Around 80 people attended a panel at CSU Northridge (CSUN) on April 30 featuring trauma expert Dr. Miri Bar Halpern and Pakistan-American civil rights activist Anila Ali discussing trauma and the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
The panel was held in the Jake & Florence Presentation Room of the CSUN Library and began following a screening of the documentary “Screams Before Silence” by Israeli filmmaker Anat Stalinsky. The film features Sheryl Sandberg interviewing witnesses and survivors of Oct. 7 who recall the Hamas rapes that day. Before the screening, Shira Brown, a lecturer at CSUN Women’s Research and Resource Center, told attendees that the event focuses on a question that should never be asked: “When did we stop believing women?” Brown acknowledged that while the allegations of sexual assault on Oct 7 “are still being investigated, documented and understood,” they’ve been “dismissed” or “outright denied. …
This room is big enough for nuance,” she said, as well as “grief,” “anger” and “respectful disagreement.”
Halpern, a Harvard Medical School lecturer and director of Trauma Training at Parents 4 Peace, spoke about the issue of traumatic invalidation, meaning that someone tells you the trauma is your fault or that it didn’t happen, “can lead to emotional neglect, ignoring, denial of truth” as well as self-harm, anxiety and depression. She warned that traumatic invalidation from the global community could “lead to the belief that I don’t matter.” Halpern contended that if the rapes and sexual assault on Oct. 7 occurred to any other community “we would see a different reaction” and “people would be acknowledging that.” But because the victims were Jews and Israelis, “people are still questioning it. This is traumatic invalidation and antisemitism at the same time.”
Ali said that “if you’re a woman, you need to see this” and recalled how on Oct. 7, she spoke to a distinguished lawyer she had worked with who said, “but don’t you think these women deserved it?” Ali, a Muslim, realized that she was going to see her community’s anger and hatred against the Jewish community/Israelis and turn into denial and blaming it on the Jews and Israel.
She claimed that the board members of her organization, the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, were telling her they needed to issue a statement supporting the Palestinians after Oct. 7. She replied that Hamas started Oct. 7 and that “this is the time for us to tell the truth … as Muslims, as citizens of the world, and as women.
Our trauma is very deep … we just don’t have to worry about what the global community is going to say we’re worried about what people are going to say in our community when things like that happen.”
The civil rights activist added that some of the members of her board were told they couldn’t enter mosques unless they resigned from the organization and that her children have been targeted and ostracized.
“This is about terrorists using Allah’s words … and killing and raping people,” Ali said, adding that those who deny the Oct. 7 rapes also deny that 9/11 happened “so there’s a connection.”
“This is about terrorists using Allah’s words … and killing and raping people,” – Anila Ali
Ali said that she and her organization plan on asking members of the Muslim community if they’ve been to the Gaza Strip and the kibbutzim that were attacked on Oct. 7, as they have. “And that’s what we did,” she said.
Amit Soussana, an Israeli women who was taken hostage by Hamas and said she was raped while in captivity, told Ali and her organization to “tell our story, don’t let it die.” And Ali said that “her story is the story of Muslim women too” who have been raped and victims of domestic violence. “If we’re not going to do that as women, then shame on us.”.
On the issue of “whataboutism” regarding the Palestinians, Halpern said that her dialectic work as a therapist has caused her to understand the importance of two truths. “Of course I’m holding pain for the Palestinians,” she said, adding that the “us vs. them” mentality is “polarizing society.”
She heard that there were concerns that there might be protesting at the event and asked why Jewish pain doesn’t matter— “When we start using nationality and religion and identity as the hierarchy of empathy, then we’re losing humanity.”
Ali remembered hearing a story of a Gaza man visiting one of the attacked kibbutzim on Oct. 7 with his wife and baby and how Hamas shot his wife, a Muslim woman, 32 times from her neck down to her toes. The man hid in the closet behind where the Hamas terrorists were hiding when the Israel Defense Force (IDF) surrounded the house and told everyone inside to leave; he tried to warn the IDF that Hamas terrorists were inside but they didn’t hear him. He escaped with his baby.
