The WHM Supremacist Christian-controlled Press, Islamophobia, and Misogyny: the Reporting of the Murder of Katya Koran

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It's strange to me that a book about Islamophobia would have this cover. Islamophobia is a xenophobic Western phenomenon that includes the stereotyping, persecuting, and mass murder of Muslim women and men, particularly but not only in or from Central Asia. Are we supposed to be sure we view this bigotry and violence towards followers of Islam as something aimed primarily at women? Is "the covered woman" supposed to adequately represent Islam? Usually men who abuse women want to pretend the "real" harmed ones are all male. That's why the cover is strange to me--not because Muslim women are spared abuse from Muslim men, Christian men, Jewish men, and women who are not Muslim; they are not spared. 

For whom do women publicly represent the members of a Ibrahimic/Abrahamic religion? When white Christians write about Christianity, do they assume an image of a female on the cover will suffice?

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Apparently not. Here we have a cover showing a dark--get it? DARK, as in black, as in NOT WHITE--hand hovering behind "the" cross. That cross was one Roman soldiers killed hundreds or more Jews on. That it has become a symbol of something non-Jewish is already strange enough. But we can notice no women on the cover; in fact, we have two men--maybe gay, so maybe too feminine--too much like het men imagine het women to be? On this book cover, women are only represented symbolically in the lower right--and it's appears to me to represent the allegedly topsy-turvy morals of lesbians--because of course the morals of het white Christian het men haven't been tumbling around at all. (Cough.)

From the website promoting this vile book:

Gay apologists continually claim that there is an unreported epidemic of hate crime against members of their community. The author tackles this contention head on by analyzing statistics from various police departments and by examining just how law enforcement concludes whether or not a particular incident qualifies as a hate crime. His critique simply blows away the assertion that homosexuals qualify as a persecuted minority in Canadian society. He also exposes that the way the police delimit such crime is seriously flawed, at least in part because of their dependence on the testimony of the “victim.”

In the closing portion of his book, Emmanuel explores the term “Christophobia” and how it has informed his views on hate crime legislation. He concludes that while there are a number of factors driving legislation of this kind, one of the most basic factors is a “thoughtless and irrational reaction to Christians, Christianity and Christian teaching.” He points out that the moral absolutism of Christianity is totally at odds with moral relativism, the reigning philosophy of our age. His implicit conclusion is that people with an animus toward Christian absolutist values exhibit such hostility precisely because their moral relativism brings them into conflict with eternal Christian values. On a personal note, one could wish that Emmanuel had done a more thorough job of developing his assertions for “Christophobia” as being a key factor behind hate speech legislation, given that he chose to use the term in the title of his book.

In an interesting chapter entitled, “Stop Being Defensive,” the author takes careful aim at the common practice among Christians of issuing disclaimers whenever they critique homosexuality. Emmanuel does not approve, for instance, of disavowing hatred by saying, “While I may not morally agree with the homosexual lifestyle, I certainly do not hate them as persons.” He maintains that such “defensiveness” is unnecessary, plays into the hands of the other side, is a concession to political correctness, and is not helpful in advancing our cause in the culture war. While I endorse strongly most everything in this excellent book, I must confess that I see this point of view as misguided. Simply put, we must deal with the reality that gays and lesbians have succeeded in convincing the population that they are victims of ongoing hatred. It’s not true, of course, but perception is just as important as reality. Millions of moderate people who are not on one side or the other of this question must hear Christians renounce hatred for homosexual people. In the present cultural and political context, silence on this point simply gives fodder for gay apologists to use against us. [source: *here*]

As should be clear to most everyone, there is a direct relationship between the persecution of lesbians and gay men and the persecution, discrimination against, and domination of women generally, by men. While the debate above appears to be concerned with Christian het men vs. "homosexuals", we might take a moment to remind ourselves that Christian white het men are committing atrocities against the following groups of people: Christian white het women; Jewish and Muslim het women; lesbians of all religions and ethnicities; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Black and Brown men; women of color of all sexualities; and Indigenous people across gender. That's quite a list to be targeted--all without the Western dominant press seeming to notice. Certainly without the corporate media posting notice to beware of this group of politically active extremists and terrorist.
 
White Male Supremacist Media cannot accurately report on the politically motivated death of a woman or girl, at the hands of one man or boy, or many men or boys,  unless the politics involved are connected to some demonised group of men, such as Islamic men. Because if non-Islamic men kill women, we are left to question other dominant societies, like white Christian male-dominated society, white secular male-dominated society. White Christian or secular men are not to be demonised; we're too busy giving them medals for murdering Islamic men and women across Central Asia, calling them heroes for their efforts and murderous "accomplishments". Do we need many more stories like this partially fabricated one, partially corrected below, to prove these points? A very young Ukrainian non-Muslim woman, Katya Koran, was murdered by a man, a boy, or a group of males. This is the salient political feature of this crime and human rights violation. Beyond the male supremacy and masculinist violence, we might notice the very particular patriarchal atrocities of the Christian-dominated European man.

