If “Believe Women” has exceptions, then it was never a principle

For years, Grace Tame has been one of the most powerful and persuasive voices in Australia insisting on a simple moral principle: believe women.
Believe survivors. Believe testimony.

Do not reflexively dismiss the accounts of women describing sexual violence.

It is a principle that has rightly challenged police, courts, institutions and a culture that too often doubts victims. For many people it has become a moral touchstone: when a woman speaks about sexual violence, the default response should be belief, empathy and seriousness rather than suspicion.
Which is why Tame’s recent claim that the rape of Israeli women on October 7 has been “debunked” as propaganda is so shocking.

Because if the principle is believe women, it cannot suddenly become: believe women — except when they are Jewish women.
On October 7 we saw images the world cannot unsee. Naama Levy — dragged into a truck in Gaza, blood soaking the back of her pants. Eyewitness accounts from survivors of the massacre. Testimony from first responders who encountered the aftermath of sexual mutilation and assault. Investigations by journalists, forensic experts and the United Nations documenting what occurred.

To dismiss all of this as “propaganda” is not skepticism. It is not feminist solidarity. It is selective disbelief in service of a political narrative. And that selective disbelief reveals something deeply uncomfortable.
If a misogynist commentator from the manosphere dismissed allegations of rape this way — waved away eyewitness testimony, mocked evidence and suggested it was fabricated propaganda — Grace Tame would be among the first to condemn it.

She would call it exactly what it is: victim denial.

So why the exception now? Why the sudden willingness to discard testimony, images, witnesses and forensic evidence? The answer lies in something deeper that has infected parts of modern activist politics.
When a cause becomes a moral theatre, one side must remain permanently virtuous and the other permanently villainous. Once that narrative structure takes hold, evidence becomes dangerous. Facts that disrupt the story must be dismissed. Testimony must be reframed as propaganda. Reality itself must be filtered.

Because once you acknowledge that Hamas — the organisation celebrated by many activists as “resistance” — committed acts of sexual violence against women, the moral clarity of the narrative collapses. The victims suddenly look human and the perpetrators suddenly look monstrous. Consequently the slogans become harder to chant.

This phenomenon is not new. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed something similar when analysing ideological systems in the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argued that ideologies possess a peculiar relationship with reality.
“Ideologies do not begin with evidence and draw conclusions from it,” she wrote. “They begin with a conclusion and interpret reality through its lens. Facts that confirm the narrative are amplified. Facts that complicate it must be dismissed, reinterpreted, or ignored.”

Such systems, she noted, possess a strange resilience. Their strength lies not in empirical accuracy but in internal coherence. Once the ideological premise is accepted, every event can be made to fit the narrative.
Contradictions therefore become intolerable. Evidence threatens not merely an argument but the entire intellectual structure. The response is predictable: the evidence must be discredited.

Seen in this light, the hostility to scrutiny that characterises much contemporary activist discourse begins to make sense. Investigations become propaganda. Statistics become manipulation. Context becomes “whataboutism.” The intrusion of empirical analysis is treated not as clarification but as aggression. Great Thunberg literally shuts her eyes and ears when shown the infamous 49minute Hamas GoPro video.

The objective is no longer to discover what happened. It is to protect the narrative. And that protection comes at a cost. Because truth does not bend to ideological convenience.

Rape is rape. Torture is torture. And the suffering of women does not become less real because the victims are Israeli.

Grace Tame has asked Australians to show courage in believing women when it is uncomfortable to do so. That was the moral force of the movement she helped lead: that justice requires consistency.

That principle still stands. The question now is whether she is willing to apply it when the victims are politically inconvenient. Because feminism that believes women only when it suits a political narrative is not feminism at all. It is selective empathy. And selective empathy is simply another way of saying that some women matter more than others.

For decades feminism has fought to dismantle exactly that hierarchy of credibility. It has argued that women’s testimony should not be filtered through prejudice, ideology or convenience. To abandon that standard now is to reinforce the very injustice feminism set out to confront.

Principles reveal their meaning not when they are easy to apply, but when they are difficult. If “believe women” collapses the moment the victims are Jewish women and the perpetrators are politically fashionable revolutionaries, then it was never a principle in the first place.

It was a slogan. And slogans are always easier to chant than truths are to face.

Adam is an ALP Life Member, Spokesperson for Jewish Labor, podcaster and businessman.