On the evening of 17th March 2025, the state of Israel unilaterally ended a nominal two-month ceasefire in Gaza. In one of the deadliest episodes of the whole genocide, that night’s assault killed more than 400 Palestinians and wounded more than 550. The morning after, Netanyahu made a statement announcing the resumption of hostilities. He said: ‘Hamas is responsible for this war. It invaded our towns, murdered our people, raped our women and kidnapped our loved ones.’
It was during a previous temporary ceasefire in late 2023 that initial reports emerged of systematic sexual violence enacted by Hamas against Israeli women on October 7th. A (now widely disputed) New York Times article called ‘Screams Without Words’ galvanized the war effort and bolstered the case for collective punishment. This continued even when a UN investigation failed to find corroboration and a significant amount of misinformation was exposed. The spectre of ‘Hamas rapes’ used sex exceptionalism to sharpen the tableau of inverted perpetration and victimisation that underpinned the Gaza genocide. As Keir Starmer had already insisted: ‘Israel must have the right to defend herself’. Incarnating the Israeli people as a violated woman and the Palestinian people as a predatory man created a state of exception; defining Hamas as a ‘rape cult’ redefined the genocide of the Palestinians as a war of sexual justice.
In July 2025, a group of Israeli and American lawyers and academics calling themselves The Dinah Project published a report that alleged Hamas had used sexual violence as a ‘tactical weapon’ in a ‘genocidal scheme.’ The report presented very little new evidence: indeed, it claimed that ‘non-traditional evidentiary methods’ could and should be used to establish a pattern of systematic sexual abuse. As well as the inclusion of new evidence types, the authors presented a new legal rationale: because October 7th constituted an organised attack, even one associated incident of sexual violence could and should be considered a war crime. The definition of ‘systematic’, in other words, could be stretched and borrowed when required (it was not applied to the Israeli military’s persistent infliction of sexual abuse in conflict settings, prisons, and detention centres since the beginning of the Nakba).
In Genesis, Dinah is introduced as the seventh child and only named daughter of Leah and Jacob. In Genesis 34, the story of her rape by Shechem, and the subsequent revenge of her brothers Simeon and Levi, is told. This retribution took the form of massacring all the Shechemite men and plundering the city for its wealth, its livestock, its women, and its children.
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The ‘wild men’ and barbarians of Antiquity and early Christian lore resurface in stories of Viking rape and pillage and the Mediaeval idea of sexuality as the ‘African sin’, and culminate in the dangerous brown and Black men of modern coloniality. The post-1492 planetary project of invasion, dispossession, expropriation and extermination did make systematic use of sexual violence; moreover, it relied on a pincer movement between acts of sexual abuse and imputations of sexual threat. Sexual violence as a tactic of war was combined with an inversion of the war imaginary. Lands and bodies were sexualised as both terra nullius awaiting penetration and a savage wilderness bent on violating the colonisers in return. As the Americas and the African continent became what Anne McClintock calls ‘a porno-tropics for the European imagination’, they became racialised repositories for both the repudiated violence of coloniality and Europe’s libidinal fantasies and fears.
The deep sexualisation of the colonial project positioned fear of revolution and fear of rape as one and the same. Any evidence of the phallus in colonised communities was met with frenzied retribution: completing the circuit, this was often enacted on the pretext of sexual threat. Rumours about white women being raped during both the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 1865 Morant Bay uprising were used to justify torture, massacre, and mass starvation, as well as quid pro quo rape and femicide. Similar dynamics underpinned lynching, a form of sexualised torture that we cannot cleave from the role of white femininity in white supremacy and the emancipation of the enslaved.
In 1921, up to 300 Black people in Greenwood, Tulsa, were killed by white mobs in 48 hours, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman in a lift. Previously, Greenwood had become so prosperous it was known as ‘Black Wall Street’ – until the attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighbourhood. In late capitalism, the idea of Black Wall Street is irreconcilable with the reality of urban slums, immigration detention centres and postcolonial wastelands that constitute contemporary racialised geographies. Elite fears of revolution are now settled on the growing ‘surplus’ populations produced by neocolonial dispossession and over-accumulation, austerity, and climate catastrophe. Such surplused groups are only just contained, through the material structure of the border and ideological structures such as the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis.
Since the second intifada, the Israeli economy has been replacing Palestinian workers with migrant ones. The Palestinians have been repositioned from reserve army of labour to excess humanity standing in the way of a new round of capitalist expansion and threatening to revolt. Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ security model, as Naomi Klein writes, is also part of a broader programme of statecraft produced by over-accumulation and stagnation, obscene wealth and crushing impoverishment. The Dome is both a local defence technology and a regional defence metaphor for the planetary project to contain, expel or exterminate the ‘brutes’. When Hamas managed to penetrate the missile shield in October 2023, the ideological shockwaves that followed carried both Israel’s genocidal project and the Western governments that lined up behind it.
