We all know that Palestinians are victims, right?  That’s why they get a free pass for eating up billions of dollars in foreign aid without establishing viable communities, for launching tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, and for periodically boarding Israeli buses or entering Israeli restaurants to get an up-close-and-personal approach to massacring Jews.  Still, even self-styled victims have their limits.  In Israel, Palestinian women in Israeli prisons drew the line at being portrayed in Turkish television shows as the victims of sexual assault.  Their gripe is that it makes them look so . . . so . . . victimish:

The Turkish TV show which sparked a diplomatic crisis between Ankara and Jerusalem has now incurred the anger of those who were depicted by it as the victims. Female Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails called on the Saudi MBC channel Monday to stop airing the “Valley of the Wolves” series. They claim that a scene depicting a prisoner being raped by soldiers offends their honor.

[snip]

According to a report in the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, “Valley of the Wolves” focuses on the “suffering of a Palestinian family whose sons are killed by the Israeli army.” The report states that Palestinian female inmates are outraged over a scene in which a supposed Palestinian prisoner named Miriam is being raped by IDF soldiers in an Israeli prison.

In a statement issued Monday, the prisoners said that the scene has no bearing with reality. “This is an attempt to slander the Palestinian female prisoner’s image and mask its heroic role.” The prisoners feel that the scene is offensive to Palestinian women portraying them as submissive.

“The broadcast of these images is a humiliation for the people and the whole nation and serves the occupation alone,” the statement read.

The al-Quds al-Arabi report noted that the prisoner in the scene is later seen released from prison and murdered by family members “as traditionally done by the conservative Palestinian society.”

The murder scene also incurred the wrath of the women. “It’s a slandering of the Palestinian family which kills its daughter to clear the family’s honor,” their statement noted.

The prisoners noted that they were proudly welcomed by their families upon their release from prison.

Interestingly, one former prisoner admitted something very important about those Israeli prisons — Palestinian women are not sexually assaulted there:

A former Palestinian inmate from the Gaza Strip Manal al-Nawajha told the newspaper she had never heard of any rape incidents of Palestinian inmates throughout her prison term. She said that the rape scene in the series “compromised the Palestinian struggle and society at large.”

I believe that. Aside from the fact that Israelis generally hold themselves to a high standard, rape has not traditionally been a Jewish crime. That doesn’t mean Jews don’t commit rape; it just means that rape, traditionally, has been aberrant, rather than a part of the larger cultural norm.

Charles Martel left a comment to an earlier post about Islam’s core nature:

I used to ask myself how Allah is served by the grotesque torture of non-Muslims. How is the supreme deity gratified or honored by the sadistic disfigurement and dismantling of his creations?

Then I came to my senses and thumbed through my copy of the Qu’ran, where I came across description after description, all in loving detail, of how Allah intends to torture for eternity those who have dared to not submit to him. Who cares if his most devoted followers jump the gun a bit and start the torture before death?

Then I read further and came to understand that Allah has predestined all men for either Heaven or Hell. Even the good man who never lies, prays devoutly and treats all others with justice and compassion will go to Hell if Allah has predestined him to do so.

The violent, murderous, lying man who has left ruin and sorrow in his wake will go to Heaven, which apparently is a bordello, if Allah has preordained it so.

Mohammed could not have done a better job of creating a religion designed to make men both violent and despairing.

He’s exactly right.  Several years ago, in the wake of yet another Muslim created massacre, my cousin, who works as a Christian prison chaplain, wrote to me about the way in which converting to Islam has become quite the thing in prisons around the world:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

We all know that in the news world, “man bites dog” gets the front page, while “dog bites man” is ignored.  In a twisted way, then, one could say that the wall-to-wall Abu Ghraib coverage reflected the media’s horror that the American military had morphed from honor to dishonor.  (Or we could be realistic and say that the MSM adores anything that puts the military in a bad light.)

Given the impression that Abu Ghraib created of S&M prison conditions for Iraqis detained by the US, the current “man bites dog” story should be this one, from Max Boot, about the extraordinary success the American military in Iraq has had with the current batch of detainees.  Part of the success stems from changed conditions on the ground, but a significant part stems from changed conditions within the prison.  Given the airtime Abu Ghraib got, and the way it shaped perceptions about American prisons in Iraq, this should be a news story — but what do you bet that it won’t be?  Don’t bother to answer.  That was a rhetorical question.

As for me, I salute our American military for learning from its mistakes, and for being creative, innovative and flexible.