Oh sorry, that was about cartoons


Maajid Nawaz is furious at the Guardian for the way it worded its reporting on the kidnapped and enslaved Nigerian schoolgirls.

maajidMaajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz May 1

Typical. @Guardian uses “mass marriage” instead of “rape” describing jihadist enslavement of 230 Nigerian schoolgirls.

The 230 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria by jihadist terrorists Boko Haram, forcibly turned into ‘brides’ ie: raped

maajid2

Furious. @guardian cannot even call it enslavement & rape but calls it “mass marriage”? Has our cultural relativity gone that far?

He’s also furious about comparative outrage.

maajid3Maajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz May 3

Kidnapping,enslavement&mass rape of 230 Nigerian schoolgirls by jihadist Boko Haram led to worldwide riots..oh sorry,that was about cartoons

Zing. Yeah.

Comments

  1. leni says

    The descriptions of this as marriage were super creepy to me, too. I kept thinking about how easy it is for people to call this “marriage”, but two adults of the same gender? That apparently makes a bigger a sham of marriage than mass enslavement and rape.

    I know most people don’t mean ill and the papers are probably trying to avoid sounding sensationalist (selectively, the bastards, I know). And I’m sure they do understand the “marriages” are forced, but on the other hand it just makes me angry. Would they have called it that if it were middle class European white girls? I’m thinking no. They would have called it “white slavery”, which is obviously worse than all the other kinds of slavery. Ugh.

    What a nightmare, though. America could help, but all of our drones are busy killing children in the Middle East.

  2. quixote says

    That Guardian wording struck me the same way when I saw it. They didn’t use it just once when quoting some Haramite. They used it over and over, also in the title, and not once did they call the crimes by their right names.

    Very weird. It didn’t occur to me that it could be an insane level of relativism. I’ve never thought of kidnapping and slavery and rape as anyone’s cultural values. Somewhere in my tiny mind I guess I assumed that people would feel about crimes against humanity as they do about, say, the rights of gays. But I forgot. There are male gays. These are just women.

  3. Katherine Woo says

    “all of our drones are busy killing children in the Middle East”

    No. What our drones are doing there is targeting Islamic militants, people trying to implement theocratic rule based on a religion founded on precisely the sort of mass rape being described here. Many of Mohammed’s wives were ‘married’ to him under identical circumstances and his men practiced an even uglier form of ‘temporary marriage’ to justify mass rape.

    But like ANY military intervention, innocent people, including children, will die, even if not the intention of the U.S. We further target those militants which are a threat to the U.S., which Boko Haram has not proved as of yet.

    Most importantly children would die if we intervened in Nigeria. So are you OK with those children dying, but not children in “Middle East” (I’m real sure on your geography which puts Pakistan and Afghanistan under that rubric)?

    The U.S. is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t with leftwing hypocrites like you.

  4. regrettablybritish says

    One way of explaining it is that the word ‘raped’ suggests a singular event. Forced marriage, on the other hand suggests that these girls will be raped repeatedly until they escape, get rescued or die.

  5. leni says

    No. What our drones are doing there is targeting Islamic militants, people trying to implement theocratic rule based on a religion founded on precisely the sort of mass rape being described here.

    No. What our drones are doing there is targeting suspected Islamic militants and anyone else who happens to be nearby. And people suspected of trying to implement theocratic rule based on a religion founded on precisely the sort of mass rape being described here and anyone else who happens to be nearby.

    Fixed it for ya 🙂

    But like ANY military intervention, innocent people, including children, will die, even if not the intention of the U.S.

    That is undoubtedly true. I should not have been glib about that.

    We further target those militants which are a threat to the U.S., which Boko Haram has not proved as of yet.

    Hey, maybe we could just conjure up some “evidence” from a drunk Nigerian who has seen some yellow cake in the forest bunkers and legitimatize it? Would that work for you?

  6. Decker says

    America could help, but all of our drones are busy killing children in the Middle East.

    Why do some people always have to tie all the world’s ills back to America?

    This is a posting about the kidnapping and sexual enslavement of girls in Africa by some pretty nasty islamists.

    What good could taking jabs at America possibly do for those girls?

    These kidnappings have nothing whatsoever to do with America, so why drag America into the portrait?

