Protecting Women and Children: France, Drones and Disingenuous Justifications

Formerly Titled: Protecting the Honor of Women and Children: Allons-y!

Update I [below]

Any day now, I expect that the US will do the right thing and invade France–or at least send stealth drones–to manage the Gallic descent into degradation and chaos. The French judicial system just today has acquitted 6 of 10 men who gang-raped two teens repeatedly; it gave the remaining 4 men fewer than 3-year sentences. It gets worse: because of time already served, only one man was returned to prison. The two women were in their teens, and were raped for years by “scores” of men. I can’t summarize it. Here is the description in today’s Guardian:

The alleged Fontenay-sous-Bois attacks took place between 1999 and 2001. One night returning from a cinema, aged 16, Nina, described as a tomboy who was good at school, said she was grabbed by a local group of youths, taken to basement cellars in the flats, raped and subjected to a series of brutal sex attacks by scores of local boys. The extremely violent, prolonged sex attacks by large groups of boys continued daily, in car-parks, stairwells, apartments, cellars and the empty playground of a local nursery school. She said there would be “at least 25” youths present during attacks in which she screamed, protested, cried and vomited. One witness described 50 boys “queuing” to attack her.

Threatened that her flat would be burned down if she spoke out, she was afraid to tell her mother, who noticed she was washing eight to 10 times a day.

The women kept quiet for years about the attacks until 2005, when Nina was left unconscious by one final brutal beating following years of abuse and finally told a female police officer. Psychiatric experts had agreed that both women were the victims of rape.

We know that the French have long had a history of devaluing women and their testimony regarding rape and sexual assault. Remember the French’s response to the allegations of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sexual assaults? Scores of French denizens, including philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, rushed to defend him. They couldn’t believe that such a celebrated figure, the head of the IMF no less, could ever have done such a thing–despite the detailed accounts of Tristan Banon, the French journalist and god-daughter of DSK’s second wife, who described having to fend off the advances of the “rutting chimpanzee.” The Guardian’s account seems to confirm the same French’s attitude towards the gang-rape charges.

Clothilde Lepetit, a lawyer for one of the women, now in her 20’s, described the trials as “a judicial shipwreck. Here is another excerpt from the same article:

Another lawyer for the women, Laure Heinich, asked: “What sentence makes sense when one hears that gang-rapists are given a three years suspended sentence?” The case, which has gripped the country, has highlighted the problems in historic rape investigations where material evidence is lacking and much rests on the women’s word. Lawyers for the women said they felt the women’s testimony had not been respected during the trial.

Amid surprise at the verdict in France, the justice minister, Christiane Taubira, said there could be grounds to appeal. “Personally, I’m shocked by gang-rapes, by every form of aggression against women and I think we have to create conditions so that the facts are established and those guilty can be effectively identified.”

The women’s minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said the case had shown that better education on sex and sexuality was needed in schools.

Sounds like the descriptions we hear of Pakistan. Vallaud-Belkacem is wrong: we need more than better education on sex and sexuality in France. We know that the French adore democracy, reason, and political freedom, because Ayaan Hirsi Ali has told us so. From the outrage gleaned, it makes sense that the rape trials were shams and that democracy is missing in France.

And where democracy and civilization are missing, we must be consistent in our stance against terror and anti-women actions. After all, we brought our beloved troops into the clash of civilizations between the Middle East and the freedom-loving “Developed World.” We needed to help replace the sovereign authority and sham judicial system of Iraq—and our troops did it! They not only toppled Iraqi oppression, they won their hearts and minds. Now it only makes sense—I’m sure Niall Ferguson would agree—that we must reintroduce democracy to the former light of the western model of fraternité, liberté, egalité—in the form of an invasion, or at the very least, drones.

Why am I so sure? Because we have heard from various elements that the vicious attack by the Taliban on the 14 year old Pakistani girl indeed confirms–justifies the POTUS’ decision to continue a (no-longer-stealthy) drone war. As Paul Whitefield of the Los Angeles Times sagely points out:

And this isn’t the horrible “honor killings” or acid attacks or whatever that we read about. This is a group attempting to kill a young girl to make a political statement.

How do you deal with such people? Sadly, I say you have to fight fire with fire.

Gibson’s right. People are cowering in terror in their homes in Pakistan, fearful of U.S. drones. But there are many kinds of terror, and in Pakistan, too much of it is home-grown.

So at this point, those terrible, deadly drones help Americans — and girls like Malala Yousafzai — sleep at night, knowing that they keep the Taliban from doing the same.

