I feel like it's genuinely fucking deranged to primarily fret about women and children during a genocide where men are lined up in the street and executed or dumped in mass graves, especially in an attack that was made against a group that is majority men.
I don't mean to sound like a fucking MRA here, but the phrase "women and children" with how it's used (in many cases, but especially) in regards to Israeli atrocities is pretty fucking gross actually. Arab men are routinely dehumanized and treated as acceptable targets in the "war on terror" or whatever the west thinks is happening over there.
I feel like not just liberal but most """radical""" identity politics is just completely morally impoverished at this point, but more than that, it doesn't even track reality in many cases on even the most basic things.
We genuinely will not change the world so long as we continue to think in such asinine simplistic ways.
> There seems, indeed, a decided lack of sympathy for noncombatant men in war zones. Even reports by international human rights organizations speak of massacres as being directed almost exclusively against women, children, and, perhaps, the elderly. The implication, almost never stated outright, is that adult males are either combatants or have something wrong with them. (“You mean to say there were people out there slaughtering women and children and you weren’t out there defending them? What are you? Chicken?”) Those who carry out massacres have been known to cynically manipulate this tacit conscription: most famously, the Bosnian Serb commanders who calculated they could avoid charges of genocide if, instead of exterminating the entire population of conquered towns and villages, they merely exterminated all males between ages fifteen and fifty-five.
@hakan_geijer You are right that arab men are treated as acceptable victims, and that the western radical narrative makes a symbol of women and children. On the other hand many of these men would agree that stopping violence on women and children is the priority. This doesn't mean that male victims should be disregarded, or that everything they say should be accepted acritically, but they should be listened to, even if we don't completely agree with their point of view.
@NicholasLaney I don't think suggesting that we collectively as "the west" avoid contributing to the dehumanization of brown men is "being a savior" toward anyone.
@NicholasLaney Effective is measurable. Is saying "women and children" all the time stopping Israeli from killing them? Probably not. But it is almost certainly contributing to the subtle demonization of male migrants, who make up the majority, and who often are sending money back home to take care of their families.