Reporter Lara Logan had this to say in an interview after her frightful gang rape in Tahrir Square during Egypt's Arab Spring:
Before the assault, Ms. Logan said, she did not know about the levels of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other countries regularly experienced.
“I would have paid more attention to it if I had had any sense of it,” she said. “When women are harassed and subjected to this in society, they’re denied an equal place in that society. Public spaces don’t belong to them. Men control it. It reaffirms the oppressive role of men in the society.”(NY Times)How could a journalist not know about the ugly plight of women who suffer in silence in backward societies? Rape is one of the most common tools to punish, to denigrate, to demean and to silence. I wish she could have arrived at this enlightenment without having to endure an ugly crime at the hands of brutal misogynist miscreants.
Hot Arab Lesbian Chicks!
The latest edition in the catalog of journalistic ignorance involves "A Gay Girl in Damascus," who wasn't really the LGBT hero of the Levant that they thought she was. She was really a he, a "40-year-old straight dude from Georgia living in Scotland," which is almost as interesting if you think about it.
I expected the soft-heads who believe in Arab Springs and Islamic democracies to lap it up, but even CNN was fooled. The clues that this was a hoax were obvious to those willing to view all with a critical eye.
First, how does a woman's lesbianism even become an issue in the Middle East, where homosexuality stays deep underground because it is punished by jail and death? If she's a lesbian fingered by the government and society, she's not going to be blogging about it from her apartment, she's going to be suffering in a dungeon or dead.
The other big clue was this excerpt from the CNN interview (feel free to laugh along with me):
Besides, "she" has never been harassed by Arabs for being gay. But in America, "she" has been "struck by strangers for being an Arab" and "had dung thrown at me" for wearing the hijab.I haven't heard of any dung attacks lately her in America, have you?
But seriously, the level of ignorance displayed by our reporters is stunning and a detriment to the nation. Many seem shocked to find that the world is a dangerous place. I know it is, I've been there. Is this willful ignorance on their part driven by reflexive political correctness?
If anyone has a more plausible explanation I'd love to hear it...
