Over at National Review’s The Corner, John Podhoretz links approvingly to a review of Brian De Palma’s new anti-war film: Redacted.
Redacted is, putting it mildly, not going down well on the right.
“How about a movie where Hollywood filmmakers take money from America’s enemies to undermine morale?” asks Glenn ‘Instapundit’ Reynolds. “It wouldn’t be any more dishonest than Brian de Palma’s latest.”
The film is based on an incident where “American soldiers took turns raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and one of them put a bullet through her head after killing her parents and 5-year-old sister.”
The attack, led by a sociopath called Steven Green, was preplanned, and was long and gruesome:
Barker said the soldiers found the girl and her father outside their home. Spielman grabbed the girl while Green seized her father and took them into the house, Barker’s statement said, and Cortez and Barker followed them inside.
Green led the father, mother and younger sister into the bedroom and closed the door, while the teenage girl remained in the living room with the others, Barker’s statement said.
Cortez pushed the girl to the floor, lifted her dress and tore off her underwear while she struggled, Bierce said, citing Barker’s statement. Cortez appeared to rape her, then Barker tried to rape the girl, according to the statement.
Suddenly, the group heard gunshots, and Green came out of the bedroom holding an AK-47 rifle and declared: ‘”They’re all dead. I just killed them,'” according to the statement.
Green then raped the girl while Cortez held her down, Barker’s statement said. Green picked up the AK-47 and shot the girl once, paused, then shot her several more times, Bierce said, quoting Barker’s statement.
Barker said he poured fuel from a kerosene lamp on the girl’s body but did not say who set it on fire. The soldier’s statement did not say whether Howard or Spielman participated in the rape, Bierce said.
Another investigator, Gary Griesmyer, quoted Cortez as telling him that the teenage girl was weeping and speaking in Arabic and that Barker told her to “shut up.”
After the attack, the soldiers headed back to their post for a meal of grilled chicken wings.
Few have yet seen Redacted, so let’s leave arguments about its quality aside for a moment. Instead, ask why the film about the rape has received so much more attention on the right, than the crime itself.
Search for the words ‘rape’ and ‘raped’ on The Corner from July 2006 (when the to the present day and you get 75 or so posts (after a few duplicates have been weeded out).
Unsurprisingly, abortion is the subject most likely to get Cornerites talking and writing about rape, with 17 posts or nearly a quarter of the total, but the Duke fake-rape case is only just behind with 16 posts in total.
For those of you who missed it, the Duke scandal erupted when members of the university lacrosse team were accused of rape by one of the strippers they’d hired for a party.
An energetic prosecutor pushed the case with all his might, but was then himself accused of ethical violations. The victim’s credibility evaporated and the North Carolina dropped all charges, blaming the prosecutor’s “tragic rush to accuse.”
The race dimension – white men, black woman – ignited the blogosphere.
Lefties, such as Amanda Marcotte, covered themselves in little glory by assuming guilt (“Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?). Her reaction helped make her tenure as John Edward’s blogger a brief one.
The right, meanwhile, was ecstatic as the case began to fall to pieces. Wronged white men. Media jumping to conclusions. Horrible lefties. Spineless academics. What more could they want?
The Corner’s next most popular rape-related subject has been Muslims and their sexual crimes. Honour killings. Barkingly-mad judicial responses to attempted rape. Grim reminders of ‘what we face‘ as we wage the GWOT. 13 posts or 17% of the total.
Then you need to fast forward through a hodge podge of one-off posts or unrelated uses of the word (John Derbyshire wonders whether Hitler or Stalin raped Estonia first, for example) and you’ll get to the Corner’s extensive coverage of the crimes of Steven Green and his comrades…
Three posts.
First mention is a characteristically batty post from Kathryn Lopez. She is worried not by the crime, but by the media referring to the 14-year old as a ‘young woman’ rather than a girl. “How could such a thing get out of a newsroom?” Ms Lopez wonders.
Next, an aside from Victor Davis Hanson using the rape as an example of the media’s insistent focus on bad news in Iraq.
Finally, we have Podhoretz’s post from today complaining about Hollywood’s treatment of the story.
Spot a pattern yet?
Muslim on Muslim sex crime? White boys falsely accused of rape by black girl? Great excitement in the Corner.
Gruesome war rape/murder involving American soldiers. Radio silence. Unless… somehow or other… the media is to blame.
