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Just caught part of a C-SPAN thing -- I think it was a Washington Press Club event -- and found myself very impressed by the statements of one Hisham Melhem, the Al Arabiya satellite TV folks' Washington correspondent. Among the gems that I heard him say were that we should dispel the notion that it is somehow inherent to 'the Arab mind' that being stripped naked in prison is any more degrading than it would be to anyone else. He stressed that the prison tortures were horrific, but that the idea that Muslim men are somehow more shamed by nudity is a bogus one spread by misinformed 'experts.' His testimony flies in the face of what I know of Muslim mores, from personal experience, but I can certainly at least allow that he's undoubtedly correct of at least some Arabs at least soem of the time. After all, Muslim and Arab people are not uniformly homogeneous any more than any of the rest of us are. As he said, being treated in that way would be plenty degrading in any American prison, too. I think he makes an interesting point, particularly in light of how westernized and secular Iraq was under Saddam.
Kind of along the same lines, in response to a question as to whether the fact that female soldiers were present for the torture-humiliation somehow made it worse, he maintained that the idea that Arab men uniformly view women as inferior or verboten from certain activities is similarly bogus. When pressed further, and asked if the very presenc eof American women in the war theater was significant to Muslims, he admitted that conservative elements in Muslim countries are offended by women's participation but that the same was true of many conservative elements in the American bible belt and elsewhere in the US. He then went on railing against what he called self-appointed American ayatollahs, mentioning Falwell and others by name.
I was most impressed.
He offered an interesting perspective, that runs contrary to the sacred 'conventional wisdom' (and I'm not saying that his is the whole truth, but I'm sure that it's part of it and a part that's been overlooked by most) and he stated his case very cogently. The dude was impressive. His evaluation of the problems with the US news media (he basically wants Chomsky et al. to have some degree of equal time in an increasingly right-skewed newspaper market) was also spot on.
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