Friday, January 04, 2008

The No Rape Charge Gathers Steam:

The mills of justice grind slowly. But finally, the outrage of IDF's ban on raping Palestinian women, about which I blogged here , seems to have made it into international awareness:

A report claiming that Israeli soldiers do not rape Palestinian Arab women as part of a sinister racist Zionist plot (see Help! Rape!) has stirred the outrage of world media. Human rights organizations and Palestinian groups greeted the latest evidence of Zionist racism with justifiable rage. Major reactions:

The UN Human Rights Committee, on the initiative of Special Raporteur John Dugard, passed three resolutions condemning Israel for gross Human Rights violations. Commented Dugard, "There is no avoiding the facts. The study showed an appalling and brutal lack of rape on the part of the IDF. Those people are inhuman. When will the world wake up to the depths of Zionist depravity?"

Jewish activist Ben Murrain said, "I am ashamed to be a Jew. This is not the Judaism I know. I was taught to rape everyone."

Rabbi Michael Lerner, spiritual leader of Tikkun, lamented, "This is Judaism? Where is compassion for the other? Where is Tikkun Olam? Where is Ahavas Hazulat? Where is the Shukeenah? The insensitivity of Israeli soldiers to the charms of Palestinian Arab women shows how the occupation has dehumanized those Israelis and distanced them from the humanistic values of Judaism.

By a vote of 143 to 3 (USA, Israel, Micronesia) with 6 abstentions, the UN General Assembly passed a Saudi Arabian initaited resolution condemning Zionism as racism and appointed a committee to monitor the incidence of rape in the IDF and ensure that as many Palestinian Arab women are raped as Israeli Jews. Saudi spokesman Abdul Wahabi Salafi noted, "In our country, we know how to treat women. According to reports, not only does the IDF not rape women, but the Zionist dog judges don't order beatings for raped women either. We are also investigating reports that the racist Zionist regime doesn't allow wife beating. This is an abridgement of Muslim freedom of religion. We will submit a separate resolution about that human rights violation."

(Read the rest of it, here)

And staying within the rape-theme obsession that seems to have become somewhat popular in Israel, here's Normblog take on a recent, shocking revelation by Haaretz Editor-in-chief:


It's good to have time away from the news occasionally. You get to miss unpleasantries like this one. It's from last year but has only just been drawn to my attention:

[C]omments made by David Landau, editor of the Israeli daily, Haaretz, to Condoleezza Rice about Israel needing to be "raped" by the U.S. to achieve a Mideast settlement caused quite a stir among the 20 or so attendees at a confidential briefing with the secretary of state on a recent visit to Israel......[Landau] was said to have implored Rice to intervene, asserting that the Israeli government wanted "to be raped" and that it would be like a "wet dream" for him to see this happen.

This man is the editor of Israel's major liberal newspaper! Can he, after saying that, still be in the job? Perhaps he'd like to contemplate for future usage some other jolly figure of violent assault - like Israel being in need of a pogrom against it. Or, then again, perhaps not.

In other rape-related news from the same country, there's an academic research paper claiming that Arab women aren't raped by IDF soldiers because they [the women] are... de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes. Isn't that a brilliantly novel insight, when it's more or less standard to see rape as itself a mode, or manifestation, of the process of dehumanizing others?

I've seen this astonishing piece of information doing the blogosphere rounds for a few days now but was at a loss for words as to how to deal with it. Thank God for Norm and his understated commentary about it.

1 Comments:

At 10:14 AM EST, Blogger Nobody said...

Brilliant !!!

:D :D

 

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