As of 2016, around 66 percent of Iron Dome components have been manufactured in the US. In April 2024, Congress agreed an aid package to Israel of $8.7 billion, much of which was earmarked to strengthen air defence systems.
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The border fence Hamas breached on October 7th cost NIS 4 billion to build. When Hamas breached it – in at least thirty places – the reaction in the international intelligence and defence community was panic that, as Newsweek put it, ‘Israel’s High-Tech Border Failure Could Happen in the US’. The free movement of capital is facilitated by labour being fixed in place. When the constant motion of capital produces threats of social and political disorder, the border – together with the prison – suppresses resistance. The prison and the border are also techniques of semi- and deproletarianisation deployed according to racial capitalist needs. Surplus value is preserved by the scrapping of surplus populations: some are literally ‘put away’, while others are kept outside. This is a cyclical, cynical process of mobility and immobility, exploitation and waste.
Racial capitalist bordering is thoroughly sexualised. Borders are sites of permeability where one national or economic ‘body’ sits alongside another: Gloria Anzaldúa has described the US-Mexico border as una herida abierta, ‘where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.’ In the ideological geographies of racial capitalism, borders between poor countries and rich ones are sites to which coloniality displaces its own appetites, as the condition of ‘civilisation’ and legible subjectivity. In the economic geographies of racial capitalism, borders are sites where surplused populations are either warehoused or hidden, in ruling class strategies that produce the material and metaphorical Iron Dome. All this creates a terror of invasion, as violence is transposed to the wastelands or contained through ‘putting away’ unwanted Others within. In this necropornographic fantasy, the monster either looms just beyond the back garden or is already inside the house.
Anzaldúa famously referred to Mexico as the ‘double’ of the US: it is the doppelgänger in the national psyche, the collective shadow at the door. This spectre was strategically enfleshed by Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, when he legitimated his $11 billion border wall through a lurid effigy of Mexican men. ‘They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime…they’re rapists…. They’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15…and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die.’ This projection goes deeper than the fact that Trump himself has been credibly accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women since the 1980s.
The sexualisation of the border is rooted in the split psychic and political economy of coloniality. The Cartesian mind/body split is a rupture between colonial modernity, spirituality and nature, which encourages violence against the body (or particular bodies) alongside the violent exploitation of the earth. As colonial/modern Man emerged through the brutal repudiation of sexuality and the body, the violence of colonisation turned inwards and generated sexualised anxieties attached to racialised flesh. At the level of the psyche, coloniality splits the privileged subject in two and projects its ‘darker’ sides on to the Other. As the door is bolted against the ‘brutes’, racial capitalism disavows its own sexualised violence.
This is how femicides in Latin America and conflict-based sexual violence on the African continent are understood as manifestations of violent and savage cultures and not as products of the deliberate wasting and enclosure that produces what Valencia would term gore capitalism. Racial capitalism both engenders gore (pun intended) and uses the fact of its own gory wastelands as a pretext for bolting the door. This is why the idea of sexual threat has sustained almost a quarter-century of the War on Terror, in which Muslim men are figured as misogynistic predators even through their own sexual abuse. In the 21st century iteration of ‘white slavery’, the ‘monster-terrorist-fags’ of Abu Ghraib and Guantanámo are as one with the trafficker and ‘groomer’ of tabloid headlines and far-right incitement.
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It was late 2024 when Elon Musk apparently discovered the issue of ‘migrant grooming gangs’ in the UK. Spurred on by a handful of far-right accounts, he made a series of posts on X denouncing Keir Starmer, calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed as a ‘rape genocide apologist’, and demanding the release from prison of far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson). This became part of a broader Reform-led revival of a racist trope conceived in the early 21st century, which had embedded itself in Northern England in sites of deindustrial decline. The rhetorical device of the ‘Muslim grooming gang’ enabled real incidents of group sexual exploitation to be overdetermined and racialised through a combination of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and sexually exceptionalist myths.
Yaxley-Lennon has criminal convictions for violence, fraud, possession, public order, and contempt of court. In 2018, he had been jailed for almost causing a Huddersfield trial to collapse by filming a Facebook Live stream about ‘rape jihad gangs’ outside. Rape jihad is a necropornographic fantasy that positions sexual violence as the key weapon of an (un)holy war. It relies on the sexual exceptionalism that renders sexual harm the preserve of Islam (and only Islam) and creates a sexualised state of exception that demands retaliatory violence. The latter can manifest in many forms: as militarised killing, criminalisation, vigilantism (as seen in many English towns in the 2010s), and the sociopolitical death of bordering regimes. The rape jihad trope also sustains cycles of wasting and disposal: in the early 21st century, it helped deflect from the massive disinvestment in Northern England that had rendered working class girls so vulnerable in the first place.
