Violence in the US is in the Iraq news cycle -- or at least one incident. An Iraqi woman was murdered. You may remember we ignored that hype. Dropping back to March 26th:
One visitor has been lobbying in the public e-mail account
repeatedly since Saturday morning for us to include the death of Shaima
Alawadi. No, thank you. In this morning's four e-mails, the visitors
argues that surely the Iraqi press must be covering the woman's death.
They are. Here for Al Mada. They're also covering that Omar Sharif's grandson "admits" he's gay and half-Jewish.
We're not going to be devoting space to that story either. For those
who don't know, the woman is an Iraqi-American who came to the US in the
early 90s. She was beaten and she's died. That's what's known. The
coverage is a bunch of items that are speculation. And inflated
outrage. It allows people to pretend they care about an issue, these
momentary topics that flare up every few months. But they don't really
have much to do with news. To be clear, her death is tragic,
unfortunate and all too common for women in the US and around the world.
However, nothing is known. When we covered the Iraqi woman run down
in the US, killed by her own father, there were eye witnesses and that
was a story the media didn't want to touch. This isn't any such story.
The media has portrayed it as 'killed by an outsider who hates
foreigners' and that is easy to cover, no real risk to anyone and allows
everyone to mount their soapboxes. I'm sure there's already a Facebook
outrage page for the woman, there are not, however, any real facts
about who killed her or why.
We didn't take part in that crap. We noted how sad it was that a woman was murdered. That's the only time we touched on the story. About 9 days later, the press would suddenly grasp what was obvious to me from the start, she wasn't killed by a stranger and she wasn't killed for being an Iraqi. Al Rafidayn reports that the husband of the woman was arrested Thursday. So the man, with the help of a daughter, created a fake threat in the woman's blood and the history of fake threats against the woman prior. They should both go to prison. That's not "my opinion," that's the law. A murder took place and two people worked to alter the crime scene, to manufacture fake evidence, to create a 'suspect' that did not exist and more. The killer broke the law. So did the daughter. Sorry that I can't work up sympathy for the young woman who -- confronted with her father killing her mother -- worked overtime to help her father get away with murder.
Shame on all the idiots in America who worked to create a fantasy of the sick world they want -- one they apparently live in daily within their own heads.
I mean Workers World, Indymedia and others. It was really damn important to them that this Iraqi-American woman be murdered by strangers, strangers who hated her because she was from Iraq. It didn't matter to them that there was no history of crimes like that in the area or in the United States. No history of targeting Iraqis at all. What mattered to them was that they wanted it because in their world it seemed normal.
That says a great deal about Workers World and others. Some people really need to start explaining why they see evil everywhere they look.
They also need to explain why they devalue women so much and so often. From the original reporting, I said to Kat, "The husband did it." It was obvious including from the description of the scene and the photo of the message scrawled in the blood. It was obvious the daughter was lying as well. And would a daughter lie for strangers? No. She was a teenager so she could be lying for a boyfriend or girlfriend but most likely she'd be lying for a close family member. Did I rush to proclaim that here? No.
But damned if supporting evidence was a concern to the ones screaming, "It was a hate crime!"
Do Workers World and others not get that they are a lynch mob?
They want to get outraged today about the fact that the 20th century saw African-American males were falsely accused (how often, no one knows) of rape cover up for White crimes. But same outlets don't get that they are today's lynch mobs.
Rushing to judgment, writing copy intended to incite (incite in the US and in Iraq), they are the same lynch mob mentality they decry except that this new lynch mob wants to say they're opposed to racism.
I don't know how you can truly be opposed to racism and repeatedly attempt to fuel a lynch mob.
And maybe we need to grasp that what took place through the sixties was often someone accused for family crimes. Forget the race of the accused the motive was often to to cover up for family crimes. Like family murder, family rape, etc.
A family murder is what the police and prosecutors believed happened in El Cajon. Not a hate crime.
It's really telling that in a country where would should all know that most women who are attacked are attacked by someone they know, that a woman who is abused is most likely to be killed when she's trying to leave the abuser (the woman in El Cajon, Shaima al-Awadi, had planned to divorce her husband and move to Texas to get away from her husband). Yet despite that, Workers World had to see some racially-motivated crime -- where there wasn't one, let's remember that.
April 7th, they insisted:
[. . .] continues to stoke the fires of righteous anger at racism, another
killing has taken place that has touched a nerve of outrage and
solidarity around the U.S.
This time it happened in the Southern California city of El Cajon, a
suburb of San Diego that is home to some 50,000 people from Middle
Eastern countries, second only to Detroit in that population. This time
the victim was a 32-year-old woman. Her name was Shaima Alawadi, an
Iraqi immigrant, a devout Muslim and the mother of five children.
On March 21, Alawadi was discovered by her 17-year-old daughter
Fatima on the family’s dining room floor, bleeding profusely after being
severely beaten with what police say was a tire iron. A note was found
which read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Several weeks
before the attack, a note stating the same sentiment was found at the
family’s house, but Alawadi had dismissed it as the doings of misguided
youth. Despite the notes, so far police and the FBI have not declared it
a hate crime, even though doing so would give the federal agency, which
has persecuted many Muslims since 9/11, more powers in the
investigation.
On March 24, Alawadi died after being removed from life support. She was buried in her homeland on March 31.
That's all they could see and what they saw were lies. "Hoodies and Hijabs," they yelled hoping ot link it to another case that they'd decided needed a lynch mob. And of course the ridiculous march about Wall Street's alleged War on Women in which women made women the focus . . . Well, almost. They wore "hoodies" to keep the focus on that other case involving a man.
They couldn't even make women the focus of one damn march as they made clear that that they really didn't give a s**t about women -- in case we had missed that point in all the coverage they offer that never includes coverage of women (unless the women are serving the penis -- Naomi Wolf went from over-sexed flake in their eyes to hero when she decided to serve the penis).
Every week in the United States, women are assaulted by men they loved. But that's not news to Workers World or anything for them to get outraged about or grab their torches over. They won't lead the lynch mob on that.
I'm not going to lead one on it either because I don't believe in lynch mobs. The police have arrested the husband. I think the daughter should be arrested as well. I doubt she will be (even if she's not cooperating with the prosecution). But whatever happens -- and in the US, there's always a good chance a man who assaults a woman will walk -- that's what happens. I don't have a need to gin up outrage or start a Facebook page or rant and rave like a lunatic.
It's a shame others can't make the same claim.
Most of all, it's a shame that there are no apologies for the false coverage. But to apologize would be to acknowledge it. And they won't do that.
They'll let it disappear. Because she doesn't matter, Shaima's death never mattered, to them. She was only important if they could use her to push their belief that she was killed because she was from a different country and that this was all about xenophobia and racism. When it became about gender, when it became domestic violence -- since when is violence domesticated -- 'hate' flew out the window and so did their interest. And if you wonder why women struggle still for equality in the so-called 'advanced' United States, there's your answer. If she's killed because she was born in a foreign country, it's a "hate crime." If she was killed because she was terrorized in the home and was trying to leave and get away from her attacker, in some sick f**ked up way, the Workers World contingent see it as being about 'love.'
It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)
The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4488.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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