"A Rape in Iraq" Good article on why Abeer's story is important

[uppityperson]

Important beyond the fact that the USA military "allegedly" murdered, mutilated and raped a family with their children. Why is this story, this 1 incident, important? Because it is proving that this event, rape, is happening and has had only minimal coverage so far. Like the media showing pictures of New Orleans flooding and the Mississippi coast destruction while the administration said "things are under control", this incident shoves military rape and murder into the mass public's face. I am so sorry to all the children and adults who have been hurt or killed by those acting in my country's name. So sorry. Now, stop.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=11415

This is no distant story. It holds a personal note for me, this possible gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers. The story has been hitting the media for the past week and a half, and—as of today—the New York Times reports that six soldiers might be implicated.

The personal note is that I have been gang raped by American soldiers. (See my “War and Sex” article for my description of this experience in my past.) The cold fear of male violence never entirely leaves raped bodies. Unexpectedly, things surface, and this story is triggering those things in me--phantom rape pain, jumpiness, feeling startled if a man comes too near. Since I am used to reading about rape, living with it, writing about it, even experiencing it, why such an impact from this one incident?

It may be because this is the first time the “R” word has surfaced in Iraq. In our three-year occupation of that country, is this the only time our men have raped? Given their war/rape record elsewhere, it would be hard to believe. It is a real puzzler to me that the U.S. Military is admitting to this possible rape of one Iraqi girl when they have done little, if anything, to acknowledge the rapes of thousands upon thousands of other girls by our soldiers during wartime. Widespread violation of girls took place in Vietnam. (One vet I know said it was so common the men called it SIMR, Standard Issue Military Rape.) After WWII, rape by American soldiers in Europe was “extensive,” according to the Oxford Companion to American Military History. Rape of French girls by our men was so widespread that General Eisenhower actually had to acknowledge it was going on. He did nothing about it, of course, but he did admit it was happening. Our men produced roughly 200,000 Amerasian children upon the bodies of destitute Japanese girls after WWII—an indication that massive rape of prostituted/brothelized bodies was going on in the Pacific. During the battle of Okinawa, our boys raped a whole village of women and girls too sick and weak to even run away from them.

Wartime rape/prostitution is common, the norm. Why is the military only taking note of this one incident, when the bodies of hundreds of thousands of girls have been sexually brutalized by our military?...(much more @link)

Edited to add this link to her other articles, some about the topic of sex in war.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewByAuthor.asp?authorID=938

[uppityperson]

1. 1 kick to boost back up

[bloom]

2. That is a POV that has rarely been heard.

Women have not been the writers of history - for the most part.

With the internet - more women - who unfortunately have experiences like the writer did - are speaking out.

If accounts like this were what was in our history books - not glorifying this General or that - there would be less wars and less rape.

Truth is a naked woman. I saw that quote yesterday and it applies.

[uppityperson]

3. I quit reading Mitchner's male only fictionalized history

he does research his topics, and a lot of people have read him, but I got really tired of the only women being those needed to support the men. Sexism is a whole nother topic. Yes, good to see this sort of article printed.

[Generic Other]

4. Disturbing

Thanks for posting

[anarch]

5. this really needs to be acknowledged

and widely. All armies throughout history have committed rape on a mass scale, especially armies of occupation. This is powerful stuff, particularly the acknowledgment that soldiers' "use" of "comfort women", or any women or girls that are basically forced into prostitution, either by physical or economic coercion, can pretty much be called rape.

So sad.

Here's some Crass lyrics, just because I've been thinking of them lately, and they seem fitting:


"Women"

Fuck is women's money.
We pay with our bodies.
There is no purity in our love.
No beauty. Just bribery.
It's all the fucking same.
We make soldiers with our submission.
Wars with our isolation.

Fuck is women's money.
We pay with our bodies.
There is no purity in motherhood.
No beauty. Just bribery.
It's all the fucking same.
We are all slaves to sexual histories.
Our awareness of whoredom can be release.

War is mens money.
They pay with their bodies.
There is no purity in that game,
Only blood, death and bribery.
It's all the fucking same.
But we've got the power.
Don't just stand there and take submission on the strength of fear.
FIGHT WAR, NOT WARS.

[uppityperson]

6. Good lyrics, been thinking of the cuss word "fuck" recently

Cuss words come in 3 basic categories, sex, excretion, religion.

