- I don't know about you, but I deeply distrust this twaddle
about how "the six morons who lost the war" (the Pentagon's insiders
aptly contemptuous joke at the prison dominators) have deeply offended
Muslim sensibilities with their S&M stunts at Abu Ghraib. We are told
that nudity is deeply shaming to Muslim sensibilities. This is undoubtedly
true, but it is also irrelevant and hypocritical.
-
- Have you ever seen photographs or films of European Jews,
running naked to their mass graves under Nazi rifles or standing naked
waiting for their fate in death-camp yards? That nakedness suggests pre-annihilation
gratuitous humiliation, vulnerability, helplessness, de-individuation,
objectification, and reduction of the human person to a haunted animal.
Does one have to be a Muslim to understand that?
-
- At Abu Ghraib the offense was against human dignityóa
human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations (1948). The sexual tortures (for that is what they were), voyeurism,
and exhibitionism under coercion are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions
IV (1949), which prohibits writing "rapeist [sic]" on a detainee's
leg and indeed tatooing, undressing, or violating in any way the moral
and physical integrity of persons under detention by occupying powers.
-
- Let's be absolutely clear about what was violated at
Abu Ghraib's theatre of cruelty: international law and human rights. The
victims were human beingsóbefore they were Muslims! And, by the
way, what gives us the right to assume that all Iraqis are Muslim believers?
Some may be secular. Were they not, too, violated in their human dignity?
Just because people in the United States are in the throes of fundamentalism
or cling to religious faiths and 60 percent of them believe in angels doesn't
mean that their religio/racialist views correctly mirror the world's. We
have no right to project our retrograde, 19th-century religio-imperialist
world-views and assumptions on other peoplesónot even on the culturally
Muslim world. Blithely assuming that offending religious feelings is the
intolerable offense reveals the prejudice of an ideology that is anti-secularist
at its gut level.
-
- Not that these neo-imperialists really give a hoot for
other people's gods, but it is undiplomatic to admit it in public because
it negates the supermen's view of the divinely-ordained political orderósuperior
gods belong to superior people; inferior gods rule the inferior races.
That is why calling other people Satanic idol-worshippers is off-limits,
though it may be freely thought in private. Rumsfeld's appointee to head
military intelligence in Iraq is Lt. General William Boykin who cause a
firestorm of embarrassments for giving enthusiastic speeches on behalf
of Christianity last year. "We're a Christian nation, and the enemy
is a guy named Satan." Earlier, in Somalia, he said of a warlord (don't
you love this choice of words? Boynkin, of course, is King Richard the
Lionhearted!): "My god is a real god and his is an idol."
-
- Iraq was pretty secular officially until 1991, although
Islam traversed it at vital cultural nerves. Today, we had best refrain
from dragging a complex society into an exclusively religious discourse.
Or do an alleged 19 Muslim fundamentalist (if that is what they were; we
still don't know) terrorists who weren't even Iraqis on 9/11 reduce the
people of cultural Islam to a single identity of fundamentalist jihadists,
religious fanatics, or devout believers? There are always others. Are they
not human beings?
-
- Today, Iraq is manifesting opposition to Anglo-American
occupation through religious leadership, religious identity, and religious
affirmation, but they have no other organizing principle capable of fielding
their resistance. It may well be that Muslim fundamentalism will emerge
as the ruling political order of liberated Iraq, but it will not be with
the consent of many liberal, secular, and democracy-oriented Iraqisójust
look at women's organizations in Iraq who vow that they will accept the
abolition of their secular civil rights over their dead bodies.
-
- The idea of explaining the horrors of Abu Ghraib as an
anthropological faux pas reeks of hypocrisy. It suggests that Muslims are
somehow more sensitive to coerced nudity than the rest of human beings.
If that were so, it wouldn't have been implicitly forbidden by the Geneva
Conventions. The imperialist arrogance that divides the world into "us"
and "them" is pernicious enough; the cultural relativism that
appeals to sympathy via radical differences is equally insulting!
-
- This invidious cultural mea culpa distracts attention
from real culpability, which is the use of nakedness as a condition of
ridicule and threatówhich it clearly was. I have had life-long recurrent
nightmares, from my childhood of war, in which I find myself walking naked
in city streets. I wake up in a sweat. And, I'm neither a prude nor a Muslim!
-
- Couched in the hypocrisy is a sly condescension toward
"their" repressive versus "our" more liberal sexual
customs regarding covering the body. I should like to remind ourselves
that the celebrated western permissiveness may be the expression of intense
repression. Just because we are inveterate exhibitionists doesn't mean
we are liberated. It may quite equally mean we are out of touch with our
sensuality and are desperately seeking to fulfill it in hyper-neurotic
expressions of excess and self-proclamation. Maybe we can get no satisfaction,
as the song goes. So we display ourselves in self-triumphalist infantilisms,
since intimacy and pleasure are elusiveóand quite possibly stigmatized
in a culture that tells us simultaneously to strip for the market and cover
up for our morals!
-
- We are telling our young people that abstinence is a
prescription leading to sexual fulfillment in marriage. Feels like a life-long
sentence to legally-enforced sexual slavery with an equally oppressed unfortunate
partner! Nor is the triumphalist sexuality of the marketómovies,
videos, advertising, pornographyóproof of a maturely human and rewarding
sexuality. In our culture, market sexuality is a commodity not an achievement
of the body's right to express trust and love. So let's not congratulate
ourselves on the status of our senses in the West! Just because "our"
women don't have to wear the burqa doesn't mean our individual sexuality
is permitted. Just ask the sanctity-of-heterosexual-marriage folks in the
US Congress!
-
- No, that hypocritical charade of feeling sorry for violating
Muslim sexual sensibilities must be unmasked for what it is, a ruse to
avoid acknowledging a more damning responsibility toward upholding the
law. If only these victims hadn't been Muslims, those "abuses"
wouldn't have been so bad. We meant well; we just forgot to be a little
nicer toward these childishly primitive, culturally inferior, naively prurient
people! As though modesty, dignity, and respect went out of style with
the invention of the X-rated film industry.
-
- This lopsided apology is, of course, confected for the
consumption of liberals. The reactionaries are content with dismissing
the horrors as a bit of "hazing" or "blowing off steam"ówhich
speaks volumes for the legendary sexual liberation of a considerable portion
of the "enlightened" West!
-
- - Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro
University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu
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