Uh… huh.
Courtesy everything is ruined, I have been delivered to some commentary from first-rate psychiaitrist Charles Krauthammer…
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.
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 ‘ 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.
You know… this general attitude* regarding this particular incident is leaving me horrified for the future of our nation.
Maybe I should read this book.… but it’d only depress me further.
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* See also Joseph Lieberman.