As Americans need truth, not propaganda to understand the real issues in the Middle East and eventually bring this mess to a close, justly; my comments to Mr. Krauthammer's racism and misinformation appear in blue. Though the full text is included, for simplicity we did group similar paragraphs together.

Abu Ghraib as Symbol

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A33, The Washington Post

On Sept. 11, 2001, America awoke to the great jihad, wondering: What is this about? We have come to agree on the obvious answers: religion, ideology, political power and territory. But there is one fundamental issue at stake that dares not speak its name. This war is also about -- deeply about -- sex.

For the jihadists, at stake in the war against the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts.

The appeal of this fear can be seen in the Arab world's closest encounter with modernity: Israel. Israeli women are by far the most liberated of any in that part of the world. For decades, the Arab press has responded with lurid stories of Israeli sexual corruption. TOP

The above is your cause, Mr. Krauthammer, a declaration of war against Islam by misguided religious zealotry from both the Jewish and Christian camps. These zealots daily discard the Ten Commandments to fulfill their blood lust and distortions of superior entitlement, justifying what they perceive as moral acts with immorality.  Perhaps they might want to re-read former President Warren Harding's statement: "Do not do an immoral thing for a moral reason."

If you actually read the Bible or Torah, you'd know the above is based on false bible passages that do not exist and a fringe belief not part of Christianity called The Rapture.  The Bible in Genesis specifically states the land of greater Israel belongs to all decedents of Abram, including David (Jewish), Jesus (Christianity) and Ishmael (Islam).  Not just the Jews.  Look it up, Genesis 12:1-3, Acts 7:2-5 and Genesis 15:18-21, it's right there with no mention of "Israel" and every mention of Abram the man. And frankly Mr. Krauthammer, if the tables were reversed and the Arab people made the above proclamations; you'd be screaming "anti-Semitism" at the top of your lungs! TOP

As for this being about sex, your statement alone magnifies your complete ignorance to Islamic cultures.  Instead of making assumptions based on ignorance, try sitting down with a Muslim woman.  You'll find they are hardly controlled or repressed in most instances. We have battered spouses in this country and Israel has the same problem, so this "western sexual liberation" you speak of, isn't exactly what you present it to be.

Women are revered in Islam, considered sacred.  The Virgin Mary, which I know you do not acknowledge and your faith considers a whore. Within Islam she shares the highest respect, fully revered and admired. The veils and customs you ridicule in your ignorance, serve protect from what they consider the evils of lust, coveting and the other deadly sins.  Their customs are no more repressive then those practiced by Hasidic Jewish males or Amish Christians in Pennsylvania.  In some areas of the culture women are repressed, but at least they don't force their women to have abortions as the Israeli  military does.  Or actively promote and export white slavery like Israel, the world's foremost supplier and runner of such. Forced prostitution, talk about repression of women!

Also, I have a feeling the women of Syria, Jordan, Qatar and others would disagree with your idea that Israeli women are the freer. First of all, these women enjoy the same freedoms of western women, despite how propaganda paints it.  You'd know that if you actually sat down and talked to them. Another inconsistency in your argument, Israel's compulsory military service for both men and women is hardly freedom. It's only freedom when it is a choice. What about Christian women in Israel? They are so free they cannot even wear crosses in public without punishment! And the nuns wear plain clothes in public because if they do not, often they are targeted, suffering racially/spiritually motivated attacks by the IDF and Jewish settlers. Yes, Israel is definitely a free society where women are not discriminated against.  Try again.  Israel is in the real world with the rest of us.  Female utopia does not exist, even in America. TOP

Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the model of what the jihadists want to impose upon the world. The case the jihadists make against freedom is that wherever it goes, especially the United States and Europe, it brings sexual license and corruption, decadence and depravity.

Actually Mr. Krauthammer, Osama bin Laden's issues with the west are its insistence on cultivating sins the Muslim faiths, (and Christian and Jewish faiths when adhered to) define as harmful and have proven destructive to society as a whole through scientific and sociological research. Just because you don't like his opinion, doesn't mean he's wrong.  Science and hard core historical facts back up his position pertaining to these issues, not yours. Like many with conservative religious views, pornography, homosexuality, adultery and drug use are seen as threats to society, not benefits to it.  The west promotes these. Islam does not. TOP

You would know that if you actually read the transcripts from his interviews instead of relying on Israeli propaganda.   Judging a people by the few extremists hardly constitutes ethical journalism.  How would you like it if we all judged Israelis by the conduct of Baruch Goldstein, the first suicide bomber in 1994, an Israeli Jew and mass murderer who walked into a mosque during prayers, slaughtering twenty-nine and wounding over three-hundred people?  Or Ariel Sharon, the man who refers to gentiles as cockroaches and vermin, a known war criminal, a man with active strong ties to organized crime, an embezzler, and terrorist…this guy makes Nixon look like a kindergartener and a saint. 

The most famous example occurred in the late 1990s, when Egyptian newspapers claimed that chewing gum Israel was selling in Egypt was laced with sexual hormones that aroused insatiable lust in young Arab women. Palestinian officials later followed with charges that Israeli chewing gum was a Zionist plot for turning Palestinian women into prostitutes, and "completely destroying the genetic system of young boys" to boot.

Which is why the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake. TOP

Gratuitous sexual abuse, not torture?  That's like calling a pedophile healthy or saying a woman enjoys being rape! Shall we invite the Iraqi people over and have them do the same to you?  Given your stance, since you do not consider this torture but a simple a romp through S&M, this should not be a problem for you. However you are safe.  It seems such actions are AGAINST THE LAW, both in the US and internationally.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe -- and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an "I told you so" played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.

