What Hamas Called Its Female Captives, and Why It Matters
What Hamas Called Its Female Captives, and Why It Matters
MSN
So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:
- One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
- The IDF translated that as "women who can get pregnant"
- Basically the whole world got up in arms about the translation, and rightly so
What was missing from the discourse IMO was the procession on to step 4: Someone comes in and explains exactly what the word actually does mean, and why even just bringing it up in this context was an important thing, neither of which are trivial questions.
This article does a pretty good job of that, hitting the high points of:
- IDF's wildly inflammatory translation aside, it is a word with explicit associations to sexual slavery, which has been resurrected in the last 10 years after it had basically disappeared as the common practice of slavery had waned, and its use in this context is an important window onto Hamas's rank and file's mindset
- While of course bearing in mind that one random soldier saying one fucked-up thing isn't indicative of anything other than that soldiers (especially ones deployed against civilian populations) sometimes do and say real fucked up things
Obviously the full article has lots more detail, but that's the TL;DR
From the end of the article:
So the answer to "why it matters" in the headline is that it doesn't and I wasted my fucking time reading it.
The syntax they're constructing is working the opposite of how you said
You don't have to agree with them (and as they point out, one random solider saying one random thing doesn't mean anything "official" about Hamas as a whole), but they are saying that it is relevant that some individual in Hamas is talking about its female captives in explicitly sexual-slavery terms.
Put it this way, if a US prison guard or an IDF person were talking about female prisoners in an analogous way, it would abso fuckin lutely be some news.
Because U.S. prison guards and the IDF aren't already declared to be terrorist groups.
Letting us know that bad people say bad things is not news.