Fuck can mean sex, intercourse, making love, whoopey, or it can be used as a violent thing, forced sex, rape.

It is a really telling thing that saying, basically:
fuck you=sex as a weapon, force sex on you (rape you?)
fuck off=go have sex with yourseld and leave me alone
fucking ai!= strong agreement with something, not sure why fuck is invoked except to startle as it is a "bad" word
aw fuck= usually means something is bad, not sure why invoke fuck except as previous thing.

[bloom]

8. If people thought about what they were saying

"fuck you=sex as a weapon, force sex on you (rape you?)"

would they say it? I always thought that was an esp. bizarre thing for people to go around saying.

[lyonn]

7. Ouch, those lyrics are sooo depressing

Things we don't talk about in war among all the other atrocities that war causes. This has been said often but apparently not often enough that those that have never been in a war should not start one, or, if they do, be on the front lines.

[vickitulsa]

9. Wow, heavy lyrics ... I don't recognize them, do you have the source?

When I was 18 and fresh from divorcing the brutal young man I married to get away from my brutal molesting father (who was a State Trooper for 23 years and a WWII vet who served and no doubt raped in Italy), Vietnam was hitting its peak with half a million of our troops incountry.

I was close to madness at the time, understandably, I now believe. Yet I was desperate to find a "real man" who would also be a loving, protective one. I found myself dating soldiers from a military base not far away, Ft. Sill. When I look back on those days now, I realize I was being repeatedly raped -- they might call it "date-rape" now -- by good ole red-blooded American boys who were all just trying to get their last bit of "round-eye" before shipping out to Nam.

I was emotionally beaten-down, but thought I was being defiant by dating soldiers in a sense because my father, a vet himself, hated the very idea that I'd date "doggies." I thought I could find a good one who might have the courage to protect me from my own dad, like Johnny had done one day in 1966 when he pulled my father off me when he was dishing out a beating and slugged the guy right in his own house, flooring him. I saw my dad down there on the floor, with both hands out as if to say, "I doan want no more of that!" -- and I think my heart sang out, "I'm gonna MARRY that boy!"

Of course violence was obviously his trademark, too, however, and it ended up being directed at me eventually.

After I divorced him and re-established myself with an apartment of my own and a decent job so I could support myself, I began dating the soldiers. I wasn't trying to "win their hearts" with sex, I don't think; but I was trying to earn their loyalty, probably. It never worked, of course. I was pressured and coerced and I inevitably gave in out of fear, since I'd get myself into dangerous situations where it was either get beaten up and raped or just get screwed and dumped.

Within six months, I was pregnant by a guy who lied when he claimed to have had a vasectomy. He was six years older than me, too, and a tall, handsome, and brilliant man who dazzled me on our first two dates.

He soon learned I had "slept with" another soldier in his company, and he broke up with me a month before he was due to ship out to Nam. He became a doorgunner in helicopter gunships, "hosing down" enemy troops and civilians alike for over a year before he came home. He never knew he'd left me pregnant -- and obviously wouldn't have cared if he had known.

Our daughter, whom relatives adopted when she was six weeks old because my father and other kinfolk pressured me into letting them have her, finally contacted me by phone in 1998 -- 30 years almost to the day after G.I. Joe had planted his seed in me. Then she located and called her biodad. Talk about one stunned -- and worried -- old man! He logically figured I might well hate him with a passion and be willing to risk prison in order to exact my long-delayed revenge.

I had become an entirely different person by then, however, and I had never been vengeance oriented, anyway. After our daughter called him and told him who she was, he insisted on talking to me. He didn't remember me.

He knew I had the right guy, though, when we spoke on the phone and I asked him this:

"Do you remember that you told me you'd had a vasectomy?"

He sputtered, caught once again with his pants down, and simply blurted out, "I LIED!"

Then he started to say something else ... sounded like, "I told that lie a lot--" but he abruptly stopped himself.

I'd wager our daughter has some half-brothers and half-sisters still living in Vietnam, sadly but likely cast off as the "bui doi" or "children of dust" in their own culture. Amer-Asian children of American soldiers in that war who were shunned by their own society and often grew up in the streets.

God how sick and sad a "business" war is! Why must the most innocent suffer the worst of all the hell?

With young American "boys" like this turned loose in the middle of a war where they find themselves virtually immune to any justice, why should we expect anything other than frequent rapes of helpless women and girls in other lands?

