Couldn’t make it up if I tried.
On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust-denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.
But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.
Sending fathers of toddlers to fight and die is apparently a-ok, because men really don’t matter, at least when it comes to parenting. Or dying.
When a pretender to sanity like Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we’ve effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders.
Not only does the Iranian president get to look magnanimous in releasing the hostages, but he gets to look wise. And we in the West get to look humiliated, foolish and weak.
Just because we may not “feel” humiliated, doesn’t mean we’re not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we’re wimps. While the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Islamic men “rescue” women and drape them in floral hijabs.
Who, exactly, is supporting Ahmadinejad’s opinion that women shouldn’t be soldiers, other than the usual suspects? I really don’t think this scored him any gotcha points.
I’m also curious as to who this “we” refers to. Parker isn’t British, although I suppose she maybe means “the West” or simply “white people.” And if she’s concerned about how the Muslim world perceives us, perhaps she should be more concerned with our repeated invasions of Muslim countries and how we kill tens of thousands of Muslim civilians in the process. I think that might hurt our reputation a little bit more than having one female serviceperson taken hostage.
We can debate whether they’re right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won’t change the way we’re perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.
Call me crazy, but I suspect the propaganda value that Iran gained from our invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and the ongoing Palestinian situation is probably a little more valuable than its lone female hostage.
It is not fashionable these days to suggest that women don’t belong in or near combat — or that children need their mothers. Yes, they need their fathers, too, but children in their tender years are dependent on their mothers in unique ways.
There’s not enough space here to go into all the ways that this is true, but children (and good parents) know the difference even if some adults are too dim, brainwashed or ideologically driven to see what’s obvious.
Or, to borrow a term from the MRAs, too misandrist.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that women, despite all evidence to the contrary, are as capable as men in any battle. If our goal is to prevail, then shouldn’t we also consider other ramifications of putting women in combat and/or in positions of risk?
Those ramifications include women’s unequal vulnerability to rape and injury, as well as cultural attitudes toward women that may enhance their exposure to punishment or, alternatively, to make them useful to our enemies.
Parker may be shocked to realize that men can be raped, too. She might also want to recognize that men have historically committed the vast majority of war crimes, including rape. Shouldn’t we also consider the ramifications to human rights and international law by putting men in combat? And what about cultural attitudes toward men? Couldn’t those attitudes enhance their exposure to punishment, torture or murder?
Rape, though not a likely risk in this case, is a consistent argument against putting women in or near combat. While advocates for women in combat argue that men are also raped, there is an important difference. Women are raped by men, which, given the inherent power differential between the sexes, raises women’s rape to another level of terror.
So take the rapists out of combat. Problem solved.
What kind of man, one shudders to wonder, is willing to allow his country’s women to be raped and tortured by other men of enemy nations?
The kind who sees women as “his country’s,” and considers rape a property crime instead of a human rights violation.
Shorter Kathleen Parker: Men are brutes who don’t have the same parental skills as women, and women generally suck. One wonders why it’s ok for her to even comment on the war in public space, given her inherent emotionality and lack of male-identified rational thought. And doesn’t all this column-writing take away from her taking care of some toddlers?