Dear Ms. Rama Duwaji,
You publicly liked social media posts describing the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas as “collective liberation.” You also placed a heart next to an Instagram post claiming that the reports of mass rapes on Oct. 7 were a “hoax.”
For the past two and a half years, I have been treating survivors of October 7, helping them slowly rebuild shattered lives and broken nervous systems. Some were suicidal. Others could barely speak. Some of the people sitting across from me in therapy had witnessed rapes and executions so brutal that their nervous systems simply shut down. Words stopped working.
These people did not simply survive war. They survived mass and socially sanctioned sadism. Subsequent investigations by journalists, forensic teams and international bodies documented widespread sexual violence that day. Families were burned alive. Festival goers hunted down, raped and then executed.
Hamas terrorists documented much of the violence themselves: one attacker used a victim’s phone to call his parents and brag that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands; and you surely saw the footage of Shani Louk, whose body Hamas fighters paraded through Gaza in the back of a truck while crowds spat and celebrated. Survivors of the Nova festival have also described militants laughing as they hunted festivalgoers hiding in the fields. These were not acts carried out in secrecy. They were recorded, boasted about and, in some cases, carried out with visible pleasure.
These were not only acts of murder. They were staged performances of cruelty. This was not violence used as a means to an end. It was violence relished for its own sake. That is the socially sanctioned mass sadism my patients are still haunted by, superimposed on everything they see.
Once that sadism becomes undeniable, the narrative has a problem. Mass murder can still be reframed as resistance. Rape cannot. It exposes the cruelty too clearly, so it has to be denied.
That denial carries consequences not only for the survivors I treat but for Palestinians as well. Refusing to confront the mass sadism of Oct. 7 keeps Palestinians trapped under the same violent movement that terrorizes them. Hamas has long brutalized its own population. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented torture, arbitrary detention, and killings of Palestinians accused of dissent or collaboration, and journalists have reported Hamas beating and arresting Gazans who protest its rule. This is what authoritarian movements do. Cruelty outward. Repression inward.
As New York City’s first lady, you are in a public position to inspire a movement for Palestinian rights and safety. The survivors I treat are still trying to rebuild their lives after what they witnessed. Palestinians deserve to be free from the same sadistic movement that terrorizes them as well.
Public gestures matter. When someone in a position of influence treats atrocity as liberation, the signal travels far beyond a social media post.
The evidence is clear. Admit that you were wrong and withdraw your support for the lie.
Some of us spend our days helping survivors rebuild the lives that Hamas shattered. The least the rest of the world can do is stop sanitizing mass sadism and tell the truth about what was done to the victims of Hamas’ cruelty.
Dr. Orli Peter is a clinical and neuropsychologist and founder of the Israel Healing Initiative, established after the Oct. 7 attacks dedicated to advancing trauma recovery and healing based on neuroscience. She can be reached at opeter@israelhealinginitiative.org.
