politics

I have been defamed in The Telegraph

What has happened

The Telegraph has published an article which misrepresents comments I made last week on Twitter and used that misrepresentation to defame me as a denier of the rapes that occurred during the Hamas attacks on October 7.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/15/why-do-feminists-refuse-to-believe-hamas-raped-jewish-women

Archive: https://archive.is/dPEV4

Why I am writing this

I am asking all those who support my work or have a principles objection to people being deliberately misrepresented for political purposes, to write a complaint to The Telegraph.

The complaints form is here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/contact-us/editorial-complaints

The complaint should be made under violation of the IPSO Editor’s Code of Practice, which The Telegraph is signed up to.

What I Want

I want The Telegraph to remove my name entirely from the article, because given its theme there is no amendment that could be made that would not constitute the implication that I am a rape denier.

I would also like them to publish a retraction and an apology, and I would like Nicole Lampert to tweet her acknowledge of that retraction.

Substance of the Complaint

I have written a thread also detailing the misrepresentation https://x.com/janeclarejones/status/2055717244261257417?s=20

1. On May 15 The Telegraph published an article by Nicole Lampert titled ‘Why do feminists refuse to believe that Hamas raped Jewish women?’ I am cited in the article:

“On being asked why she, and some other prominent British feminists, had failed to even tweet about the report, Dr Jane Clare Jones wrote: “We think it’s flagrant racism and dehumanisation being used in order to justify war crimes and ethnic cleansing.””

2. This is a deliberate misrepresentation of the context of my tweet.

This is the actual question I was responding to:

If you summarise the two conversations next to each other the significant change in meaning becomes evident.

3. In the context of the discussion of October 7 and the response in Gaza, I was responding to a question I took to be* about why some women would deny that Palestinian/Muslim men are worse than other men/Israeli men.

As I explain in this thread https://x.com/janeclarejones/status/2055717244261257417?s=20 the question I was responding to was a response to this tweet:

This conversation took place following the release of The New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristoff on the rape of Palestinians by Israeli forces:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opinion/israel-palestinians-sexual-violence.html Archive: https://archive.is/BpYvK.

Many pro-Israeli women dismissed this article and made a performative demonstration of cancelling their NYT subscriptions on social media. Given the amount of investment in claiming that some women have dismissed the rapes by Hamas, this seemed like a pretty egregious double standard.

In response to this double standard, I made the above tweet to underline that the effort to present men of ‘the enemy’ as worse that the men of the side to which you have allegiance is an artefact of tribalism not feminism. When questioned in response to this about why I refused to accept that “some men are worse than others,” I explained that I consider it to be racist, and part of the mechanism being used to justify the atrocities in Gaza.

The words that are frequently invoked to describe the atrocities of October 7 – ‘animal,’ ‘savage,’ ‘barbaric,’ ‘monstrous’ – are words that it has become commonplace to use about Muslim men in general, and sexual violence is playing a central role in generating the heightened ant-Muslim racism that is fuelling the rise of the far-right throughout the Western world. It is this shared comittment to anti-Muslim politics, mediated especially through the representation of the Muslim man as rapist savage, that explains why the British far right and Zionism have become intertwined over the last couple of years. As Daniel Levy has written recently, in the course of the defence of Misan Harriman, who was also defamed by Zionists in the mainstream press:

My position on this issue is informed by the historical facts, and the feminist analysis of rape, which maintains that rape as a war weapon is used by men of all ethnicities, nationalities and creeds. Moreover, it is important to understand that the representation of rape is also a weapon of war, and is a central mechanism of drawing and deepening ethnic division and violence. My position here is not that Hamas did not commit rapes. It is that they did, and that so did the Israelis, because this is a feature of how men behave in wars, and especially wars marked by territorial/ethnic conflict. My belief, as a laid out in the tweet above, is that asserting that this is a feature of only some men, or that the men of ‘the enemy’s’ tribe are uniquely barbaric, is a feature of tribalism and the deepening of ethnic conflict, and is not consistent with the feminist analysis of rape.

4. Lampert’s deliberate misrepresentation was designed to present me as saying that reporting of the crimes on October 7 is de facto racist. The larger purpose of this is to present me as a rape denier or rape apologist.

This is made clear by my inclusion in an article on this theme, and by the positioning of my quote directly below a sentence about “all those who denied the rapes [On Otober 7].”

