Friday, October 23, 2009

We're all sex criminals now

Clayton Cramer hopes this report is dropping major amounts of context from the paper it summarizes.

(IsraelNN.com) A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers' committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that "the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.

Yes, a lack of rape is because those Israeli soldiers hold Arab women in such utter contempt. But if there was a lot of rape going on--that would also be a sign that Israeli soldiers hold Arab women in contempt. This sounds like one of those papers that started with the result--Israeli soldiers have dehumanized Arabs--and then looked for a way to twist the data to match that result.
Yes, imagine the poor dears watching IDF soldiers going past, and saying to themselves, "What are we, chopped liver?"  (BTW, can anyone explain what's so bad about chopped liver?) 
 
Yet I imagine the terror that could be wreaked upon the menfolk of this country if this theory were to make its way into law enforcement and the courts.  Every man in the country could be sued by any woman for sexual harassment and "creating a hostile work environment" because he hasn't raped her. 
 
Would being gay be a defense?  Maybe against that particular charge.  Men would start wearing rainbow pendants "pride" t-shirts in self-defense.  But would they then be vulnerable to legal action from other men, because they haven't raped any men?
 
Lawyers of the world, rejoice!

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