I hope the recent story that wouldn't stay covered up, of poor little Abeer and her family in Iraq, just keeps getting more and more airing here so that Americans will have to face the truth -- ONE of the many ugly truths of this ugliness, this madness, called war.

By all means, let's "support our troops" no matter what wretched and unspeakable things they do....

[anarch]

10. the song is called "Women", the band Crass,

from the album The Feeding of the 5000. 1978.

Here's a review:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:pw5h8q9tbtz4

Thanks for sharing your story...I think Americans need to face the truth about a whole lot of things.

[vickitulsa]

12. Wow ... interesting review. Thanks. And thanks for

reading my story.

Americans definitely DO need to face a lot of things, and I just had a "flash," an imaginary projection of a possibility for that eventual "dawning" among the Kool-aid brainwashed, if it should indeed ever come.

Amounts to this: In the near future, yet one more incredible and criminal outrage committed by this administration makes breaking news bigtime and is SO BAD and so obviously unexplainable and inexcusable that the Bushbots all across the country are hit with a sudden case of "cognitive dissonance" that renders them completely unable to speak for several days.

Then, as their realization of how they have been "used" finally emerges, their wrath comes forth with equal ferocity to the passion with which they have supported their dear leader... and boy is he really in BIG trouble at that point!

Imagery that almost lends itself to a spoofy 50's sci-fi movie title: "Revolt of the Bushbots!"

:D

[bloom]

11. "immune to any justice"

And yet we are supposed to support them "no matter what wretched and unspeakable things they do..."

It doesn't make sense to me.


Your story speaks to the strength of women - what we survive.

[vickitulsa]

14. I see it that way too, Bloom. What we survive, what that says about us.

I was against the war in Vietnam, but I felt that most American citizens took out their anti-war feelings on the veterans when it was really their own government they should have held in most contempt. There was a draft then, and so many who served in that heinous war would never have gone on a voluntary basis. Standards for recruits then were lowered as they have been now, also, so that especially in the later years of that war, many who were shipped out as cannon fodder were of borderline IQ and mental stability.

Dump such young men in the middle of the insanity that was Vietnam (as the U.S. had made it), and you get a LOT of atrocities.

But because Americans treated the Nam vets so badly, ruining their lives even more than the war had already done, I have supported many of them for years and don't regret that.

And I have tried to feel supportive toward our all-volunteer military now, even in Iraq though I never have believed they should have been sent there. But I have a big problem with blind "support" for people who decide that for their career, their calling in life, they want to learn to kill.

Isn't it that simple, really? I know my saying this will offend some military people and veterans, but I just have to pose the question, give voice to the dilemma that troubles me. Somehow it just doesn't seem as simple (in a different sense) as some might think it to be -- not merely a matter of "wanting to serve and protect my country." Not when the way one serves is to learn to kill effectively....

Man, these times are making me crazy ... and here I had finally arrived at a place in my heart and mind where I had genuine PEACE. Up is Down, and Ignorance is Strength, and Everyone is Equal -- Only Some Are More Equal Than Others....

[uppityperson]

13. Thank you for sharing your story, tough one

and thank you for the last line. :hug:

[Marie26]

16. Thanks for sharing your experience. nt

[vickitulsa]

15. I just read the entire article by Suki Falconberg...

and I'm blown away, just blown away by this woman's courage and commitment. I hope my earlier posts to this thread do not distract anyone from the importance of the OP's referenced article.

I was so engaged by the "Rape In Iraq" article by Ms. Falconberg (I notice she has a PhD now, too) that I decided to read some of her other articles published at that Website, American Chronicle. After finishing both "War And Sex" and then "War and Civilians: A Few Modest Proposals," I am more than ever struck by the author's brilliant verbal ability to portray the facts she has obviously researched thoroughly, on top of what she knows from her own experiences in life and as a "prostituted body."

I highly recommend these two articles in addition to "A Rape In Iraq," and I hope others will read them. Dr. Falconberg uses a lot of satire in the "Modest Proposals" piece to great effect, so it makes an especially rewarding read. You can easily find her other articles by using the link in the OP.

I think I've found a person to whom I'm spiritually kin.

But that's beside the point. Her message is enormously important in our world at this time in human history, and I hope she can keep getting it out so that everyone has to think about what she says.

THANK YOU, uppityperson, for posting this!