Woman Overboard

“Rape is always present where you have slaughter,” she told BBC Question Time on June 9th. “All soldiers, in certain circumstances, will rape, regardless of whether they’re ours or theirs or whose.”

The Sun reckoned this “a vile slur” on “ours”. The Daily Mail preferred “outrage”. Etc.
Ms. Greer was responding to a question arising from a claim the previous day from the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, that he had evidence “that Gaddafi himself had decided to punish using rapes” and had “acquired containers for (sex) drugs to enhance the possibility to rape women.”
The rape claim had been made three weeks earlier at a UN Security Council meeting by Obama’s representative Susan Rice, but attracted little attention until endorsed by the ICC.
The ICC endorsement came the day after a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels at which the US, Britain and France had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey to throw themselves more fully into the drive to kill or oust Gaddafi. The timing of the intervention will have struck even the most trusting as, at least, suspicious.
I am not aware of any mainstream media outlet in Ireland or Britain presenting this sequence of events and allowing its audience to make up its mind.
Still, there was nothing inherently implausible about the rape allegation – although the idea of Gaddafi distributing Viagra to his troops to enable them to get an erection for a rape seemed fanciful from the outset. Ms. Greer was right that slaughter is commonly correlated with rape. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped as the Red Army advanced across Europe in 1944/’45. Just as many were raped by the Japanese in Manchuria, China and Korea. Pakistani soldiers raped tens of thousands of Bengali women during the violent secession of Bangladesh in 1971. Amnesty estimates up to half a million rapes during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Joshua Phillips’ None Of Us Were Like This Before, reviewed here last year, described how rapidly the requirements of war in Iraq and Afghanistan turned American boys reared on MTV into predatory sexual savages. On August 27th last year, Amnesty pleaded for action following “the latest reports of mass rape and other sexual violence committed in the Walikale region of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between 30th July and 2nd August... including (by) the government forces that the United Nations is supporting.”
Then again, the fact that something commonly happens doesn’t mean it invariably happens.
The chief of Amnesty’s Libya desk, Diana Eltahawy, told the London Independent: “We spoke to women, without anybody else there, all across Libya, including Misrata and on the Tunisia-Libya border. None of them knew of anybody who had been raped. We also spoke to many doctors and psychologists with the same result.”
Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, agreed: “We have not been able to find evidence.”
Supporters of regime-change in Libya denounce Gaddafi, on the basis of no convincing evidence, for using rape as a weapon of war. Just as vehemently, they denounce Ms. Greer for suggesting that this isn’t a specifically Libyan phenomenon.
In this perspective, it’s not mass rape for military purposes which is at issue, but the extent to which the allegation can be used as propaganda against the enemy de jour.
Meanwhile, hard evidence of mass rape in the Congo continues to mount and, studiously, steadfastly, continues to be ignored.
One difference between the two situations is that some of the Congo rapists are sent out by a regime which the major powers are not intent on overthrowing. Another is that the Congolese are blacker than the Libyans.

My comrade Dave Randall from down Brixton way has written and recorded ‘Freedom For Palestine’ with some of his mates from Faithless, a South African Gospel Choir and, he says, “musicians from around the word.” Which is not a misprint until Dave says different.
The song is available for pre-order from iTunes and HMVdigital. At time of writing, the video has notched more than 200,000 Youtube plays, plus endorsements from Coldplay, Billy Bragg, Mark Thomas, Lowkey and others.
Even more brilliant: daft far-right commentator Glenn Beck has described the song on Fox News as “evil propaganda”. What further encouragement could anyone want?
If we can push the song into the charts here and across the water, the Man will find it difficult to turn a cloth ear.
Check www.freedomoneworld.com for more info.

I was pondering the reviews of the Spiderman musical when I chanced on calls to Joe Duffy’s Radio One whingefest from the neighbours out at Killiney who have had their tranquillity destroyed by the incontinent screeching of Bono’s peacock. They should count themselves lucky. They could be in New York having to put up with his turkey.

Here’s a couple of old ones but good ones which I thought I’d pass on to fill out the space. “I want to be a rock star when I grow up.”, says the child. “Ah now, Jimmy,” says his mum. “Sure you know you can’t have both.” And what’s the connection between a guitar solo and premature ejaculation?
You know it’s coming, but can do nothing to stop it.