Andrew Fox, a British veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former member of the Special Forces, a a warrior with a doctorate, went to Amsterdam to speak about the use — the misuse, the abuse — of international law as a weapon against Israel. And he has now posted at his Substack what he spoke about, and what, from some hostile members of his audience, he learned. “‘Rape is just part of war’: what happened when I spoke in Amsterdam,” Andrew Fox, May 9, 2026:
Today is going to be a bit of a different article. I want to tell you what happened to me this week in the Netherlands.
I was invited to speak at a conference organised by Thinc, a Dutch think tank, on the weaponisation of international law against Israel. My first talk to the main audience was about the psychological function of that weaponisation. The point I made was simple: accusations against Israel are no longer treated as accusations; they are presented as verdicts. The allegation becomes the punishment.
Israel is accused of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, starvation, war crimes, and so on. In normal legal reasoning, such claims are tested against evidence, definitions, context, intent, precedent, and the conduct of the enemy. However, in anti-Israel discourse, the accusation itself is treated as a judgment. The charge is enough. The slogan is enough. The process becomes the stick with which the Jewish state is beaten.
My second speech was at the Free University in Amsterdam alongside the superb Anne Herzberg and Danny Orbach. I am told the event had been difficult to organise. The university had hosted pro-Palestinian events, but this was apparently the first event that could be considered to have given a more balanced perspective, and the organisers had to jump through a number of hoops to make it happen.
When we arrived, security escorted us to the lecture room. This was something of a clue that things were not normal. Outside the room, we were met by what I suppose you could call an arrivals committee: four activists in keffiyehs, silently holding Palestinian flags.
That gave us a fairly good sense of how the morning would go.
Once we entered the room, they followed us in and sat together at the back, still wearing their keffiyehs and carrying their flags. There was no attempt to engage. No appearance of curiosity. No indication that they had come to listen. They had come to perform.
My talk began with the basic strategic point that viewing Gaza in isolation is a mistake. 7 October did not merely start a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It sparked a regional war. Israel has been fighting across seven fronts: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, the West Bank, and Iran itself….
From there, I turned specifically to Gaza. Israel’s reason for going to war in Gaza was the 7 October massacre. That fact has been almost entirely erased from the discussion. The war is now spoken of as though Israel simply woke up one morning and decided to destroy Gaza for no reason. Hamas has managed, with extraordinary success, to erase itself from the conversation. I spoke about the massacres of 7 October. I spoke about the sexual violence. I spoke about what Hamas did to Israeli civilians. This, I believe, is the only correct framing for why Israel chose the strategy and thus the tactics it did in Gaza….
Then came the questions.
The first to stand was a man in a white T-shirt who appeared to be affiliated with the university. He moved towards me in a confrontational manner. White spittle gathered at the corner of his mouth as he began hectoring me.
His argument, if it can be called that, was that the rape on October 7 was merely a feature of the longer, broader conflict between Israel and Palestine since 1948, he alleged, on both sides. He then accused Israelis of rape and said that I was only talking about the sexual violence committed by Hamas because I wanted to dehumanise Palestinians….
Hamas members smashed into Israel on October 7, 2023, and proceeded to engage in mass rape, torture, mutilation, and murder of 1,200 Israelis. There are videos of those rapes that the rapists themselves took; there are Israeli eyewitnesses who peeked out from their fortified rooms and witnessed the rapes; there are the tapes of the rapists and murderers making excited phone calls to their families and friends back in Gaza, telling of their brave deeds.
There are no records of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians, or any other Arab women. In fact, the Israelis were a few years ago charged with being “racists” precisely because they did not rape Arab women.
The critical point is that the sexual violence on 7 October was no ordinary “feature” of war. It was an orgy of sadism. It went far beyond anything that had occurred in this conflict before. So I responded by describing what I had seen. I made the point that I was not dehumanising Hamas. Hamas dehumanised itself on 7 October, and when Yoav Gallant described fighting Hamas as fighting human animals, he was absolutely correct….
That “orgy of sadism” Andrew Fox described included tying up entire families together and then setting them on fire; smashing babies against walls, raping girls and then stabbing them in their vaginas; slicing the breasts off women; cutting the genitalia off of men and gouging out their eyes while they were live; and much, much more in that gruesome line. Did the keffiyehed part of his audience listen to his testimony, or did they shut their ears because they didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want reality to break in?
That is the world we are dealing with, and after what I saw in Amsterdam this week, I am more convinced than ever that the fight is not only about Israel, Gaza, or international law. It is about reality itself.
That’s what the nonpareil Andrew Fox learned on his trip to Amsterdam. And in telling us about what he learned, where one side accepts reality and the other side, the one with people wearing the keffiyehs, makes up its own, alternate reality that supports its crazed and vicious narrative, we too have now learned what he learned, in a lecture hall beside a canal in watery Amsterdam.
More than one threat says
The Left work in close collaboration with the Muslims.
Cynthia says
The red/left alliance creates a false narrative and refuses to accept any facts.
They stand with the regime in Iran that that has killed tens of thousands of their own unarmed people. Because Iran is the benefactor of Hamas, the activists in the west are against the Persian people.
What useful idiots!
࿗Infidel࿘ says
It sure is: the antisemitic world collectively pretending that there is actually a state called “Palestine”
Bexarkat says
Pro-Hamas supporters are correct at one point and that is “October 7th did not happen in a vacuum.” The alleged professor in the white t-shirt, Mr. Fox noted was incorrect. This is part of a broader war that did not begin in 1948, but rather began in 1929 with the Muslim slaughter of Jews beginning in Hebron and extending throughout every major town and village in “palestine” (as it was called them) where Jews and Arabs lived somewhat harmoniously together for centuries. The massacre of 1929 was set in motion by lies told by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the red bearded-blue eyed “leader” of the palestinians, who claimed the Jews wanted to occupy and destroy the al-Aqsa mosque (sound familiar? The same is often cited today).
This is the same grand mufti that befriended Hitler, who provided the grand mufti opulent living quarters in berlin for the duration of the war (Hitler noted that he must be of Arian stock due to his eye color), it was the same grand mufti who begged Hitler to extend the final solution through the Middle East wherever Jews lived. This was the same grand mufti who raised battalions of Muslim soldiers to fight alongside Nazis and kill Americans.
The problem with historians and educators is they like to cherry pick their facts when they present their version of “truth.”
Siddi Nasrani says
But what fuel was Hamas taking to make their murdering spree more enjoyable ?
It was Captagon?
Officials from both the Israel Defense Forces and the United States government recently confirmed an earlier report that Hamas militants were high on a counterfeit stimulant known as Captagon when they carried out the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Also known as the “jihadi drug,” “Captain Courage” and the “poor man’s cocaine,” Captagon reportedly helped fuel a violent mania on that day.
The drug was eventually banned in the 1980s due to its “highly addictive nature,” the outlet added, but a “clandestine trade” of counterfeit Captagon has flourished in the Middle East ever since. The drug remains extremely common in the region and has “particularly blossomed” in Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.