Drone-Strike Feminism: Using the oppression of women to sell another Iraq War

[KamaAina]

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/drone-strike-feminism/

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 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’s rights as a selling point for perpetual war.

Media have even published complaints that ISIS’s 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) that ISIS’s brutality towards women is receiving “scant attention.” A similar article appeared in Foreign Policy (9/16/14) lamenting Washington’s supposed failure to even “talk about” sexual crimes committed by ISIS....

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—namely, the Iraqi, Egyptian and Saudi regimes.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. I rec, but the war supporters will claim a difference in 'degree of oppression'.

They'll say that as oppressive as conditions are for women in those countries, ISIS is even worse, literally enslaving and selling women. And they're right, but there still is a lot of hypocrisy in using that to sell war.