Letter: Middle Eastern women's lives don't matter to U.S. people

Editor,

In the name of liberating women from the clutches of Shariah, how many innocent women have we killed from all our bombings for all these years?

Is there even a running count, by us? The Middle East probably has this count, however rough, but will our own media so much as breathe a word about it to us here stateside? You think the Arabs don't talk about it? We certainly don't.

When bombs explode, they kill over a wide space in 3D, like reducing an entire Arab house to rubble. But we euphemistically call it an airstrike, making it out to be more precise than it is. But even a laser-guided bomb is a bomb. How come we are not talking about our hit-to-miss ratio anymore? (It’s been a while since we heard the figure 70%; that was back when Clinton lobbed missiles at Iraq). But no, this measure could give us accountability for how many women we are getting killed there, “collaterally” and just “as an unavoidable sideband of taking out that one terrorist”, of course. 

In the name of giving women there a more dignified family life, how many of their kids have become "damage" by dying from our bombs? How many of their bread-winning husbands have we killed merely on suspicion of association with a known suspected potential terrorist? 

Let's get specific: 1) In our recent bombing for a full half hour of that hospital in Kunduz, how many of the dead were local women?; 2) We speak of freedom of assembly here as a non-negotiable right; how many wedding parties out there have we bombed out of existence, just because it looked from the air that they were assembling? A wedding party, there have got to be women among the dead; 3) Is it true that we went in like gangbusters and killed Bin Laden, we also killed his female relatives, women and girls right there in the same house, no questions asked?

Then some of their women become terrorists in response, and we are surprised – women like she whom we called a mere accomplice, who was as an integral part of the Paris attacks. Women like the wife of Sayed Farouk as one of two shooters in the San Bernadino attacks. How many of us even know her name? Can we as USAans look the faces in photos of these women in the eye?

Our media downplays the fact that there are women terrorists out to get us. It is clear that there have been women suicide bombers, but does our media report these with the same vehemence and frequency as men doing the same? We don't want to go there, else the cognitive dissonance of women being protected by us over there versus women being killed by us and turning terrorist – all this will make us schizoid. We want everything and life to be like a video game, all incoming data in neatly wrapped packages: Black or white. Besides, we want to keep demonizing only their men.

But just one of our own men dies there in a long while, like that Navy Seal who just died, and the media give him a name, a face and make him a hero. But do we mention the name of even one civilian woman who died without warrant in Iraq? How many of their bystander women die as a ratio to how many of our men dying there, in this twisted "theater" of what we keep calling war?

No, we are all about being media savvy; the power of Youtube snippets drives the world. So as the world’s attention remains fixed on the attention-grabbing scene that is Gitmo, we’ve made sure there are no women prisoners in Gitmo. That would destroy the heroic front we are presenting that we are about the freedom of their women.

ArunAhuja

UNM student