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JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi
(4)I have great pity for JonBenet Ramsey. She was exploited during the brief years of her life. She was brutally murdered. (How can such a small child have a twelve-inch skull fracture?) And she has been exploited in death for longer than she lived. It’s the United States at its ugliest.
It begins to look even uglier when you consider the racist nature of this frenzy and all such frenzies over beautiful white girls in sexual danger.
As Juan Cole points out this morning in his post JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi :
That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi. Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi’s death is not treated obsessively in the same way. In the hyperlinked story above, CNN even calls the little girl a “woman” at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less overed up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.
Members of our army raped and murdered this 14-year-old “woman” and killed her entire family to cover it up. What our army does it does in our names. George W. Bush would have us believe our army is there to protect the Iraqi people, not to prey on them. Where’s the furor and the outrage?
Here’s another take on Beautiful Dead Girls.
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4 Responses to “JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi”
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Powerful post, Sherry. I might make a link to some of this.
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sherry August 22nd, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Thanks, Helen. Juan Cole should get most of the credit.
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[...] erning the role of racism in our collective Americanmindset in an entry entitled, “JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi.” She also links to a tro [...]
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Thank you for posting this. I get really upset when people go on and on about what a victim JonBenet was. As a mother, it tears me apart to even think about things like this happening to an innocent child, but I feel like the American press and public have contributed to making her a victim. And, what about Abeer Al-Janabi, how many voices will she have? And I wonder, too, if one reason more is not made of her trauma, is because it would force us to admit that our own people committed this heinous act. It’s humiliating, to say the least.
Thank you, Sherry, for bringing this to light.
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