Amerika

In a society without direction, you cannot compare your actions to those of heroes and say “see, I was trying to achieve what we all agree is good.” No one agrees or knows what is good.

What’s left is only whether your action inconvenienced them or not. You started a war? That’s bad, even if that war avoided a bigger war. More taxes? Bad. Not wanting to support a parasite? Even worse.

In that climate, your only defense is being a victim — or portraying yourself as one. Initial signs are emerging that poor raped CNN anchor Lara Logan may not have been raped, but may simply have been “assaulted” or “detained” and she may have perceived these assaults to be have been a result of her gender, thus “sexual assault.”

I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”

I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it. There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and dissapeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.

Later I spoke with two young male activists who helped the person I later learned was Lara Logan (I didn’t know her before, I don’t usually follow US networks). They were Omar El Shennawy, a 21 year old teacher of English, and Abdulrahman Elsayed, a 25 year old teacher of physical education. They said they had formed a human chain with other young men to protect Logan, and then delivered her to the Egyptian Museum military post.

When I read CBS’s story and it’s interpretation by other media outlets, I felt troubled. It seemed misleading. “It didn’t make sense to me”, said Benjamin Starr, from Boston who arrived as a tourist on January 24th, and stayed to witness the uprising. He also saw the mob pass by with Lara Logan. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe something happened in another part of the square, but from what I saw, she was being taken by men to the soldiers, and her clothes were not torn off. There were no women, I didn’t see a single woman in the crowd around her.” – Témoris Grecko

We have to admit: it’s a better news product thinking about a gang rape than a scuffle.

It forms outrage on both sides. People like us here at Amerika who wonder why some CNN anchor thought she could treat Egypt like her comfy American suburb, and people who think any person should be able to go anywhere on earth at any time and do anything, without repercussions or consequences.

That makes it a successful meme and a profitable product. In the meantime, they’ve covered their bases:

The separation and assault lasted for roughly 20 to 30 minutes, said a person familiar with the matter, who added that it was “not a rape.” A CBS News spokesman declined to comment beyond the statement. – WSJ

Shame on us for being so easily fooled. We update our original statement “We in the West are walking chumps who seem to invite others to victimize us because of our naivete” — but this time, to include a justified paranoia of our media-product as well.

Tags: gender, inequality, rape