She also said that when she has told some of her fellow Muslims that Hamas terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” while cutting off the breasts of women, they simply didn’t want to hear about it anymore. Ali knows of instances of imams in the United States who have called to “annihilate the Jews and their helpers” and referred to Jews as “apes and pigs,” prompting Ali to retort “then so are we because we are an Abrahamic people.”
Ali went on to claim that she spoke to a PBS journalist for a documentary but ended up not happening after the journalist allegedly claimed “they make everything up do you think that happened … did you see them cutting the breasts off that woman.” Ali cut off all contact with her because journalists are supposed to “take an oath of truth” and that the last thing she told her was that she went to Israel to bear witness and told the journalist she should too. “That’s what we are facing right now,” Ali said.
Asked by the moderator, CSUN English Professor Audrey Thacker, on how to handle selective believing of women, Halpern stressed the importance of “moral consistency,” especially from organizations that claim to be focused on human rights and feminism. Halpern said that one of her clients, an Israeli woman, “keeps having flashbacks” to her trauma as a result of seeing women in the news not being believed, because “the message we’re getting is we’re not being believed.”
Halpern called on journalists “to do your job the right way“ and that selectively amplifying voices is a problem. She encouraged attendees to speak out after the event and “challenge people around you,” as silence on this matter “is a sin.” “This is not just about Oct. 7 this is about the next war that’s going to happen out somewhere else in the world.”
Ali lauded CSUN for allowing for diverse viewpoints, saying that as a society we’ve lost the ability to talk to people with differing views. “It’s so important to hear people.” She claimed that various mosques have “silenced” the Muslim women from her organization because “we were fiercely fighting Islamism.” She said that her father is one of the founding fathers of Pakistan, and he taught her to speak out. And Ali stressed that she speaks out for all women.
Halpern said that survivors can’t truly move on and heal “until they’re being seen. See them … speak out about their pain.” She added she didn’t know how any women’s organizations that failed to speak out about this issue could continue if they don’t acknowledge being wrong to ignore this. As a trauma expert, Halpern said she wouldn’t let her husband touch her for a while after hearing the Oct. 7 rape stories.
Ali said that the events of Oct. 7 give her nightmares and that it’s hard for her to think about being in a relationship or getting married again. She said the battle is “personal” to her. “When someone hurts a woman and rapes her in front of her family that is a message to a nation that we are going to bring your people down,” said Ali. Halpern said that Ali is someone who gives her hope.
During the audience Q&A, someone asked how “Screams Before Silence” can be squared with the fact that NGOs have claimed that Israeli soldiers have raped Palestinians in prisons. Halpern pointed out that Palestinians were not mentioned in the movie and asked if the person who asked the question would say the same thing if the movie was about any other community. She called the question a form of traumatic invalidation and asked the questioner to check their “hidden biases.” Halpern did acknowledge that the current war in Gaza is awful and that she condemns any instances of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians, but the film is not about that.
Ali said that the crux of the conflict is that one side wants peace and the other side thinks they have to kill in order to live. “That’s not going to work,” she said. She contended that the best friends the Palestinians have had were the peaceniks in the kibbutzim who were killed on Oct. 7; one friend of hers was burned alive.
She asked why voices are being silenced, especially on campuses. “This is about coming together and saying there is a way out.”
After the event, Thacker told The Journal that they “had a little pushback when it was out on Instagram but that’s also part of people speaking their piece.” Ultimately, there were no protests at the event. “What we had was people talking and listening,” she said. “Part of the problem in our society now … Is that people don’t want to listen, they just want to talk. And it looked like people were really listening.”
The event was hosted by the Academic Engagement Network, Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement, Matadors Against Antisemitism, CSUN College of Humanities, CSUN Undergraduate Studies and CSUN’s Women Research and Resources Center.
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