5. Deliberately misrepresentation of the context of my quote in order to accuse me of rape denial is a baseless lie. I have never denied the occurrence of the rapes on October 7, and nobody will be able to provide any evidence to substantiate the claim that I have.

6. This is a direct attack on my reputation as a feminist thinker and writer. It is a particularly egregious attack given that rape is my area of academic expertise. My PhD is on the philosophy of rape, and I have written extensively on the role of rape in territorial and ethnic conflicts, and in far-right thinking.

https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/2493

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/27/breivik-anti-feminism

https://kjonnsforskning.no/en/2015/10/ideals-purity-create-misogyny

https://www.academia.edu/129012140/Dehumanizing_Women_and_the_Territorial_Logic_of_Rape

Example of Compliant

Here are some examples of complaints put in by friends and supporters.

Zoe Strimpel’s Article

Following Lampert’s article, The Telegraph has now published another article by Zoe Strimpel on the subject of feminists denying the rapes on October 7.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/16/why-i-can-no-longer-call-myself-a-feminist

Archive: https://archive.is/0rvex#selection-3567.84-3571.27

The only direct quote given to evidence Strimpel’s claim that “Anti-Zionist rape denial is the biggest cluster of the red lines I’m talking about” is from Reem Alsalem, who is cited as saying that “No independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7.” This is also cited in Lampert’s piece.

Other evidence is a direct link to the piece in which I was defamed by Nicole Lampert, which is here glossed as a “perverse phenomenon” that “reared its ugly head the moment alleged feminists started denying Hamas’s sexual torture of Israeli women on (and after) October 7.” Therefore, a comment I made last week, which was not a denial of the rapes by Hamas, is effectively being used as evidence of a phenomenon that happened directly following October 7, 2023.

The third piece of evidence used by Strimpel refers to a statement at https://stopmanipulatingsexualassault.org/ which very clearly condemns all rape, and reiterates that condemnation multiple times.  Strimpel claims this statement “stooped so low as to condemn Israel for “weaponising the issue of rape”, heavily implying that stating simple facts about the appalling crimes committed by the terrorists against women was racist and colonialist.”

Political Context and Stakes

The political issue here is the use of the horrific crimes on October 7 in order to justify the horrific crimes that have taken place subsequently during the Israeli assault on Gaza.

I have not denied or justified the events that took place on October 7, and all feminist women would be correct to be horrified by other women doing so.

What I have not done is expressed the view, either explicitly or implicitly that the crimes of October 7 are justification of the response.

What is happening here, both with respect to the deliberate and defamatory misrepresentation of my comments, and Strimpel’s misrepresentation of the statement against the ‘weaponisation’ of October 7, are instances of a concerted campaign to defame feminist women who oppose the atrocities in Gaza and oppose the use of rape to justify those atrocities, by accusing us of rape denial, or rape apology.

The fact that there have been two pieces in The Telegraph this week dedicated to the narrative of feminists as rape deniers, and that those narratives are so poorly evidenced, and depend on such clear and deliberate misrepresentation and defamations, is indicative of both how invested pro-Israeli feminist are in propagating this narrative and the significant political function that it serves. That function is to smear feminist women who oppose the actions of the Israeli state in Gaza, render the expression of that opposition politically and personally costly, and this to silence feminist criticism of events in which nearly forty thousand women and children have been killed. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2026/04/more-than-38000-women-and-girls-were-killed-in-gaza-between-october-2023-and-december-2025-un-women

Feminism, Rape and Patriarchal Violence

Feminism is a project committed to the humanity and rights of all women. Beyond that, it is an analysis of the mechanisms of domination which should stand against patriarchal and militaristic violence in all its forms. It must be committed to the assertion of fundamental humanity of all women, and indeed all men. Tribal and hierarchical mechanisms which rely on the dehumanisation and justification of violence against any group of human beings is inconsistent with feminist thinking and practice and are artefacts of the mechanisms of patriarchal domination.

As feminists we should be committed to the recognition of the humanity of both sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict, we should honour both sides needs and interests, and recognise that like all human beings, both sides are capable of grace and of engaging in heinous brutality.

It is our job to stand with the peacemakers, and to resist the mechanisms of tribalism, and manipulative lies, that are intended to make us take one side and dehumanise the other.

There are no conditions under which it is acceptable to dehumanise entire groups of people and justify violence against them.

