>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>What do such facts have to do with torture, though? Even if the
>>tortured individuals at Abu Ghraib had been all flaming drag queens
>>and professional strippers from San Francisco who are into S/M in
>>their free time, their rape, torture, and murder would be as much
>>of an outrage as the rape, torture, and murder of Abu Ghraib Iraqi
>>detainees (some of whom, for all you know, may be liberal gay men
>>like Salam Pax) is.
>
>Of course it's an outrage. It's fucking awful. What really does that
>have to do with whether Islam, or versions of Islam, oppresses women?
I mention torture and orientalism in the minds of torturers and the liberal media, and you and others begin raving about how Islam oppresses women and has done so everywhere for centuries. Evidently, in your mind, there is a connection between them.
If the photographs had not gotten leaked to the press, and if we had had only the testimonies of Iraqi detainees to go by, I'm afraid that many Americans -- including some on LBO-talk -- would have concluded that Iraqis made it all up out of their sexual anxieties and misogynist fantasies. After all, look at what's up at Sistani's website! -- Yoshie
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