Paul Whitefield seems pretty content to discard due process and instead depend upon the razor sharp intel (and unverifiable for national security purposes) that justifies countless assassinations of foreign and U.S. nationals, interrogations (cf Maher Arar, Omar Khadr, Adnan Latif), torture, renditions, the declaration of wars on terror in “any” parts of the world where the United States sees that lives of women are at stake. He echoes Former First Lady Laura Bush’s sentiments, who informed us under her spouse’s Administration that we needed to invade Afghanistan because women were suffering under the Taliban. I take solace in the concern of American women-feminists—looking out for their oppressed counterparts—and I look forward to their consistent and applied pressure on their spouses to do the right thing in France. So I’m expecting Whitefield and other feminists to champion and endorse an invasion of France along with Cleveland, Texas (see below), and elsewhere where women can’t expect to sleep safely at night—or during the day.

Irony aside—let me say clearly that what happened to Malala Yousafszai, the 14 year-old outspoken activist shot by the Taliban in Pakistan is unjust, outrageous and shocking. According to mainstream media, it has—and should have–sparked outrage in Pakistan. In the United States, the widespread attention to the shooting is notable in the near eclipse of attention to the violence targeted against women all over the U.S., Canada, and other “first world” Western nations. I can’t help but wonder about the outrage—especially in contrast to the continued gang-rape of the two French teens, the gang-rape of the 11 year old in Cleveland, Texas by 20, TWENTY, men—a rape by the way that induced the denizens of Cleveland, TX to lay blame upon the victim for being promiscuous, for dressing too provocatively (and we think the Taliban are the only bass-ackwards group out there?). It makes me physically ill to consider the way an entire town flanked to protect the 20 men involved in raping her. I’m waiting for U.S. Armed Forces to invade Cleveland, Texas, or maybe send some drones in to bring some civility to those adults.

It makes me equally physically ill to hear the smug, righteous screams of Americans who exploit the horrific Taliban attack on Malala Yousafszai to justify the deaths of 2000-3000 men.

[An aside: these are the numbers that we have if we take seriously the report that “only” 1/6^th to 1/3^rd of the victims who’ve died from drone attacks since 2004 were civilians. And that’s before we try to reconcile that statement with the “Living Under Drones” Stanford/NYU report released in the last month that

All reporting of government accounts of “militant” deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as “militants,” absent exonerating evidence. Media accounts relying on anonymous government sources should also highlight the fact of their single-source information and of the past record of false government reports.

Avid followers of the drone “debates” will be familiar with American Security Fellow Joshua Foust’s criticism of the report—including the charge of “bias” of small sample size of interviewees, and nonrandom interviewees, i.e. concluding that the report did not try objectively to count who really was a civilian victim and who was not. They might also be familiar with Kevin Gosztola’s and others’ ensuing challenges and exchanges to Foust as well as Gosztola’s challenge to Reuters reporter Myra MacDonald. The fairly obvious and definitive point of rebuttal was that it’s a bit hard for dead civilians to prove their innocence. And by extension, that the numbers are most likely severely deflated. Apologies to those of you who found that statement a bit obvious.]

The retroactive justification of an eight-year systemic drone war on Pakistan (ramped up 400% under the present Democratic POTUS) with a country with whom we are not officially at war–is heinous and morally despicable. It reminds me of the various right-wing charges of moral equivocation in 2002 as critics of the war on Terror suggested that the U.S. historical presence as an empire might have had something to do with the attacks upon the Twin Towers. How ironic that the apologists for the drones in Pakistan are engaging in a similar, morally problematic game of retroactive justification and moral equivocation.

If we really care about protecting the safety and security of women and children then presumably, those same defenders of drones will rise up to demand that we send in the National Guard and Active forces to France, Sweden, the UK, and the rest of Europe-where children have been captured, tortured, raped. If we really care about protecting the safety and security of dissenters and activists, then presumably, those same defenders of drones will rise up to demand the release of Julian Assange, Bradly Manning, Tarek Mehanna, and hundreds of others who have insisted that they want a life. Those same defenders will demand a repeal of Section 1031 of NDAA 2012, FISA, H.R. 347, and countless other erosions upon free speech, whistleblowing, and dissent in the U.S. [I am preparing for the onslaught of detractors who will call me batshit crazy for insisting upon a dose of skepticism with respect to assurances by the U.S.—or any government—about actions taken to protect its citizens that require secrecy and confidentiality. See every post I’ve ever written in the last year on PATRIOT Act, NDAA, FISA, H.R. 347, etc. Despite those seductive assurances, shockingly, I still tend to feel that I’m owed an accounting for the state’s actions in form of legal procedure. Must be PMS.]

I’m waiting, Paul Whitefield, Joshua Foust, Myra MacDonald, and others—to join forces to protect the safety of women, children, and activists around the world. Anyone? Hello? Hello?

Update:

Sadia Toor has an excellent article, “Imperialist Feminism Redux,” in Dialectical Anthropology. There, she argues seriously & clearly against the imperialist mentality that justifies drones, wars, invasions, i.e. what I am satirizing in this piece. Thanks to @avelokiteshvara for the lead.

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