Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration in Spring 2011

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report. It claimed that female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks. At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said that 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests." But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said that the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice. The general said that the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities. "We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)." This may make sense to an Egyptian but I fail to see how the women not being virgins proves that they could not be the victims of rape or sexual assault.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't it racist to unfavoraby compare the culture in a non-Western culture with Western cultural norms?

Average Joe said...

Pretty much anything a white gentile does these days is considered racist.

Anonymous said...

You missed my point.

When (charges of) racism meets (charges of) sexism, (charges of) racism wins.

Since it is all about convincing people in the west, just recast many such complaints as being racist and move on. Eventually, people will start to get the idea that it is racist to criticize western behavior as well.

Average Joe said...

Eventually, people will start to get the idea that it is racist to criticize western behavior as well.

Then who will liberals criticize for being racist? Liberals will always find some way of demonizing white Americans and Europeans as racist while ignoring or even condoning worse behavior in the non-western world. For example, it is quite common for liberals to blame homophobia in Africa as a legacy of European colonialism. Therefore even though it is blacks who are engaging in anti-gay violence, it is whites who get the blame.