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Anti-Israel academic who denied Hamas rapes may become a university diversity officer

Sima Shakhsari attended multiple anti-Israel rallies on campus and was seen chanting ‘Globalize the Intifada.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Sima Shakhsari, a candidate for a senior position at the University of Minnesota’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) department denied testimony and physical evidence that Hamas terrorists engaged in numerous rapes and sexual assaults against Israelis during the October 7th massacre, according to The Jewish Insider. 

During her testimony before a university review panel, Shakhsari, who works at the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, said she didn’t believe the evidence of sexual violence on October 7th.

“Of course, any person who has been raped — I am a rape crisis counselor, I believe the survivors. I am yet to see Israeli rape survivors of Hamas come and speak,” Shakhsari said to the panel in search of an associate dean to fill the role at the DEI department.

In the first few weeks of the following October 7th, most of the evidence of rape, such as broken pelvises and legs, bloody underwear, and mutilated genitals, came from corpses who couldn’t report what happened to them.

However, more recently survivors of the October 7th attack reported that they witnessed gang rape and mutilation of breasts and genitals.

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In addition, the medical staff examining freed hostages have said that many of the male and female patients between the ages of 12 and 48 were sexually abused in captivity, and also witnessed the sexual assault of hostages still being held in Gaza.

Sima Shakhsari attended multiple anti-Israel rallies on campus and was seen chanting “Globalize the Intifada.”

During her interview at the University of Minnesota, Shakhsari compared accusing Hamas of sexual crimes to false claims of white women in the segregated South against black men which, in many cases, led to lynches.

She said, “We know the history of lynching, of black man, lynching, of indigenous man lynching Latinos in this country… because of accusations and they’re kind of violating the innocence of white women, right?”

Shaksari continued, “I think that is also this force that is repeated in the context of Israel and Palestine, because Arab men have been demonized and have been marked as monstrous people who are rapists.”

On a Facebook post in 2020, Shaksari supported Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who participated in hijackings in 1969 and 1970.