Thursday, February 22, 2007

Riverbend's heartbreaking comparison

Riverbend at Baghdad Burning has two new posts up this weekend which play on the unfortunate juxtaposition of what's playing on Oprah and Al Jazeera:
As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.


Here's an excerpt from the victim's testimony:
I told him, ‘I don’t have anything [I did not do anything].’ He said, 'You don’t have anything?’ One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did- I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause- sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, 'Are you finished? We also want our turn.'


So how does the US-supported leader of Iraq respond to these allegations:
He denies them, rewards the accused for "having to endure fabricated charges", and accused"Sunni politicians...of inventing the claims in an attempt to undermine security forces during the Baghdad security operation." (links from here. As riverbend writes,
:
Al Maliki is claiming the rape allegations are all lies. Apparently, his people simply asked the officers if they raped Sabrine Al Janabi and they said no. I'm so glad that's been cleared up.


Now, it might make sense to al-Maliki, in his sheltered little world, that a 20-year old Iraqi woman would publicly lie on international television, and claim that she was raped, in order to "discredit" his pathetic little operation.

Right.

P.S. I know that Riverbend is widely linked by the dkos set-- but this post is just amazing. Please go to the original and read it in its entirety.

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