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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....
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To: Sully- who wrote (2180)5/4/2004 10:43:51 AM
From: Sully-   of 35834
 
SEX AND HUMILIATION:
Andrew Sullivan

I cited an article yesterday which quoted an al Sadr supporter saying he would rather have been shot between the eyes than subjected to what appears to be a strip search. The full quote was truncated in the piece. Here is the rest of it:

Mr Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime he was electrocuted, beaten and suspended from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back. "But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us... They made us stand in a way that I am ashamed to describe. They came to look at us as we stood there. They knew this would humiliate us. We are men. It's OK if they beat me. Beating don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman."
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I am in no way attempting to minimize the horror of what appears to have gone on in Abu Ghraib prison under U.S. command. But it's worth realizing that the nakedness and the sexual humiliation might be far more potent in a sexist, homophobic and patriarchal culture than in less sexually repressed societies. One of the most important things to remember about today's Muslim extremism is that it has taken what is the submission of women under Islam and turned it into a political pathology. Like most variants of fascism, it is deeply troubled by women's equality and by homosexuality. Hence the impact of these images could be psychologically devastating to many Iraqis - and far worse to those in countries where Islamism has made even deeper inroads. This was not simply a p.r. debacle; it was a p.r. catastrophe. And that in itself shows the enormous cultural gulf between where the West is now headed and where Islamism wants to take the Middle East.
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