In July 2025, there were a series of far-right protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, after an Ethiopian asylum-seeker was charged with sexually assaulting a local girl. Worse riots had raged the previous summer, after teenager Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff to Christian parents, was falsely identified as a Muslim immigrant who had arrived by small boat the previous year. Protestors chanted ‘save our kids’ and ‘we want our country back’, while attacking mosques and hotels housing asylum-seekers. Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: ‘I understand the frustrations people have.’ Two in five of the 899 people arrested for rioting in 2025 had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse.
At all scales, we know that the men who ‘protect’ women and the men who harm them are often one and the same. Women are most likely to be sexually abused by a current or former partner, or by someone they know. There are high levels of sexual misconduct amongst police officers, and of sexual violence by officials in immigrant detention and at border security. Misogyny and sexual harassment are the ties that bind the far right groupuscule, both on- and offline. At the geopolitical scale, the same dynamics are at work – racial capitalism relies on rampant sexual abuse and weaponises ‘women’s safety’ at the same time.
The racial capitalist protection racket is an extension of the patriarchal protection racket – the heteronormative contract through which women exchange submission for security, which legitimates rape within marriage while women are encouraged to fear the stranger rapist on the streets. Race and class ideology produces the tropes that give form to the mythical rapist, the mythical protector, and the legitimate victim within broader designs. These exploit and co-opt white women, or sometimes their conditionally embodied proxies such as migrant care workers and trafficked womenandchildren (but not sex workers). These women figure as property to be abused at will, which is violently defended from the Others when racial capitalist interests are at stake. This heady blend of sexual violence and sexual fear helps to maintain both social control and surplus value.
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Musk’s name, like Trump’s, appears in the Epstein files. Emails show him pursuing several visits to Epstein’s island between 2012 and 2013, years after Epstein had been imprisoned for soliciting a minor. In one message, Musk asks Epstein what day or night would see the island’s ‘wildest party’ occur. Epstein’s island is not just a story of individual moral degeneracy: it represents a political and economic class for whom gendered and racialised Others are merely commodities for use. For Epstein and his many associates, sexual violence enacted supremacy as well as consolidating intricate bonds of intimacy, complicity, blackmail, and tribute. This, of course, is not called a grooming gang, and it is not called gore capitalism – it is normalised as celebrity culture, elite society, global intelligence, and high finance.
In September 2025, Musk addressed a 110,000-strong ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in London, at which Charlie Kirk was memorialised, and the Palestinian flag was destroyed alongside that of Islamic State. Musk, speaking by video link, condemned the British government’s failure ‘to protect innocent people including children who are getting gang-raped.’ Yaxley-Lennon played a video that included images of non-white men convicted of group sexual exploitation of children, followed by a video of a white woman in tears. The French white nationalist politician Éric Zemmour told protesters they were on the cusp of the Great Replacement – ‘you and we’, he said, ‘are being colonised by our former colonies’.
The coloniality of sexual violence describes the monopoly on sexual violence that constitutes colonial/modern Man. The rape and sexual abuse of women (in both colonised and colonising societies) sits alongside the violent domination of the male ‘savage’ on the pretext of sexual aggression (often against the white bourgeois women Man reserves the right to abuse himself). Racial capitalism both enacts rampant sexual violence upon the Other, and projects this violence onto the Other in the form of imputations of sexual threat. This is why fear of revolution is fear of rape: the ‘angry mob’ represent racial capitalism’s disavowed sexualised violence returning to itself. This is why sexual harm only counts at a formational level when enacted against white women (or their proxies) by racialised men. In the sexual economy of coloniality, some bodies are property to be protected, others are property to be transacted for political capital when convenient, and still Others are property that is already derelict, so can be violently used and thrown away. Sexual violence and sexual fear are means by which life, death and living-death are organised to support accumulation.
In 1840s colonial Australia, the ‘white woman of Gippsland’ was said to have been abducted by the Kurnai people and forced into marriage with one of their leaders. This fabled damsel was fantasised in ‘a silk dress of quality’ by Port Phillip Superintendent William Lonsdale, and became the subject of many rescue missions. These expeditions, while massacring the Kurnai, were used to appraise the value of the ‘wilderness’ in which she was said to be held. ‘I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location…Look at this beautiful piece of property’. This was what Trump said when he unveiled his plan for the ‘New Gaza’, during the Board of Peace signing ceremony at Davos in early 2026. Two years earlier, Mondoweiss had interviewed Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, one of the last people through the Rafah crossing after October 7th. ‘There’s a bumper sticker that’s everywhere in Israel,’ he remarked, ‘that says, “Finish them off”.’
Alison Phipps 