UK Foreign Office official under fire for denying Hamas sexual atrocities

Dimpy Saganee works against violence towards women but signed an Egyptian petition vilifying Israel and rejecting the overwhelming proof of mass rapes on October 7.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A UK Foreign Office official was slammed for denying Hamas sexual atrocities its men committed during its October 7 invasion of Israel even after overwhelming proof has been gathered of their war crimes, the British Jewish Chronicle (JC) reported Thursday.

Dimpy Saganee, an adviser whose work focuses especially on battling female genital mutilation, signed a petition against a New York Times article that delved into the horrific mass rapes and sexual violence the Islamist terrorists perpetrated.

Egyptian feminist organization SpeakUp had rejected the article, stating that Israel had lied about the assaults and “push[ed] propaganda for an unlawful occupation, thereby abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

At the same time, the anti-Israel group wrote that if there had been rapes, there was “no evidence” Hamas committed them. They then speciously claimed that the IDF, on the other hand, has a “confirmed history” in “gender-based violence towards women.”

Commissioner for Public Appointments Sir Wiliam Shawcross told the Jewish weekly that in the wake of her identification with the Egyptian group’s beliefs, Saganee’s appointment should be investigated right away.

An official in the Foreign Office explained to the JC that due to her role in the fight against violence towards women, Saganee could be involved in forming government policy on Hamas’ sexual crimes, and she was therefore “horrified” at her stance.

The JC report said that after it queried Saganee about her signature, first her name was dropped from the petition and then the whole missive disappeared from the Change.org website.

In reaction to the criticism, a Foreign Office spokesman said, “Allegations of staff misconduct are taken very seriously and will be fully investigated. The UK condemns sexual violence unequivocally and without exception and stands in solidarity with all of the victims and survivors.”

The British Foreign Office has been known as a bastion of anti-Israel bias for decades. A government intelligence analyst, Anna Stanley, who recently resigned from her position, told the JC that she “often” heard her colleagues talking against Israel since the Jewish state declared war on Hamas following the massacre of 1,200 people that included other atrocities as well, such as beheading infants and burning families alive.

She described many of them as taking the woke, progressive view of Israel that has adopted wholesale the Palestinian narrative of the age-old conflict.

These government officials believe that Jews in general are “privileged whites” and see Israel as “colonialist, apartheid and evil,” Stanley said. “October 7 was contextualized with discussion of ‘Israeli occupations,’ so that it seemed that some saw the attacks as in essence justified,” she added.

Earlier this month, Stanley wrote an exposé for the Fathom journal that described a three-day counter-terrorism course at Kings College she had attended for government employees as “amounting to indoctrination” against Israel and excusing Islamic terrorism. While Israel was offered as the main example of a state that could commit terrorism, the lecturers told the attendees, who included Foreign Office personnel, that “Condemning terrorism is to endorse the power of the strong over the weak.”

She said they were taught that even using the word “terrorist” was a problem because it “implied a moral judgment.” They would not even define what terrorism was, espousing the adage that “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”

“It confirmed my fears,” Stanley wrote, “that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.”

AntisemitismGreat BritainHamas sexual crimesIsrael-Hamas war