Raping Hadji Girl

by digby

Via Arthur, in this fine post, I see that former right winger Paul Craig Roberts is at it again:

Americans who get their propaganda from Fox “News” or are told what to think by right-wing talk radio hosts are outraged at news reports that U.S. troops planned and carried out the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman. They are not outraged that the troops committed the deed; they are outraged that the media reported it. These “conservatives,” who proudly wear their patriotism on their sleeves, dismiss the reports of the incident as a Big Lie floated by “the anti-American liberal media” in order to demoralize Americans and reduce public support for the war.

Playing to this audience, Col. Jeffrey Snow, a U.S. brigade commander in Baghdad, told AFP News that news coverage could cause the U.S. to lose the war. In other words, what we are doing in Iraq cannot stand the light of day, so reporters must not report or the word will get out.

Many Bush supporters believe that truth is not on our side and must be suppressed. Yet, they support a war that is too shameful to report.

This story is haunting me because it comes on the heels of that earlier story about the song Hadji Girl. Remember?

I guess it’s the cavalier killing of Iraqi girls in that song that gets me. Iraq is not a culture of strong female fighters. Women are kept down. I haven’t seen any evidence that they are being used to plant IED’s and there has only been a couple of occasions where a suicide bomber was female in my recollection. Women are being repressed in this new regime. There is little reason to see them as the enemy. And yet, those guys in the Hadji video are laughing and hooting uproariously at the death of these girls. They seem to have bought in to the conservative Muslim view that women are male property and any humiliation of them or their person is an insult to males. (Or maybe they just get off on killing women, I don’t know.) Are these guys really that close to their lizard brains?

Now I know that rape has often been a common feature of war. But this isn’t really a war in the classical sense. It’s a hybrid war/occupation/police action/whatever and it seems to me that there is something quite sick about all the psychosexual aspects of it generally. From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to this horrible rape and killing, it seems to me that there is a very strong desire on the part of Americans to sexualize and feminize the enemy. Maybe it’s always been this way. I’m no expert. I can’t help but remember Rush Limbaugh’s reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal; he was so excited that “the babes” were meting out the torture and he clearly thinks forced sexual humiliation as all in good fun. There is just something very odd about all this. I wonder if someone is studying it.

Meanwhile, here at home, its pure ostrich time on the right. Don’t tell them what’s actually going on over there, don’t show us any returning dead, don’t make them see the wounded. They’re waiting for the Mel Gibson movie in which only the blood of ruthless terrorists were spilled as our brave soldiers fought them there so they wouldn’t have to fight them here. Pass the popcorn.

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