My heartfelt condolences to the loved ones of Katya Koran.

Please click on the title below to link back to the source website. Shame on Western men's media. Please click on the title just below to link back.

Murder of beauty pageant contestant not connected to Islam

01 June 2011, Wednesday / YUSUF ERDOĞDU , KIEV

The murder of Ukrainian teenager Katya Koren (19) was not connected to Shariah law, as had earlier been reported in the media, with reports stating that she had been stoned to death for participating in beauty pageants.

The British Daily Mail newspaper reported that Koren was Muslim and that she was killed by three Muslim youths who claimed her death was justified under Islam. According to the daily, one of the three said Koren violated Shariah law and that he did not have any regrets regarding the murder.

The media was put to the test on Islamophobia worldwide as numerous websites covered the story without checking the facts, including in Turkey. Ukrainian authorities told the Cihan news agency that the report was made up and that the murdered teenager was Christian with Russian roots.

In a news conference in Simferopol, Crimean police officer Sergey Reznikov said they did not see any religious motives behind the killing and that the possibility of a sexual motive seems highly possible. "A student did it, killing his classmate. There is no other underlying reason, neither religious nor linked with inter-ethnic conflicts," said Reznikov.

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry also issued a statement and said that those who stoned the 19-year-old to death did not use Shariah law as a justification. Crimean authorities told the Cihan news agency that one of Koren's male classmates was detained as part of an investigation into the girl's death. The boy's statement, made in the presence of his lawyer and a teacher, was recorded. In his initial statement he said he helped the girl find something in forest and killed her there; however, he later denied this. Ukrainian authorities said police teams are continuing to search for the other assailants.

Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People Chairman Mustafa Abdülcemil Qırımoğlu, commonly known as Mustafa Cemiloğlu in Turkey, said the detained teenager, Bilal Gaziyev, who is of Crimean Tatar descent, was pressured by police into accepting the blame for the murder. “The killing was covered in a distorted way, as if it was a religiously motivated murder, by the media around the world. The girl was not Muslim. All these [reports] are a provocation and fabricated news,” he told Cihan.

Rape Atrocity Denial: Men's not-so-secret Weapons in Protecting Male Supremacy

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• Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating. -- Andrea Dworkin

• Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact. -- Andrea Dworkin

• Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so. -- Andrea Dworkin [source for all three quotes is *here*]

I'll add this:

Andrea Dworkin is hated because women are hated.  And because she spoke women's truths to men's violently protected power.

As a Jew with family roots that go to Europe, I comprehend with stunned silence the level of atrocity-denial it must take for people to pretend HaShoah never occurred. One might shake one's head at the racist, anti-Semitic fools who do so but as they are the group in charge shaking one's head isn't nearly enough.

I suppose in an era of Photoshopping and other digital methods of altering images, we might expect that some people aiming to keep white Christian supremacy alive would accuse those who lived through nightmares to deny Nazi genocidal atrocity ever happened. How convenient for one's effort to maintain destructive, sadistic power that one denies is power, eh?

One might be tempted to cut the HaShoah-deniers some slack, given that the horror happened seventy years ago. Except for one thing: it is happening now against Indigenous people globally, and in particular in North America, in a time and place that is regarded as being oh-so-civil. Which, of course Hitler believed Nazi-ruled Germany was also. Now Germany currently has a relatively strong economy--albeit with debt incurred in propping up the pitiful economies of other European nations. And it has managed this, this time, without wiping out hated ethnic groups, and is banning nuclear power plants. Humane action can replace inhumane action.

In North America, the story is entirely different. Indigenous women are the poorest of the poor, the most raped of the raped, and the most invisibilised of the invisible. It's not just that whites don't wish to discuss this egregious elephant in the room, but most truly do not know genocide is happening right now, in part, I suppose, because the term genocide has been equated with tremendous levels of mass murder occurring in a very short period of time. But when the mass murder and attempts at complete cultural obliteration happens slowly while deliberately--with the apparent unawareness of the white masses--in what sense is this not also genocide?

Whites will and do come up with excuses for why we don't know about this, and why we aren't engaged in revolt against the forces which maintain this inhumanity. It's because media--white-owned--doesn't report on it. It's because systematic activism and resistance movements against the status quo--which Indigenous people all over the world are waging and have been waging for several hundred years--is not registered as important and desperate. Fighting for one's life--one's individual life and one's cultural life--is only seen as notable to Christian white het male supremacist media when it is white het men doing it, with the mythological threats being women, gays, and people of color: Muslim Arab and Asian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Black Christian, Brown Christian, and Indigenous. If you're positioned below this dominant group in various ways--such as being a woman who is Jewish and Black, you'll be rendered completely invisible in status quo society's vision of itself  which it uses media to construct in the public imagination. If you're lesbian and of color, you'll not find yourself on television. If you're trans and not M2F or F2M, you'll not find yourself on television. If you're gay, poor, and Brown, you'll not find yourself on television. The Christian whites don't want to know about us. They'd just assume we all go away.

