So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:
- One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
- The IDF translated that as “women who can get pregnant”
- Basically the whole world got up in arms about the translation, and rightly so
What was missing from the discourse IMO was the procession on to step 4: Someone comes in and explains exactly what the word actually does mean, and why even just bringing it up in this context was an important thing, neither of which are trivial questions.
This article does a pretty good job of that, hitting the high points of:
- IDF’s wildly inflammatory translation aside, it is a word with explicit associations to sexual slavery, which has been resurrected in the last 10 years after it had basically disappeared as the common practice of slavery had waned, and its use in this context is an important window onto Hamas’s rank and file’s mindset
- While of course bearing in mind that one random soldier saying one fucked-up thing isn’t indicative of anything other than that soldiers (especially ones deployed against civilian populations) sometimes do and say real fucked up things
Obviously the full article has lots more detail, but that’s the TL;DR
Buddy buddy. I’m on your side. If I need to say it, I think that the war crimes Israel is committing are at least 10 times worse than anything Hamas has done. That doesn’t mean that all of a sudden a story about Hamas doing crimes becomes a non issue or a thing to react to with hostility. In my opinion.
I didn’t say anyone here was supporting Hamas. I was saying that it seems like people are clearly reacting negatively to this story because it makes Hamas look bad, when they would be completely fine with a story that made the IDF look bad, even if it contained some of these issues which they are claiming are what they’re so aggrieved about about this story.
Again, I get why there’s a value judgement that the IDF is the bad guys. I agree with that judgement. I’m just saying you don’t have to demand that your news coverage obey the same judgements.
To me, stories about the world have value beyond the conclusion being “Hamas good” or “Hamas bad,” and can be important even if the conclusion along that axis is “Hamas bad” which we knew already. It seems weird that people are saying that because the conclusion is that Hamas is bad, the story is irrelevant, and also are pretending for some reason that the anti-Palestinian-looking viewpoint is not the entire reason they don’t like it.