NCJWA slams Grace Tame for calling October 7 rape evidence “propaganda”
Grace Tame, the 2021 Australian of the Year, has spent the past two years recasting herself from a celebrated survivor advocate to one of Australia’s most polarising voices in the antizionist movement.
That shift reached a new flashpoint this week when she told ABC Sydney Mornings host Hamish Macdonald that claims of sexual violence committed during the 7 October 2023 attacks had been “debunked”. This claim has drawn an immediate and forceful response from the National Council of Jewish Women Australia (NCJWA).
Grace Tame (Facebook)
Tame’s anti-Israel activism intensified after October 2023, when she began posting on social media describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”.
In January 2025 she signed a $100,000 ambassadorial deal with Nike, but the sportswear company ended the partnership five months later after she reposted content criticising media coverage of the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington DC. Nike told Daily Mail Australia it “does not stand for any form of discrimination, including antisemitism.”
The controversy deepened on 9 February 2026 when Tame addressed a large pro-Palestine rally outside Sydney Town Hall during the state visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. She labelled Herzog a “war criminal” and led the crowd in a chant of “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada.”
The rally was organised to protest Herzog’s visit and participants defied a court order banning the march, risking arrest under special police powers introduced by the NSW Government following the Bondi Beach terror attack on 14 December.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had invited Herzog to join Jewish Australians in commemorating the victims of the Chanukah massacre.
Petitions calling for Tame to be stripped of her Australian of the Year title followed, including one that attracted more than 27,000 signatures.
Tame has since said her speaking engagements have largely disappeared. Addressing a conference in Hobart this month, she said she had no bookings for the remainder of the year, attributing the decline to “an ongoing media smear campaign.”
It was against this backdrop that she appeared on ABC Sydney Mornings today.
When a listener asked Macdonald to question Tame on why she had never condemned the rape and murder of Israeli women on 7 October, Tame replied: “I’m not going to sink to the level of entertaining any kind of propaganda, Hamish.”
Asked what propaganda the question contained, she responded: “Those things have been debunked.”
Macdonald noted that the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict had found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred” during the attacks and asked whether Tame was dismissing that finding as propaganda. She did not answer directly.
“Awful things are being perpetrated by both sides,” she said. “I’m outraged by all of the violence.”
Lynda Ben-Menashe
When Macdonald pressed her on whether she had specifically condemned the sexual violence of 7 October, Tame described the question as “a tactic of bad faith actors” designed to “trip people up”, before adding: “Clearly, I don’t support any of it.”
As Macdonald put it to her directly, “it’s rape and gang rape, those are the allegations,” Tame invoked her own experience of childhood abuse.
“As someone who has been raped multiple times as a child myself, I have been choked, hit, spat on. I’ve been locked in cupboards. I do not dismiss any of it, no matter who the perpetrator is and no matter who the victim is.”
She added that it was “really important” to “remember the broader context of this whole thing”.
NCJWA president Lynda Ben-Menashe condemned the remarks.
“On 7 October, thousands of male terrorists streamed over the border from Gaza to torture, rape and murder Israeli people in the most heinous ways,” she said. “For Tame to claim this fact has been ‘debunked’ is repugnant.”
Multiple international investigations and legal findings contradict the claim.
UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten led an official mission to Israel in early 2024, reviewing more than 5,000 photographs and 50 hours of footage and interviewing survivors, witnesses, first responders and medical professionals.
Her report concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations during the attacks and that sexual abuse of hostages still held in Gaza was likely continuing.
The International Criminal Court subsequently sought arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, citing rape and other acts of sexual violence as both crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In issuing an arrest warrant for Deif in November 2024, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber said there were reasonable grounds to believe hostages held in Gaza had been subjected to sexual and gender-based violence including forced penetration, forced nudity and degrading treatment.
Testimony from returned hostages has provided further detail.
Amit Soussana described being sexually assaulted by her captor, who repeatedly asked when her period would end so he could “have his way with her”. Aviva Siegel told the United Nations she witnessed a young girl in captivity crying after being forced to perform oral sex on her captor.
Agam Goldstein-Almog said she witnessed another hostage forced at gunpoint into unwanted physical contact with her captor. Male hostages have also described abuse, including coercion, humiliation and sexual threats.
Many victims of the 7 October attacks were killed before they could testify. Investigators reported bodies found partially undressed or showing injuries consistent with sexual violence.
The UN team was unable to conduct full forensic investigations because many bodies had already been buried under Jewish religious law, but said the available material provided credible indications that sexual violence occurred.
“For Tame to call this ‘propaganda’ is not only a wilful denial and distortion, but an outrageous insult to the survivors and those who did not survive,” Ben-Menashe said.
“We can only speculate about the reason someone who claims to fight for all victims of sexual abuse makes an exception when those victims are Jews.”
The gloating admissions of depraved and sadistic behaviour by hamas palestinians, the gleeful support of the depravity by the likes of Rama Duwaji… and Grace Tame has the gall to say they’ve been debunked? We have only her testimony for what allegedly occurred in her childhood… on the other hand, October 7th 2023 was filmed and posted to social media by the perpetrators. She is wilfully, utterly WRONG and has been exposed as the attention seeker she is.