Perhaps in an effort to burnish its brand, many of the hostages Hamas has released since Nov. 24 have been women and girls .

Don’t be fooled. Hamas hurts women.

But the women on American college campuses who think they can support Palestinian women while cheering on the terrorist group responsible for the massacre of Oct. 7 either don’t mind the horror Israeli women suffered or they’re just too stupid to notice that Hamas is no champion of gender empowerment and equality.

Sorry feminists, Hamas killers won’t trade their anonymizing black murder masks to don knitted pink cat hats and march on the National Mall.

As the battle against hatred and antisemitism on college campuses continues, the utter foolishness of female protesters who support Hamas and vocal Hamas advocacy groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine blows the mind. These American women hired by or granted admission to our nation’s institutions of higher learning are supposed to be smart.

Yet, many of them have allowed themselves to be duped by a decadeslong terrorist influence campaign waged by an organization that takes misogyny to a medieval level.

At the University of Arizona, two female educators recently defended Hamas as a mere “resistance” movement and asserted the group is not antisemitic. That’s quite a claim for a designated terrorist organization the founding document of which declares, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.”

Feminists For a Free Palestine, a group of over 140 scholars, signed an open letter espousing a refusal to tolerate sexism. It claimed to reject sexism’s “practices, discourse, and incitement to violence, without exception.”

But these so-called feminists failed to denounce explicitly the atrocities committed against Israeli women by Hamas.

Such campus feminists should take a moment to remember the horrific case of Naama Levy, the 19-year-old Israeli activist with Hands of Peace and great-granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. A viral video from Oct. 7 reveals how Hamas captors pulled Levy out of the trunk of a black jeep in which they had stuffed her like a piece of baggage. Then, barefoot with hands bound behind her back and her sweatpants bloodied, she was grabbed by the hair and pushed into the backseat as they shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”

And that was hardly the worst of it. The maniacal beasts gleefully raped, tortured, and murdered Israeli women and girls and, in at least one case, mutilated a pregnant woman and her unborn child.

Those acts of barbarism should be enough for all people of conscience to condemn without caveat the Hamas monsters masquerading as men. Sadly, the feminist compassion of some on college campuses seems not to extend to Jewish women.

Hamas has shrewdly convinced these gullible feminists that they can simultaneously support the women of Gaza and the men who systematically victimize and abuse them.

Feminists who can’t find it in their hearts to condemn Hamas’s acts of brutal violence against Israeli women should consider the demeaning, debilitating, and destructive manner in which this organization treats Palestinian women, including mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. Hamas’s sexism manifests itself in the form of child marriage, male guardianship, and gender-based violence.

What does the average feminist Hamas fan have to say about child brides in Gaza where the terrorist group governs? To protect their daughters from assault, sexual harassment, and poverty, families often resort to child marriage, a violation of basic human rights.

And men in Gaza may marry more than one woman or child.

If the two female University of Arizona Hamas apologists mentioned earlier moved to Gaza, they would discover that Hamas authorities “allow male guardians to obtain court orders or simply notify the authorities to issue travel bans on women,” according to Human Rights Watch, a group hardly known for being reflexively pro-Israel. “Men can do so at any time … and this power acts as an ever-present threat over women.”

So much for female empowerment. And the problems don’t stop there.

According to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics cited in a 2022 State Department human rights report, “Approximately 59 percent of Palestinian women who currently were or had ever been married (ages 15 to 64) had been the victims of physical violence perpetrated by their husbands at least once during the past 12 months” — and 70% of these women were in Gaza. Unsurprisingly, Hamas also failed to enforce laws pertaining to rape.

The State Department also revealed that in Hamas-controlled Gaza, “NGOs cited insufficient enforcement of laws that disallow ‘family honor’ as a defense for perpetrators of ‘honor killings’ and prohibit judges from imposing lighter sentences for crimes against women and children, compared with those committed against men.”

Hamas supports and instigates the subordination, oppression, and destruction of women. We have witnessed the manifestations of the terrorist group’s woman-hating depravity in Israel on Oct. 7, and we should not ignore their ongoing abuse of the Palestinian women of Gaza.

Hamas’s American feminist cheerleading squad is cheering with blindfolds on. Supporting Hamas makes them fools, not feminists.

Antonette Bowman writes the  Raising Americans  Substack. She served as a public and private school teacher for eight years. She is a graduate of Stanford University and earned an M.A. in teaching from Johns Hopkins University.