The So, All right, it's my real pleasure to invite to Bad Faith Podcast, Heidi Matthews.

She is an assistant professor at Osgood Hall Law School at Ugh University.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Matthews.

Thanks for having me, Bree.

So the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because you specialize in a number of areas of interest to ongoing conversations about what's been going on in Israel,

Palestine, including international criminal law, the law of war, and you perhaps regrettably,

you'll have to tell me how you feel about it,

weighed into a dispute that emerged over the course

the last week or so, as it seemed,

as a superficial observer here,

it seemed like some of the narrative pushback coming out of Israel shifted from stories

about 40 bayheaded babies to stories about Hamas using civilians as human shield and that's why we shouldn't be overly

concerned with civilian casualties to a new area or an area at least that hadn't

really been the focus of pushback since immediately after October 7th, which is this question of

sexual assault and specifically the weaponization of rape in the context of

war by Hamas soldiers. And it was a difficult conversation I think for

lots of us to have because as leftist or as people who generally speaking are

inclined to believe survivors, people who generally speaking are inclined to believe survivors,

people who are aware of the ways that the legal systems

and kind of global justice systems are disinclined

to validate or prosecute claims of sexual assault against women, rarely

are we in the position of offering up skepticism of those kinds of claims.

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