victim Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

The confusion arose when the remains of two women, charred beyond recognition, were mistaken for a single body.

The remains of a woman believed to have been abducted by the Hamas terror group on October 7 were found in the interred grave of another woman after a piece of her jewelry was discovered weeks later.

The tragedy of Shani Gabay, a victim of the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, unfolded in a sequence of painful revelations and errors. Gabay was among the attendees at the Supernova rave when Hamas terrorists stormed in, unleashing a massacre that claimed over 350 lives at the scene and approximately 1,200 across southern Israel. Gabay was later thought to have been abducted to Gaza along with more than 240 others.

As rockets rained down, 25-year-old Gabay, who had recently graduated Tel Aviv University’s school of law, pulled over in her car near Kibbutz Alumim, close to the festival site, seeking refuge in a field shelter. Unknown to her, the terrorists were already attacking the partygoers. Despite being shot, Gabay managed to flee the shelter, finding temporary safety in an ambulance with other survivors. However, their respite was short-lived as the ambulance was targeted by a rocket-propelled grenade, resulting in the death of all occupants.

For weeks, the Gabay family lived under the harrowing impression that Shani had been kidnapped and was being held captive in Gaza because authorities were unable to locate any trace of her. This belief persisted until a chance discovery of her charred necklace shaped like a half-moon, buried in the debris of the Supernova festival, changed everything.

“We concluded that Shani was missing, there was no sign of life from her, and as the days passed and she wasn’t found among the bodies, we began to believe that she had been kidnapped,” Shani’s brother Aviel, told the Ynet news site. “We became involved in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, we held meetings in Israel and around the world… we believed that Shani was taken hostage and wondered what she was going through in captivity.”

Her necklace, which was unearthed on the 47th day of her assumed captivity, bore a high concentration of Gabay’s DNA, a clue that finally led to the unraveling of her fate. The police, upon examining the necklace further, also found a lower concentration of another woman’s DNA. This led to the exhumation of the other woman’s grave, where a CT scan revealed two skulls. “A dentist then examined the two skulls and clearly identified teeth belonging to Shani,” Aviel explained.

The authorities “admitted they had made a big mistake and that they had buried Shani on the first week of the war together with another young woman,” Aviel Gabay revealed. The confusion arose when the remains of the two women, found together in the burned-out ambulance and charred beyond recognition, were mistaken for a single body.

Shani Gabay was finally laid to rest just days before what would have been her 26th birthday in a ceremony attended by mourners in the northern Israeli town of Yokne’am.

Has there ever been another time in history when the powerful, moneyed, cosseted elites achieved and maintained that elite status by claiming to be despised, discriminated against and marginalized? The latest example of this fetishization of outcast status came from Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies last Thursday, when it presented a discussion by associate professor Zareena Grewal on her book Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority.

“At the talk,” reported the Yale Daily News, “Grewal spoke about her first book — which will soon have a second edition — and her next book.” So it appears that Grewal has done quite well: she holds a professorship at Yale, her first book was successful enough to warrant a second edition, and to make her writing attractive enough to publishers that she was able to sign a contract for a second book.

Zareena Grewal has, in short, been successful and prosperous. Her work has received accolades. She got a plum job at an Ivy League university. But to hear her tell it, she lives a terrifying life cowering in fear of the racist, redneck yahoos who are bent on denying her and others like her their just rewards for their labors. Grewal complains that “the pandemic impacts us in such uneven ways reflective of structural racism and disenfranchisement.” On top of that, “we have the escalation of state violence against Black and indigenous people, the climate crisis, the fascist suppression of protestors and voters, a rise in white supremacist movements, the collapsing of institutions, and the very threat of a coup.”

Wait, which side was doing the coup again? Never mind. You’ll be happy to learn that Grewal has learned to cope with all the many, many ways in which she has been victimized: “In these dark times, I rely on what I learned about the nature of crises in writing that book over ten years ago to help me slow down and metabolize all the things we are hit with every day.” Yes, metabolize. That’s how academics these days talk, you unwashed rube.

Grewal is an experienced player of the victimhood game. “During the talk,” says the Yale Daily News, “Grewal emphasized that she wrote her first book in the context of how the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the Arab Spring Revolution affected Gen X Muslim youth.” The 9/11 attacks affected many people other than Muslims, but it has been commonplace for victimhood propagandists to claim that Muslims were the primary victims of the attacks. Several weeks ago, on the nineteenth anniversary of the attacks, the Los Angeles chapter Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release to complain of supposed bias against Muslims in the teaching about 9/11 in schools. CAIR-LA Civil Rights Managing Attorney Amr Shabaik wrote that those biases primarily involved conflating “the entire religion of Islam with the tragic events of 9/11.”

Never mind that the 9/11 hijackers and plotters repeatedly conflated their actions with the religion of Islam. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters several years ago penned a lengthy Islamic defense for their actions, which included a closely reasoned explanation of why the 9/11 attacks were justified from the standpoint of Islamic doctrine and belief.

As far as Grewal, as well as CAIR is concerned, such material doesn’t exist. What we have instead is “the Trump Presidency, the possibility of a second term of the Trump Presidency, the transformation of a series of policies in the Middle East, the brutal suppression of those revolutionary movements that I am describing at the end of the book, and how has that impacted American Muslim communities.”

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Travis Zadeh, who hosted the event, highlighted the importance of Grewal’s work in light of efforts to police the borders and control who enters the United States. Zadeh noted that Grewal’s “writing on the containment and exclusion of Muslims takes on heightened meaning in the current context of ultranationalism. In this paramedic state of closed borders, the debate over who belongs where is all the more pressing.”

Who belongs where – that’s a good question. For all their talk of marginalization and exclusion, Zareena Grewal and Travis Zadeh are in the in-crowd, and their talk of how much they are victims is the ticket to success and adulation in today’s academic world and among the intelligentsia in general. In contrast, what about an academic who is not Marxist, anti-American, and obsessed with imagined racism and victimhood? Would such an academic get featured at Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies? Would such an academic even get hired at Yale in the first place?

The answers are clear. And so in their most inmost of inner circles, Grewal, Zadeh and their ilk will continue whining about how they’re discriminated against, and will be rewarded with prestige, positions, money, fame, and influence for doing so, while genuine academics are genuinely excluded, and must hunt for jobs far outside the academic world. Today, if you can play the victim convincingly enough, how far can you advance? The sky’s the limit.

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