No way to treat a lady.

[Quicksilver]

Theodore Dalrymple is an op-ed writer whose latest piece on the Wall Street Journal asks whether or not the female Brit who was captured should be treated differently than the male soldiers. Why is she being trotted out while the rest languish? Is it a ploy by the super-right Iranian ideologues? Is she being used as a pawn to garner more animosity? You can read the op-ed piece here.

http://www.kgoam810.com/goout.asp?u=...TMzMDE1Wj.html

[fln8tive]

I predict about 9 pages of posts shortly....

[motordavid]

The Bronze Age gang of "geniuses", currently running that country,
are doing a guilt ridden mea culpa show and tell, based on the way
they have treated women since post-stone age.

[Quicksilver]

Yep and the iron age idiot right here in America are just as guilty making her and other women like her into something more than the others.

The article points out and correctly so............. As soon as a woman soldier is captured, ill-treatment of her is regarded as especially heinous.

Personally with the following

But Faye Turney is entitled to no special sympathy qua woman: that is to say, to no sympathy that is not extended in equal measure to the 14 men who were captured with her. It is the wisdom of ages that young mothers should not be soldiers, or engage upon military pursuits, and she chose to overturn that wisdom by joining the marines.

True, she did not overturn the wisdom of ages single-handedly, nor was she the only one to do so; she was, in a sense, a victim of political correctness. But she joined the forces voluntarily; she was not press-ganged into it. No one's circumstances are so reduced that joining up is literally the only possibility for him or her.

Nor does she deserve any extra sympathy because, when she joined up, she could hardly have expected to be sent to Iraq while her baby was still very young. It is in the nature of armed forces that they go where they are ordered; surely no one could be so ignorant as to be unaware of this, and Faye Turney was a volunteer, not a conscript. Indeed, on the very day before she was captured, she told a British newspaper deeply opposed to the war in Iraq, the Independent, that she was fully aware of the dangers that she faced.

Either she's a soldier, or she isn't. Being a soldier, at least of the combatant variety, entails the danger of capture, death, mutilation; it isn't just a matter of posing stylishly in camouflage uniform with an automatic weapon for a photo that one sends to one's friends, in order to fulfill some dream of what is now known as gender equality.

Admittedly, it is not Mrs. Turney who is claiming special status for herself as a woman, and no doubt she has too much self-respect to do so; but the press and Downing Street has no hesitation in doing so when it suits their purposes. A "spokesperson" for the latter said, "It is a disgrace. It is cold and callous to be doing this to a woman at a time when she is being detained in this way." Oh and please don't forget she has a baby