Osama bin Laden

So apparently he's dead. I'd heard from unverified sources that he'd died years ago, and I do find it a little suspicious that his body was simply dumped into the ocean without, it would seem, an autopsy, etc.. Of course, they claim to have DNA evidence, but where's the proof that they have it? It also seems just a little too convenient given that Obama's popularity had significantly fallen and now this happens shortly before the next US election, and predictably everyone's an Obama fan now.


But whatever. We'll leave all that aside. It may be coincidence after all; he really could have been killed recently. I don't know for certain, so let's go with it. And this brings me to people's responses, mostly Christians, remember.

About that "rape by deception"

*Trigger warning for sexual assault scenario

Last I wrote about it, I'll admit, I was angry, and what I said about that particular case I still stand by, but what if the case actually had been as we had initially thought? A few posts ago, I listed some "gray rape" scenarios and explained why each was either clearly rape or clearly sex. Rape by deception generally actually refers to instances such as a man turning out the lights and pretending to be woman's husband before sleeping with her, something I listed as rape for obvious reasons, which I won't explain here. If you want the explanation, visit my "gray rape" post. Another example of rape by deception would be a police officer telling a person ze caught that ze will let hir off if ze has 'sex' with hir, and the officer then did not let hir off. That's rape for other reasons too, obviously. So what about what we believed this case to be? Claims went from "She specifically said she wanted a long-term relationship with only a Jewish man, and he said he was Jewish" to "They were in the heat of the moment and she asked if he was Jewish and he said yes" to "She didn't even ask if he was Jewish or not; she just assumed because his nickname was considered Jewish". Not in any particular order, and there were all sorts of in between, but since these are the ones that stood out to me, these are what I will tackle.

WWII Survivors and their Descendents Oppose Israel's Treatment of Palestinians

*Trigger warning for psychological after-effects on war survivors

As I allude to in this blog's description, I am a woman of multiple causes, one of them being the Israel/Palestine conflict. As a result of being pro-Palestinian, I inevitably discovered Norman Finkelstein, and I have read several of his books and have attended two speeches. It would take an entirely different post to detail my respect and admiration of this man, but that's for another day. I frequent his website and there is an excerpt of a political memoir he's writing. The excerpt focuses on his mother, who survived the holocaust. For the sake of brevity, I have placed in ellipses those parts not relevant to what I want to discuss.

Every night as we watched the news on television my mother would avert her eyes and raise her hand to block the screen when scenes from Vietnam flashed across it. After a few moments the question would invariably come: "Is it over yet?" Not at all given to self-dramatization, she simply couldn't endure the scenes of destruction and death. ... My mother's whole being revolted against it. ...

"Rape By Deception" is that by the Israeli Court System

*Trigger warning for abuse of a rape victim by the court system

So I might be a little late on this, but I'm adding my two cents anyway. According to BBC News, it turns out that that whole rape by deception case in Israel is not as many of us had previously thought.

This was in fact a "real" rape charge where the girl in question had to be taken to the hospital, bleeding and bruised and half-naked. This girl had also been sexually abused by her father since the age of six, forced into sexual slavery, and had been living in a women's shelter when she met Sabbar Kashur. She had felt safe with him, and had hoped for a relationship, not sex. So where does the rape by deception part come in? A plea bargain.

Yeah. Rather than face full sentence, Kashur took the plea bargain sentence of eighteen months in prison on the charge of "rape by deception". Thus, the whole she-cried-rape-when-it-turned-out-he-wasn't-Jewish crap came not from her at all, but from the courts.