Again, your misinformation is mounting and your characterizations to deflect scrutiny illustrate propaganda in full swing. Secular means not religious, basically going through the motions and using for personal gain rather than practicing the faith.  That fits Israel well, by its own admission, but few Arab nations. Since you contend Islam is the problem, you just contradicted yourself.

You're also using another  transparent propaganda technique here, attacking the religion as wrong because you consider the customs strange.  Frankly, if you want to get down to it, Judaism and Christianity when followed, apply the same standards. By not following God's laws, we now have AIDS, Gay Marriage, three generations of children raised predominantly by single parent households, and a host of societal ills spawned from these forms of "sexual liberation" you consider so healthy.  An astute lawyer will argue they are not, and likely win. TOP

As for equality, look in the mirror.  They've seen Israel and the United States' ideas of equality in Palestine.  The Christians and Muslims there are so equal, they are being walled in. Christians and Muslims cannot purchase property from a Jewish citizen or live in the Jewish only housing areas, attend Jewish only resorts or Jewish only schools.  They cannot work in Jewish only shops and must conduct business in non-Jewish areas at the mercy of the Jewish aristocracy, prevented at times for days and weeks from accessing medical care, education and basics like food and water.  Their property and livelihood can be destroyed at a moments notice to make room for more Jewish only homes, Jewish only businesses and Jewish only roads. 

It is no accident that jihadists around the world are overwhelmingly male. It is very rare to find a female suicide bomber. And when you do, as with the young woman who blew herself up in Gaza, killing four others in January, it turns out that she herself was a victim of sexual subjugation -- a wife accused of adultery, marked for death, who decided to die a martyr rather than a pariah. But die she must.

It's no accident soldiers are predominantly male?  In every army and militia the soldiers are predominantly male.  What's your point...that they should force women into the military like Israel? As a woman, I take exception to that.

Most Hispanic and Asian countries adopt male dominated societies, and if you took time to review your own Jewish History, you'd see the same thing. You're condemning a people because they do not think or act like you do. That's not an argument; that's a red herring.  It's also propaganda; the story she was marked for death for adultery, like the 14-year-old suicide bomber a few weeks ago, you know the propaganda stunt by the IDF, was discredited. TOP

Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than yesterday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.

Let's be clear. The things we have learned so far about Abu Ghraib are not, by far, the worst atrocities committed in war. Indeed, they pale in comparison with what Arab insurgents have done to captured Westerners, and what Saddam Hussein did to his own people.

Does your ability to rationalize ever stop Mr. Krauthammer?  So an atrocity is only worth mentioning if it occurred during the German holocaust?  Is that your rational? It's inferred whether you realize it or not, because I'm not seeing your logic here. I can guarantee if the person holding the leash was Arab and the person being humiliated Jewish, you'd be outraged.  What's the difference?

What our soldiers did is heinous, unforgivable and disgusting, and if the victims had been Jewish, you would be singing a different song.  Your writing shows a strong bias against non-Jewish persons, Arabic persons, predominantly Muslim, but Christians were also rounded up. Frankly, there is no defense for this; these people were human beings, even if you are not ready to admit that, no better and no worse than you or I. Nobody deserves what we did to them, and if you believe otherwise, I feel sorry for you.  Humanity is no longer a concept you understand.

But you're right on one point. Abu Ghraib is not by far the worst atrocity.  Recreating the Warsaw Ghetto in two phases and its rules within Israeli Occupied territory with the same tactics used by the Nazis pretty much constitutes a worse war crime. What's happening in Abu Ghraib has occurred for only a year and a half.  The Palestinian version has been going on for sixty years, daily. 

And yes, this is the fault of the United States.  You and me are responsible for it.  Our tax dollars make it possible, as does misinformation like your commentary which mislead the American people to an agenda rather than toward the truth. None of this, the war on terror, 9-11, or Spain would be happening if Israel had honored its agreement in 1948, and later if the United States stuck to the principles in our Constitution and refused to fund apartheid year after year.  Tell the American people the truth.  It saves lives in Israel, the United States, Iraq and Palestine.  Hate poisons objectivity, making your opinions part of the problem rather than the solution.

The Arab world is reacting to Israeli and American provocation.  Our policies placed them in this position, not the other way around.  The Arab world does not hate us for our freedom.  They hate us because we took their freedom to live life according to their customs and beliefs. You'd know that too if you studied Middle Eastern history from 1850 to present day. And like the American militia during our Revolutionary War, they will continue to fight until they regain their freedom from those who wish to rule, ethnically cleanse and impose their society on them.  This is what people do when other nations invade, conquer or attempt to rule them.

Minimizing this does not serve the American people, and from a journalist empowered with the ability to shape public opinion, your negation, omissions and euphemisms nauseate me.  TOP

The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others'. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the U.S. military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of U.S. society.

The photographs suggest otherwise. Which is why the abuse at Abu Ghraib is so inflammatory and, for us and our cause, so damaging. It reenacted the most deeply psychologically charged -- and most deeply buried -- aspect of the entire war on terrorism, exactly as Osama bin Laden would have scripted it.

Since you opened your column with psychology, here is a little lesson. Hatred occurs for two reasons.  Either someone is preventing you from getting something you feel you are entitled to, referred to as hate based upon greed, power and manipulation, the type the United States and Israel practice.  Or because someone is preventing you from the basics of life: food, water, personal freedom, family, the ability to earn a living, dignity and self-actualization.  This is hate based in self-preservation, an instinct. If you want to know why Arabs hate us, this is why.  Deal with the issues causing hate and terrorism will disappear.  Propagate the policies that cause it, and it will grow. Your stance feeds terrorism. Next time, try learning something about what you write about before making judgments about other cultures you are sadly misinformed and deeply prejudice against. <end> TOP

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