Israel Matzav

How soon they forget

Both the Washington Post (Hat Tip: Soccer Dad) and HuffPo (Hat Tip: Memeorandum) picked up an AP story about Israel's Defense Ministry apologizing to pregnant New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario, who was allegedly forced to walk through an x-ray machine three times, and then to strip down to her underwear, while going through security crossing from Gaza into Israel.

I'm not going to get into all the gory details - the Defense Ministry claims that the request to avoid the x-ray machine was not received properly. I just want to focus on one line in this report:

In the Oct. 25 letter sent by the newspaper said Addario, a Pulitzer Prize winner who is based in India and has worked in more than 60 countries, had never been treated with “such blatant cruelty.”

That's pretty blunt. Does the name Lynsey Addario ring a bell for any of you dear readers? It should.

One man grabbed her breasts – the start of a pattern of sexual harassment she endured over the ensuing 48 hours.

‘There was a lot of groping,’ she said. ‘Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.’

As she was being driven away from Ajdabiya, she said another of her captors stroked her head and told her repeatedly that she was going to be killed.

‘He was caressing my head in this sick way, this tender way, saying, "You’re going to die tonight. You’re going to die tonight",‘ she added.

Thankfully, I have never had either experience, but I would think that 48 hours of a woman being threatened with death while having her private parts groped by strange men would leave a much stronger memory of cruelty than three trips through the x-ray machine, and having to strip down to her underwear (not exactly what I would call a 'strip search' as AP calls it) in front of a female worker.

Silly me.

Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Gaza, Lynsey Addario, New York Times

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:44 PM