  7. leni says

    These kidnappings have nothing whatsoever to do with America, so why drag America into the portrait?

    My mother was in a US Army Reserve medical unit and they did mostly humanitarian missions. I don’t think it was all altruistic obviously, but a lot of it of it was nevertheless good work that generated good will for the US in places that otherwise might not have had much.

    Like it or not, the US has a military presence all over the world. Even in peacetime and even when it only indirectly benefits us. If we can help kids in Haiti get clean drinking water and vaccinations, I have a hard time understanding why we shouldn’t help Nigeria with seriously dangerous terrorists who would happily hurt us if they could. Other than the fact that they aren’t strategically relevant at the moment and that the US military is already over extended fighting endless wars they can’t hope to win with drones, that is.

  8. leni says

    ..fighting endless wars they can’t hope to win with drones…

    I’m going to apologize now for this because it implies that Americans aren’t dying, It’s not a robot war and I shouldn’t have implied that it was. It’s not drones fighting, it’s people.

    I’m sorry for that and that was very wrong for me to imply that American don’t get hurt too. My irritation with the “bug splat” thing notwithstanding, it was a shitty way to frame that.

  9. says

    I actually see calling it “marriage” differently from Maajid and also Nick Cohen – I think forced marriage-by-kidnap is not a euphemism for rape but a vision of hell. There’s a place – in Ethiopia is it? I read about it and blogged about it some years ago – where there’s a custom or tradition of kidnapping women for the purpose of “marriage.” If the kidnapper succeeds in raping the woman before anyone can rescue her (or she can escape) then that’s it, they’re married. There are those insulting temporary “marriages” in Iran. I don’t see marriage as an honorific or a euphemism because it’s already perfectly capable of being enslavement. Yeah, the kidnapped girls have apparently been sold for “marriage” – and that makes their fate worse, not better.

  10. Katherine Woo says

    Leni, with your obvious military expertise, please lay out how you would deal with Boko Haram without harming “anyone else who happens to be nearby.” Does it involve a magic wand by any chance?

    I did not support the Iraq War, so your childish attempt to invoke that fails. There is a middle ground between craven Chomskyite isolationism and John McCain-style war-mongering. But of course people like you smear President Obama as some child-murdering monster.

  11. leni says

    I don’t see marriage as an honorific or a euphemism because it’s already perfectly capable of being enslavement.

    Yeah. I thought about that. Certainly some people (like vox day and pretty much every christian ever) view women as a ready made and deserving slave class.

  12. leni says

    But of course people like you smear President Obama as some child-murdering monster.

    It wasn’t just Obama that I smeared as a child murdering monster with no regard for fairness or the rule of law, it was all of us.

    Note the part where I said “suspected”.

    Leni, with your obvious military expertise, please lay out how you would deal with Boko Haram without harming “anyone else who happens to be nearby.” Does it involve a magic wand by any chance?

    I already said I didn’t think it would harm no one, jackass.

    But doing nothing also results in harm. So please, with your obvious military expertise, please lay out exactly how you would do nothing. Does it involve a non-magic wand that does fucking nothing, perchance?

  13. says

    Um, you know, the US has more than troops and drones which fire weapons. We have all sorts of reconnaissance options. We can find likely encampments and pass that information along.

    Which is a lot different by being sloppy with questionable surgical strikes from a distance, or throwing soldiers in the suck on whims and piss-poor pretenses. None of which have squat to do with combating theocracy.

  14. =8)-DX says

    @F #14

    questionable surgical strikes from a distance

    I always used to think “surgical” when used as an adjective talked about “precise, accurate, well-controlled”.

  15. blf says

    When and where have the people being executed by drones been tried ?

    It is deliberate premediated mass murder carried out by assorted USAlien military forces on behalf of the effectively unaccountable CIA.

  16. leni says

    @F [i’m not here, i’m gone], that is exactly what I was thinking.

    I was just angry about the ways we usually choose to employ them, but mostly I was thinking we could just use drones to find them. We can supposedly find one or two suspected terrorists when we want to, surely ~300 kids who want to be found shouldn’t be that hard to spot.

    Also, the US is now providing tactical support now, so fuck you, Katherine Woo. So go ahead and tell us all about a big ass waste of time that is.

    Go on. Waiting.

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