Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar of Arabic literature and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, declared Monday that raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants would deter attacks.
‘The only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped,’ said Kedar during a radio talk show.
Listen to Hebrew-language radio show ; Kedar’s comment begins at 1:35:00:
Kedar, who is an academic expert on the Palestinian population within Israel, served for twenty-five years in the military intelligence, where he specialized in Islamic groups.
He is a researcher at the right-wing Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of Bar Ilan University, as well as the founder and current director of the Israel Academia Monitor, a neo-McCarthyst website that follows alleged ‘anti-Israel activities of Israeli academics’.
Continue reading at AIC.
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The IMEMC notes: UK daily news site International Business Times stated, recently, that Kedar’s words have triggered an angered reaction among feminist activists in Israel, who sent a letter to the University’s president, one Rabbinic professor Daniel Hershkowitz, in which they condemn Kedar’s ‘words of incitement that grant legitimacy to Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Israeli civilians to commit rape, and endanger both Israeli and Palestinian women:
‘Kedar’s words echo expressions that treat rape as a remedial practice, although it is a war crime,’ he said.
Considering the fact that Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian community — which, in fact, comprises what is now the very largest refugee population in the entire world — have historically garnered little more than token denunciations from international legislators, the use of the term ‘war crime’ is perhaps less than sufficient to express the reality of rape and genocide for its victims.
Rape is an act of brutal violence, of the most inhumane proportions, which primarily occurs in three settings: urban civilian neighborhoods, military societies — and prisons. There is no acceptable theater for such heinous crimes as rape, genocide and ethnic cleansing, regardless of who is currently sputtering from the far reaches of the international podium.
Those living under the constituency of Western policy makers might, in fact, see such crimes from a very different angle in comparison to that of their political representatives who live, at best, on the utter fringes of the populations they are sworn to represent.
Have we suddenly opened our doors to a pack of rapist thugs, turning what is essentially no more a blind eye to the victims of this epidemically rampant hypocrisy on the part of world leaders? Shall we continue to skim the headlines of internationally syndicated yellow journalists, as we text friends and family from taverns amid the drone of affiliate TV sports casts and the chuckle-headed gossip of misinformed pundits which encompasses the majority of what continues to be foisted upon masses of registered voters as ‘news’?
Or, are the roots of such politics embedded much deeper into our past, as is undeniably the very ethnic and religious nature which forms the basis of these so-called ‘war crimes’?
As human rights blog Occupied Palestine also recently noted via Press TV, clerical status within the Jewish community is not necessarily a pretext for peaceful diplomacy among pro-Israeli pundits.
Dov Lior, an illegal settler and rabbi from Kiryat Arba, in the occupied West Bank, recently uttered his self-ordained holy proclamation that the killing of innocent civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip was acceptable and, to quote Lior: ‘okay’.
Rather than allowing our analysis, and that of our families, to be continually guided by the mediocrity of yet another millennium of unenlightened human shepherds and self-proclaimed prophets, perhaps we should ask ourselves:
Is this the new provincial edict we have allowed to be tacked to our doors in 2014? Has the underlying moral basis of documents such as the 1st Amendment to the Bill of Rights finally been cashed in for the same antiquated cage of olive-wreathed imperial gluttony, rattling along in choralesque harmony with centuries-old patriarchal brown-nosing and deceit?
Have we no shame?
