies, something that proved to be completely untrue. A number of other high-profile incidents similarly turned out not to have occurred. Just as these stories of Hamas violence were initially widely believed, allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas has been accepted as fact among much of the public. A highly-publicized article by the New York Times initially seemed very persuasive in documenting widespread sexual violence. However, that article soon proved to be very problematic and has been shown to have relied on several discredited sources. Chief among these was ZAKA, an Israeli volunteer group that responds to emergencies to recover bodies. Israeli newspapers have documented that many of the stores of atrocities on October 7 that were later shown to be false originated with ZAKA. ZAKA's leader has attributed this to mistakes resulting from the difficult circumstances following the attack. Either because of intention or error, ZAKA's allegations must be approached skeptically. Like the New York Times, Sandberg's film relies heavily on ZAKA. As a result, critics of the documentary argue that its allegations are not to be believed. Defenders of the film point to a report by the United Nations that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that sexual violence occurred during the Hamas attack. While the report did find evidence to believe such attacks occurred, it did not find anything near the scale that is commonly claimed. Moreover, the report explicitly found that some well-publicized allegations were unfounded. All of this is to say that while there is evidence that some sexual violence did occur during Hamas' October 7 attack and has probably occurred afterward involving the Israelis being held hostage, the allegations of widespread and systemic sexual violence have not held up to scrutiny. This has provided justifiable grounds for critics to challenge portrayals such as that in this film. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in this thread, posters are less interested in separating fact from fiction than they are in utilizing the topic for their own partisan benefit. I eventually locked the thread when it devolved in simply another debate about all aspects of the conflict without specific relevance to the initial topic.