Debunking “Screams Before Silence,” Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. “mass rape” film

Ali Abunimah Media Watch 4 May 2024

Last week, billionaire former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg released Screams Before Silence, which is being promoted as “a documentary film on the sexual violence committed by Hamas” on 7 October 2023.

But it is a total fraud. Seven months after that day, Israel has still not identified a single survivor of the alleged mass rapes on 7 October, nor a single credible eyewitness.

While Israel claims that many Israeli women and even some men were raped and sexually tortured in horrific ways on 7 October, before being killed, not one deceased victim has been identified either.

We debunked the film’s sensational but demonstrably false claims on this week’s Electronic Intifada Livestream and showed how many of the “witnesses” Sandberg interviewed are lying.

You can watch that segment in the video above or in the video embedded in this tweet:

Uncritical media

There is no forensic evidence to support the rape claims nor does Israel say it has a single video showing the allegedly systematic, widespread and pre-planned sexual attacks actually taking place – even though Israel says it has retrieved tens or even hundreds of thousands of videos and photos from that day.

And yet Sandberg’s film is being heavily promoted by such figures as former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ostensibly progressive Congressman Ro Khanna and of course the Israeli government.

It is also receiving wide and uncritical coverage in Western media.

Writing in The Washington Post on 29 April, columnist Ruth Marcus urged her readers, “You should watch it and speak out, about how rape and gender violence were deployed as weapons of war. About breasts cut from bodies. About nails driven into a woman’s vagina.”

But as we show, even a UN team which wrote a report largely favorable to Israel, said it could not find any credible evidence for these atrocity claims in the materials presented to it by Israel.

Justifying genocide

Sandberg’s film has become the latest vehicle to push Israel’s claims of mass rape on 7 October – claims that Israel supporters continue to use to either distract from or justify Israel’s ongoing US-armed genocide in Gaza.

Since its release, it has garnered almost 700,000 views on YouTube alone.

We also talked about the latest developments surrounding “Screams without words,” reporter Jeffrey Gettleman’s equally fraudulent New York Times article published in December.

Sandberg has described the Gettleman article as the “definitive piece on the sexual violence” of 7 October.

Despite praising the Times article, many of its sensational claims were omitted from Sandberg’s film – a tacit admission that they were false.

The scandal around the Gettleman article continues to mount.

This week more than 50 tenured professors from top journalism schools wrote to The New York Times, urging the newspaper to “immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

You can find all of The Electronic Intifada’s reporting on the “mass rapes” hoax at this link.

Articles and sources referenced in the video:

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Tim Moore replied on

The popularity of this film doesn't surprise me. Evidence never stops American media and politicians from creating and exploiting for their own ends the moral panic over sex monsters These moral panics of roving sex maniacs tap into a latent fear of black and brown men, and much of our mass incarceration of said men is the result.

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Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.