In early March, while the Trump administration began publicly unleashing plainclothes ICE officers to kidnap students who have criticized Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, Sheryl Sandberg maintained that, actually, the real victims here were students who felt uncomfortable at the sight of Palestinian flags on their campuses.
While Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil sat in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center known for human rights abuses in Louisiana for protesting the genocide of his people, nearly halfway across the country from his pregnant wife, Sandberg was busy promoting “October 8,” a new documentary. The film, produced and edited by several former members of the Israeli military, bills itself as a chilling portrayal of antisemitism in the U.S., particularly on college campuses, since Oct. 7, 2023. Of course, its very existence is a frankly remarkable display of narcissism and delusion. At least 52,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered by Israel since this iteration of its genocide began in 2023. Some organizations and even the New York Times estimate the actual death toll is much higher. This figure doesn’t include the widespread, deathly starvation conditions, or how Gaza now leads the world in child amputees per capita, all maimed and brutalized by Israel, or how many Palestinians have been disappeared by Israeli forces into torture camps rife with extensively documented sexual violence—sometimes for the crime of being health care workers and trying to save lives.
Nonetheless, Sandberg—a billionaire who oversaw Meta in 2016 as pervasive disinformation and hate speech on the platform fueled the genocide against Rohingya people in Myanmar—helped create “October 8,” a documentary featuring other Zionists like Debra Messing, Michael Rapaport, and New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, about the mere discomfort of some Jewish American college students who—God forbid—had to witness anti-genocide protests.
Since 2023, Sandberg has particularly zeroed in on promoting Zionist propaganda smearing Palestinian men as rapists. She’s naturally ignored how Israel—both military officials and settlers—have been charged by United Nations investigators with perpetrating mass, systematic rape against Palestinian men, women, and children, for years before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and with greater brutality and frequency since. Before “October 8,” Sandberg produced a purposefully inflammatory, disinformation-ridden documentary called “Screams Before Silence,” which centers around the unsubstantiated Zionist claim that Hamas soldiers carried out a planned, mass rape campaign on Oct. 7.
In “October 8,” several speakers continue to hammer this line home. Dan Senor, a prominent Zionist author and podcaster, says at one point, “It was October 8 … There was still fighting going on. Israel was still counting the numbers of the dead, and the mutilated and the raped and the kidnapped. And there’s a protest against Israel in Times Square. Rather than the outrage being directed against those slaughtering the Jews, the outrage was being directed against the Jews for objecting to being slaughtered.” (By “objecting to being slaughtered,” Senor is, of course, referring to dropping the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza—a 141-square-mile plot of land with a population that disproportionately comprises children under 18—within the span of less than a month.)
That said, the timing of “October 8”’s release and Sandberg’s role in promoting it was ironic on multiple levels. Not only were students and academics in the midst of being rounded up by ICE agents due to their peaceful protests and op-eds criticizing Israel’s genocide and calling for peace, but also Sandberg didn’t have a leg to stand on where condemning sexual misconduct is concerned. “October 8” came out at the same time as “Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work,” a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Meta née Facebook for seven years, assuming the role of director of global public policy before her 2018 departure.
In the bombshell memoir, Wynn-Williams claims that while working directly under Sandberg, the “Lean In” author sometimes invited or implicitly pressured her to engage in sexually compromising behaviors. Sandberg allegedly solicited Wynn-Williams to come to her home for dinner and try on lingerie one night; at another point, she claims Sandberg asked her to join her in bed on a private jet during a work trip. Wynn-Williams also wrote that she once walked in on Sandberg and her 26-year-old assistant in an intimate position. Her memoir paints the portrait of a person in a position of power who exploited or attempted to exploit her power for sexual favors from her subordinates—a form of harassment and sexual misconduct, regardless of the perpetrator’s gender.
Sandberg hasn’t commented on Wynn-Williams’ allegations, while Meta has simultaneously tried to downplay them and write off the author as a disgruntled, hysterical former employee. While Sandberg no longer has any affiliation with Meta, stepping down from its board in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg remains in charge of the corporation, which has a profit model that remains as reliant as ever on vile, prolific hate speech and disinformation. Since Donald Trump took office, Zuckerberg has largely cozied up to Trump, criticizing corporate culture for becoming too “feminine” in recent years, which reads as a not-so-slick dig at #MeToo and employers deigning to take sexual misconduct allegations seriously.
“October 8” fundamentally relies on the stark reversal of victim and offender in the wake of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, an innately anti-feminist strategy. Abusers often wield this tactic in situations involving gender-based violence. As sexual violence researcher Dr. Nicole Bedera explained in 2023, “Victims are not allowed to defend themselves from the abuser.” When they do, they’re “cast as the aggressor,” while “aggressors will try to make themselves look like the victim, to make any violence from them ‘self-defense,’ and any violence from their victim into an act of aggression. There’s only one group that’s permitted to be violent and aggressive.”
Sandberg’s hyperfixation on unsubstantiated, sweeping, and racist Zionist claims that Palestinian men carried out a mass rape campaign on October 7 has become the go-to line wielded by liberal, Zionist “feminists.” Hillary Clinton extensively promoted “Screams Before Silence” in 2024, all while conspicuously never once addressing the documented mass rapes and sexual torture perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians. And, throughout her failed presidential campaign in 2024, Kamala Harris’ central talking point to justify Israel’s genocide was her repeated line about “horrific rapes” by Hamas, referenced at the presidential debate, her Democratic National Convention speech, and all public remarks about the genocide.
This is, by design, a highly manipulative rhetorical tool: Anyone who questions the nonexistent evidence of a coordinated rape campaign by Palestinians against Israelis, or questions why anything should justify genocide, is made to look anti-feminist by the likes of Sandberg, Clinton, and Harris—especially when this propaganda is being peddled by female presidential candidates and plucky, corporate feminist CEOs who style themselves as advocates for women. But in reality, anyone who selectively invokes sexual violence to push racist, false narratives about Palestinians, but never to address the years of systematic sexual violence against Palestinians by the occupying force that holds all power over them, very clearly isn’t concerned with sexual violence.
The Zionist project itself is fundamentally an act of gender-based violence, as it creates the sharply unequal power dynamics that lead to Israelis’ sexual violence against Palestinians with total impunity. Colonization and the Israeli occupation produce an innate, inescapable vulnerability to sexual violence for Palestinians, who are routinely terrorized, detained, and abused by Israeli forces as a feature of everyday life. At the root of all sexual harassment, misconduct, and abuse writ large is the exploitation of a power imbalance by someone who knows their higher status shields them from accountability. This reality exists broadly in the contexts of imperialism and corporate culture alike.
Source: Prism / Digpu NewsTex