That is patriarchy, not feminism.

Resist. Do not comply.

* Editorial note: The original version of this text read that “I was effectively responding to a question about why some women would deny that Palestinian/Muslim men are worse than other men/Israeli men.” Susan McDonnell has objected to that characterisation, and argues that she was referring only to Hamas as being worse than other men, not to Muslim men as a whole. I have added some further discussion above to fill out both the immediate context of the exchange (see also here), and the larger political context regarding sexual violence, anti-Muslim racism, and the increasing political alliance between Zionism and the far right, in order to explain why I interpreted it in that way. However, I am not particularly invested in maintaining that that is what Susan intended, and am happy to apologise if she feels she has been misrepresented. I have therefore changed it to clarify that that was what I took the question to be about, and why I responded to it in the way I did. It is not materially relevant to the question of the defamatory misrepresentation of me by Nicole Lampert, which is what this piece is about.

Culture War Blues

Dear sisters and friends,

So, this is a short post to let you know that I will mostly be retiring this blog, and from now on will be writing over at Substack. My new project is called Culture War Blues, and will be dedicated to analysing the culture war shitshow we find ourselves in from a feminist and materialist POV. Having spent most of the last decade pushing back against the excesses of left identitarian wokery, I have recently become more proccupied with the dangers of right identitarian anti-wokery, and the way the binary opposition between these two culture-war tribes is squeezing the space in the middle for materialist and feminist thinkers, or anyone capable of nuance really.

Critical of both traditional conservative ‘patriarchy 1.0’ and new-fangled ‘patriarchy 2.0,’ Culture War Blues will involve frequent short columns on political events and trends, as well as longer more philosophical essays on the scourge of identity politics, the strands feeding into right wing radicalisation, and the foundations of feminist resistance or ‘anti-domination politics.’ Hopefully, in a few months, there will also be a podcast discussing these issues with various other thinkers also ‘stuck in the middle’ between these binary warring tribes. Please subscribe at culturewarblues.substack.com, and consider supporting the political independence of Jane’s work which, as always, is entirely funded by the (mostly) women who find it useful. It would be wonderful to see some of you over there.

Lastly, as many of you know, The Radical Notion has come to the end of its twelve-issue cycle, and is shutting up shop, both figuratively and literally. We currently have a massive sale on back issues, so if you do want to get your hands on any physical copies you missed please do so before the shop closes down at the end of the month – it will be open until the end of this weekend I believe.

Back Issues

Hope to see you in the new place.

In sisterhood and solidarity, Jane

Dear Men on the Left (Reprise *sigh*)

Yesterday, following Kemi Badenoch’s announcement of the Tory pledge to clarify the meaning of sex in law, we were greeted – once again! – with the sight of prominent left and liberal men indulging their penchant for calling women concerned about their legal rights a bunch of nasty meanie witches.

Labour grandee Ben Bradshaw characterised Badenoch’s proposals as a “nasty little transphobic crusade,” while Ian Dunt described Badenoch as “dismal…spiteful” and “toxic” and her proposals as “ghastly.” He has now written a fullfat Substack on her “Carnival of Poison and Hate,” in which he describes her motivations for the policy as a “tiny infinite abyss” of “proud, unashamed, toxicity.”

Obviously, I’m going to be one of the first people to say that, politically, Badenoch is not my cup of tea. Indeed, a government that has spent the last months randomly picking its policies out of a tombola marked ‘How to Appeal to Populists’ is very far from my cup of tea. But Badenoch has consistently done an extremely well-briefed and diligent job of addressing the issue of the conflict between the trans rights movement and women’s sex-based rights, and whatever ‘progressive’ men who don’t GAF about women think, the question of the clarification of sex in law is not just a culture war nothingburger whipped up by a dying government in its last desperate days.

There’s a lot we can say about why, after nearly ten years, leftish and liberal men can’t seem to get their heads around the idea of why women’s protected characteristic and definition in law might actually matter to women. It was said by Jeni Harvey in 2017, it was said by me this morning, and it has been said over and over again by women up and down this country all the way through this fight. Women are not just the walk-on parts and support humans in the drama of men’s lives. You don’t get to just decide that ‘womanhood’ (whatever the hell that means) is a country you can give away to male people to reward them at the end of their heroic quests. Women are whole human people with our own needs and interests, and in order to protect our own needs and interests we need to have our own definition in law. The fact that we are still having to explain why we have a legitimate political interest in our own legal definition, that you don’t just get to give it away to other ‘more important’ people because they want it, and that we have every right to defend our own political interests without being called mean witches, is, I will always maintain, one of the greatest demonstrations of sexism I have ever witnessed in my life.

