There are certain things we take for granted, things that no one will say anymore today, when we read someone in the mainstream media discussing allegations of rape. No one is naïve. We know these things are still thought and said by some people, at least behind closed doors. But it is a kind of victory that they are no longer a feature of the public space. For instance, we expect that no one will question the motives of the person who comes forward to say that they have been a victim of rape. We expect that no one will use what a woman was wearing to even hint that what she was wearing was itself an inducement to rape. We expect that if you are a male talking about rape you need to do so with an awareness that rape is a male culture that you are part of.
Enter the Chief Editor, no less, of the Australian Lebanese daily, El Telegraph, with an editorial titled: A Sex Feature Film in Canberra?! This is how it starts:
What’s up with them, they wake up to their rape in such a belated manner? And how is it that you get a stream of accusations that follow the first accusation?For, since the complaint made last week by the ex-Liberal Party employee (the photo) claiming to have been raped by a senior employee in the office of the then Minister of Defence Industry Linda Reynolds, after having consumed alcohol, in March 2019, three other women have declared that they have been subjected to sexual attacks and harassment in 2017 by the same employee.And the question is: where have these women been since 2017 until today?(The writer goes on to a brief history of belated accusations of rape made against Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein to repeat his initial question)Why did these women keep their mouth shut in the past to go back and raise such issues later?Of course, there are many answers, some of which might disturb women and some they might consider as an assertion of their claims.
I’ll stop translating this garbage. But you get the idea. And in case you are in doubt about the spirit in which the article was written see the photo above that accompanies the article.
I have to say I was particularly angry seeing this photo, as it is an innocent photo turned, in a very slimy way, into an accusatory weapon. In the way it is contextualised and presented, it reproduces the very culture of rape that needs to be struggled against. It could be the photo of any woman we know.
The idea that the main question that comes to one’s mind in the face of a belated claim of rape is ‘why now?’ is a classic deflection from the main issue, of course. So people might have motives for declaring a crime. The idea that this tells us something about whether a crime happened or not is part of the culture whereby a victim has to be innocent and helpless or they are not real victims.
Does an Australian-Lebanese person who has behind them a long history of racism really find it hard to understand why and how an injury can be hidden and suppressed and can later resurface at a particular moment? So many stories of racism follow this pattern. People subjected to a form of racial debasement that, while nowhere near as awful as rape, is nonetheless pretty awful, and who prefer not to talk about what they went through. They repress it and say nothing about it. But then an occasion arises, a change in circumstances or even more broadly a change in culture which makes it possible to put the repressed at the table. This is never easy. The history of racism and sexism is a long history of self-repression and self-silencing. People prefer not to be seen as victims, even in the eyes of their own family. For there lies a basic truth: it is demeaning to be recognised as someone who has been demeaned. This is at the core of how sexism reproduces itself. And the same goes for racism. An editor of an Australian Lebanese newspaper who is not sensitive to the nature of such injuries, is not only sexist and misogynist. They are also out of touch with one of the key affects that structures the Lebanese communities belonging to Australia.
I am not surprised that the editors produces a sexist, misogynous, kind of writing. He has done so before. The man’s connections with the conservative sections of the Lebanese clergy and the conservative part of the Liberal Party were made clear during the unfortunate ‘debates’ around same sex marriage. But this crosses the bounds of decency. The Lebanese community, like all communities and more, has it’s fair share of vile sexists. Some are sophisticated sexists and some, like the above, simply lack the sophistication to even begin to realise how bad they are. But it is intolerable that the Chief Editor of a newspaper can be free to exhibit such unreconstructed misogyny and subject the Lebanese community to it as if living in a hole away from mainstream Australia. This is both a specific community and a more general Australian matter. The man is clearly unfit to hold such a position.