But as lesbian Indigenous poet Chrystos has written, oppressed people--her people in particular, are Not Vanishing.

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Men deny rape is as serious a human rights problem as the imbalance of wealth distribution. Men deny rape in so many ways and for so many reasons you'd think the rest of us would determine this to be proof there must be a whole lot of men-raping-women going on. You really only need ask all the women you know how many women they know are rape-survivors and domestic terrorism survivors to know that rape is endemic and isn't going away. It could go away, but that would require men to not be in denial about it, to defend it, to protect their entitlements to practice it without negative consequence--to the male rapists.

Thirty-five years ago, Andrea Dworkin produced a brilliant radical feminist book called Our Blood. How many men have read both Not Vanishing and Our Blood, that you know? One? None? If Christian white het men were being assaulted by people who were not Christian, not white, not het, and not men, and they wrote about it, and about how they are figuring out how to survive it, I believe those books would be required reading across the educational system. Everyone would be made to read them. They'd stay in print. They'd be passed around among white het men, with a look in the eyes that says, "this speaks to our pain and our endurance".

In Our Blood, there is a very important speech, delivered March 1, 1975, called "The Rape Atrocity and The Boy Next Door". From that speech and essay we have this quote, which every man on Earth ought to have memorised in his own language.

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us. -- Andrea Dworkin

Indeed. Almost without exception, men will self-centeredly respond: "What about the men and boys who are raped?" To this inhumane response I reply: What about the millions of girls, daily?

What shall we conclude about the moral character of white het men who will not acknowledge the pain and endurance of other people, non-male people--people these white men structurally oppress? What is the level of humanity of these rape apologists and perpetrator-protectors? How ought they be regarded or reviled, statused or stigmatised, by society? This is how they are regarded and statused: as heroes, as geniuses, as brilliant creators. This is how they, as a group, are reviled and stigmatised: not at all, in any way.

If you combine the forces and practices of genocide with gynocide, you get a truly horrifying statistic, which is numbers placed over the violence men do to women. One women in three will be raped by a man--mostly by a white het man--if she's an Indigenous woman in North America. See *this study by Amnesty International* for much more on that. And for more understanding of gynocide and genocide, please see chapter one of Andrea Smith's brilliant book, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide: "Sexual Violence As a Tool of Genocide".

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For Indigenous women's stories of survival of many forms of men's violence, please read Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence.

If you don't get what's incredibly fucked up about this gross protectionism of white het men and their abuses of other people, you're either in great denial yourself, or you're one of lying perpetrators of it.

theoreticalgrrrl, in a recent comment to this blog, noted how many women she knows well are survivors of the rape atrocity. I hope you read it, *here* in a recent post called Hearsay and Heresy.

I welcome all readers of this blog to post their own knowledge of the globalised rape atrocity, committed by men against women, with no relief for women, and no responsibility by men, in sight.

Here's part of what I know:

My mother was raped in a place that was supposed to keep her safe. She was also incested by her father, years prior to that.

My aunt and her daughters were incested by an uncle.

One of those daughters was, many decades later, anally raped by her husband when he was drunk.

A female relative's sister threw herself in front of a train to escape being domestically terrorised--which includes rape--by her husband.

A dear female friend was raped while a prostitute when she was a teenager. She was later street raped by a strange man. And another strange man tried to rape her. She escaped.

Another dear female friend was molested three times one summer by three different men.

Another dear female friend was incested by her father and years later was street raped.

Another friend has been raped in her marriage by her husband, too many times to count. He has been a domestic terrorist.

Another dear friend was raped, as an underage teenager, at knife-point by a young man she didn't know.

Another dear friend was drugged into semi-consciousness in a hotel room by an "accomplished" man who is a serial rapist: his name is Joseph Brooks. He raped many women over thirty years, usually using drugs to physically disable the women. I am relieved to report he is dead.

I could go on and on. Statistically, I'd say, easily, seven of ten women I know is a rape survivor; ninety-nine of one hundred women I know is a survivor of some form of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault with one male or several males being the perpretrator. And none of them reported the rapes to the police, to a lawyer, to the FBI, or to a mental or physical health care provider. Not one.

Please share your stories here, in ways that keep the survivors completely anonymous and safe.

To men: please organise to end men's sexual assault of girls, and rape of women. The reason why men must do this is because it is only men's responsibility to do so.