I'm Going to Go Out On A Limb Here...
Please honestly consider the following:
(A) On a daily basis, people are firing hot slugs of lead into and through each other's bodies in Iraq. People are detonating explosives, intentionally dismembering and mutilating each other. People are burning each other alive. (People = just that... Iraqi, American, Polish, whatever)
(B) Now we learn that some American soldiers (although perhaps directed by private contractors/mercenaries) made hooded naked Iraqi prisoners pose in different positions. They pointed their fingers at the Iraqi prisoners' genitals (the hooded prisoners presumably didn't see this). They made the naked prisoners lie on top of each other in a pyramid. The worst allegations are these: a prisoner was bitten by a dog and wires (live? don't know) were attached to a prisoner's genitals.
Don't get me wrong, those are some bad times. Nobody wants a dog to bite them or to have wires attached to their wares, but compared to part A, part B seems fairly tame, doesn't it?
Apparently not.
"That really, really is the worst atrocity," Atwan said. "It affects the honor and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them."
Sexually abuse them? The articles I've read have said the prisoners were made to simulate sexual acts, not perform them. Even then... better to KILL them?
Like I said, this behavior is surely to be condemned, but with what is going on in Iraq I have a hard time mustering up any outrage about it. Am I taking crazy pills over here, or is it bizarre that we can all accept people splattering each other's brains all over Iraq, but not people making each other do naked dogpiles?
posted by Abe at 4/30/2004 11:41:00 AM
2 Comments:
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I guess I am not qualified to comment cause I havent experienced either A or B, but I think these people might have a different notion of things...to their culture, it might really be that B is worse than A. They might not be very understanding about homosexuality and close contact with the same sex in their culture. And you've got to take into account the mental torture and humiliation a person might undergo under such degrading circumstances. Its not like, the wires and the dogpile thing happened suddenly one day and then everything became normal...a sustained campaign like this might have some serious effect on the mind of the victim(s) as indeed it might have been intended to....
My final take is that, we cant judge which is the better choice for others, a quick death/physical pain versus sustained mental torture.
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