The folks over at LGF have discovered this absolutely insane article by photojournalist Molly Bingham at Western Kentucky University. I'll snippit some of the more outrageous claims for you here:
Bingham sets down very early in the article what her political leanings are:
The American military is being used to find a solution to what is essentially a political problem, an equation that rarely adds up well. As if that were not enough, our soldiers have been sent with insufficient resources to protect themselves. In my mind, that is all inexcusable.
Okay, so the mission is crap, and it's being run by a bunch of blockheads. Let's get that out of the way immediately. But hey, let's not forget that I love the troops, too!!
let me take this moment to say that I have the utmost respect and sympathy for the American soldiers overseas right now, particularly in Iraq.
Bingham loves the soldiers! Bingham loves the soldiers! Bingham loves the soldiers! I repeat that several times for emphasis because you'll need the reminder the farther into the article we get.
Almost immediately after her "we love the troops!" statement, Bingham begins to smear them mercilessly:
At the time that we were working, the American military was the law, and it seemed to me that they were pretty much making it up as they went along. I was pretty sure that if they wanted to "disappear" us, rough us up or even send us for an all expenses paid vacation in Guantánamo for suspected al-Qaida connections, they could do so with very little, or even no recourse on our part.
Aren't you glad that she thinks so highly of our troops and the sense of fairness and justice that they all must have? Reading on:
I could go into a long litany of the ways in which the American military has treated journalists in Iraq. Recent actions indicate that the U.S. military will detain and/or kill any journalist who happens to be caught covering the Iraqi side of the militant resistance, and indeed a number of journalists have been killed by U.S. troops while working in Iraq. This behavior at the moment seems to be limited to journalists who also happen to be Arabs, or Arab-looking, but that is only a tangential story to what I'm telling you about here.
I am so flippin' glad that Bingham loves and respects the troops, because otherwise, she'd be leveling some really serious charges against them (besides, you know, the rather small ones of racism, intimidation, and war crimes).
Bingham goes on to make no moral distinction whatsoever between the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein and the Bush administration (this paragraph is illustrative of the moral bankruptcy of Bingham herself):
Recall Patrick Henry's famous speech encouraging the Second Virginia Convention, gathered on March 20, 1775, to fight the British, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Why is it that we, as Americans, presume that any Iraqi would feel any differently? If the roles were reversed, do you think for a moment that our men wouldn't be stockpiling arms and attacking any foreign invader with the temerity to set foot on our soil, occupy our buildings of government and write us a new constitution?
Wouldn't we as women be joining with them in any way we could? Wouldn't the divisions between us -- how we feel about President Bush, whether we're Republican or Democrat -- be put aside as we resisted a common enemy?
Ah. So Bush has been throwing millions in the gulag and torturing them for speaking out against him, and murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people out of sheer paranoia, just like Saddam? But hey, not to worry, if the chips were really, really down, we'd support him! Seriously, we would! I mean, like, if we were involved in a war for the survival of our society, we'd get behind the President, I promise!
< /sarcasm>
Further, she equates the Iraqi insurgents (many, many of whom are imports from Syria and Iran) with the American revolutionaries:
Then why is it that this story of human effort for self-determination by violent means cannot be told in America? Are we so small, so confused by our own values that we cannot recognize when someone emulates our own struggle?
Ho. Ly. Cow.
And we'll cap it all off with this lesson that Bingham learned while doing this "work":
Lesson Five: What it's like to be afraid of your own country.
Once the story was finished and set to come out on the street, I was rushing back to the States -- mostly because we could no longer work once the story was published -- and I found I was scared returning to my own country. And that was an amazingly strange and awful feeling to have. Again, you could call me paranoid, but the questions about what might happen to me once in America -- where at least I would have more rights -- kept racing through my brain.
Yes, Lord knows she was justified in "learning" this. I mean, can any of us imagine the horror of being invited to speak on the elite University circuit? Can any of us even fathom the fear of having our work published in the New York Times, and the Guardian? Okay, so maybe that last part really is scary, but it's certainly not made any more so by having covered the insurgency in Iraq.
But remember, Bingham loves and respects our racist, intimidating, war criminal troops! I think we all need to break out our O.E.D.s to find the definition of love and respect that Bingham's been using, because they're not in my dictionary.
Bite me, Molly!
Posted by: THIRDWAVEDAVE | May 10, 2005 at 05:18 PM
Hello
I can't be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don't have anything to say recently.
Bye
Posted by: tihopilik | July 08, 2007 at 05:20 AM