It’s not wrong to think that the Tories are going into this election waving a culture-war hand. But that is not the same as thinking the meaning of sex in law is nothing but a meaningless culture war issue. It seems entirely appropriate to be cynical about why the Tories didn’t get it together to clarify the Equality Act while in office and have now dangled this promise under women’s noses going into an election they will almost certainly lose. But this precisely leads us to ask what the hell the Labour front bench and their advisers think they are doing???? After the exchange between Badenoch and the EHRC early last year, Labour welcomed plans to review clarifying the EA2010, and Starmer affirmed commitment to protecting women’s single sex spaces in April this year. Which then makes it rather baffling/infuriating/spectacularly enraging, that yesterday, instead of taking the opportunity to underline these commitments – while also making political hay out of the fact that the Tories now look like cynical opportunists – they decided to troop out and inform us this was a load of fuss about nothing.

From Labour Women’s Declaration on Labour’s 2023 Positions on Sex and Gender

John Healy, the shadow defence secretary, told us that whether female people exist as a distinct class in law with access to their own spaces was just a “distraction” from real issues that really matter. He suggested there is no need to clarify the Equality Act because there isn’t really any confusion, despite the fact that a veritable binfire of legal confusion has been raging for years, and legal experts in the area are quite unconfused about the fact that the law isn’t clear. Indeed, as Lisa Mackenzie has pointed out, why would the Supreme Court decide to hear a case if there is no legal matter to consider? Meanwhile, shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray managed to be only somewhat less flat-footed, murmuring about Labour’s commitment to “respecting women’s rights and women’s single-sex spaces,” whilst, when it comes to clarifying the Equality Act, merely suggesting that no legislation is “perfect.” (Thanks. Reassuring)

This is a load of wanton fudging. This battle has been going on for over a decade now. It has been going on because the trans rights movement has deliberately tried to obfuscate and redefine the meaning of sex in law, and to arrogate rights to women’s single sex spaces women have never been consulted about, and many are not prepared to hand over. Women across the country have put their lives on hold and risked their jobs to clean up an almighty mess (familiar eh) that was made because our political class was asleep at the wheel. Almost everyone, of all political stripes, who has thought long and hard about this issue has come to the conclusion that the best way to sort this mess out is to clarify that when the EA2010 says a woman is a ‘female of any age,’ that definition is biological. It’s not even like the Labour Party has the excuse of not knowing which way the political wind is now blowing. They’ve done the polling. They know where the public is on this issue and where the members of their party are as well. They know that the British public is basically ‘soft GC.’ They are ‘live and let live’ about how people present themselves, but not okay with women’s single-sex spaces and sports being ridden roughshod over. And yet, when given a chance to score obvious stonking political points off the Tories, and reassure women that they have our backs, they backslide to the knee-jerk lefty men response of ‘this is all a distraction from actual real issues that matter to actual real people,’ or ‘this woman has no business talking about this and is just weaponizing trans rights,’ supported by a chorus of the usual suspects telling us what spiteful cows we are.

None of this is good enough. This is sexism with red flashing lights and bells on. It’s the kind of unthinking ‘oops-did-we-forget-you-were-people-who-might-matter’ sexism that men (and sometimes women) don’t even notice they’re doing and that really pisses a lot of women off. And it is politically idiotic along more axes than I can count. Yes, the Tories want to use this issue as a culture war football, and the best thing to do with that is to confidently walk out and take the frickin ball off the pitch. The very last thing you should be doing is telling whole-ass human beings who make up half the electorate – many of whom care a great deal about this issue, some of whom have worked insanely hard and paid a very high price to get it on the political agenda – that this is all a distraction and they are getting their silly little knickers in a twist over nothing. The longer Labour ‘ums’ and ‘ahhs’ and hedges and handwaves, the more dismissive and downright sneery they are about women’s legitimate interest in their own definition in law, the more they fuel the culture war, and the more ammunition they provide for the resurgent and increasingly scary populist right. And I, for one, will not forgive them for that.