{"id":3463,"date":"2014-11-07T12:22:48","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T18:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3463"},"modified":"2014-11-07T12:22:48","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T18:22:48","slug":"drone-strike-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/drone-strike-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"Drone-Strike Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Rania Khalek<\/a>,\u00a0Extra!<\/a>
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Of all the justifications the Obama administration has employed to sanctify yet another war on Iraq, none have been more disingenuous than the portrayal of the latest US bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, aka ISIL) as a feminist rescue mission.<\/p>\n

Rather than challenge the obvious hypocrisy of this narrative, US corporate media outlets have acted as cheerleaders and stenographers, allowing the US government to hijack the deterioration of women\u2019s rights as a selling point for perpetual war.<\/p>\n

Media have even published complaints that ISIS\u2019s campaign of sexual violence is being ignored by the West. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, complained in the Wall Street Journal (9\/2\/14<\/a>) that ISIS\u2019s brutality towards women is receiving \u201cscant attention.\u201d A similar article appeared in Foreign Policy (9\/16\/14<\/a>) lamenting Wash-ington\u2019s supposed failure to even \u201ctalk about\u201d sexual crimes committed by ISIS.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Catherine Russell, US ambassador-at-large for global women\u2019s issues, wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post (9\/12\/14<\/a>) headlined \u201cISIL\u2019s Abuse of Women and Girls Must Be Stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n

Citing ISIS\u2019s abduction and selling of women and girls into sexual slavery, Russell made the case that US bombs have the power to free them, claiming, \u201cThese are women and girls who pleaded to be killed in airstrikes rather than be brutalized by ISIL.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if airstrikes are warranted because ISIS is engaged in sexual violence, then the governments of the nations the US has appointed to spearhead its anti-ISIS coalition may need to be bombed as well\u2014namely, the Iraqi, Egyptian and Saudi regimes.<\/p>\n

After all, Saudi Arabia\u2014which America has tasked with saving the Middle East from ISIS\u2019s vicious beheadings\u2014openly practices gender apartheid and beheaded at least eight people in August for nonviolent offenses, including sorcery (UNOHCHR,9\/9\/14<\/a>). Nevertheless, the Obama administration refuses to raise objections to Saudi officials about their country\u2019s human rights violations (Human Rights Watch,3\/31\/14<\/a>).<\/p>\n

A decade after George W. Bush famously declared that \u201cevery woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed\u201d (State Department,\u00a03\/12\/04<\/a>), torture and rape of women in pre-trial detention by US-installed Iraqi government forces has continued with impunity (Human Rights Watch,\u00a02\/6\/14<\/a>).<\/p>\n

And despite Egyptian police forcing detained female activists to submit to virginity tests (CNN,\u00a02\/21\/14<\/a>), the Obama ad-ministration recently announced the delivery of 10 Apache helicopters to Egypt\u2019s coup regime (Reuters,\u00a09\/20\/14<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September about the US strategy to defeat ISIS, Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated his boss\u2019s selective outrage against human rights abuses in a rant directed at members of the women-led peace group Code Pink.<\/p>\n

Referencing his opposition to the Vietnam war, Kerry insisted: \u201cI understand dissent. I\u2019ve lived it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then proceeded to lecture the women of Code Pink about how to help ISIS\u2019s female victims, whom American bombs are apparently equipped to liberate:<\/p>\n

Code Pink was started by a woman and women who were opposed to war but who also thought the government\u2019s job was to take care of people and to give them healthcare and education and good jobs. And if that\u2019s what you believe in, and I believe it is, then you ought to care about fighting ISIL because ISIL is killing and raping and mutilating women and they believe women shouldn\u2019t have an education.<\/p>\n

\u201cCode Pink and a lot of other people need to stop and think about how you stop them and deal with that,\u201d said Kerry.<\/p>\n

Rather than highlighting the hypocrisy in his claims, the few media outlets that bothered to cover Kerry\u2019s paternalistic finger-wagging practically applauded him. Huffington Post(9\/17\/14<\/a>) ran the headline \u201cKerry Takes On Code Pink at ISIS Hearing,\u201d while The Wire (9\/17\/14<\/a>) went with \u201cKerry Reminds Code Pink He Was Anti-War Before It Was Cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

The voices of women-led Iraqi civil society groups are completely absent from the establishment media. You won’t see any mention in the corporate press of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which, along with its sister organization MADRE, strongly opposes US airstrikes and holds the US responsible for creating and perpetuations the sectarian violence that fueled ISIS’s rise to power. (MADRE News,\u00a09\/10\/14<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Instead, and with the complicity of an unquestioning and largely pro-war corporate media establishment, the US government is adding fuel to the fire it ignited in Iraq, ignoring and further endangering the very women it intends to “save.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Rania Khalek,\u00a0Extra! click here for original article Of all the justifications the Obama administration has employed to sanctify yet another war on Iraq, none have been more disingenuous than the portrayal of the latest US bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, aka ISIL) as a feminist rescue mission. Rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3465,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions\/3465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}