The Attack on Lara Logan
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
In what can only be described as a case of terrible timing, I wrote my previous post reporting on how joyous and safe women were feeling in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Egyptian protests. The post appeared only hours before CBS News made public the brutal attack on journalist Lara Logan in the square.
The description of her attack, as released by CBS, was horrifying on many levels. The New York Post reported: “‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, ‘Jew! Jew!’ as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s main square Friday, CBS and sources said yesterday.”
Interestingly, the cries of “Jew! Jew!” were not in the initial description of the event released by CBS.
In any case, thank goodness she was saved by a group of women and Egyptian soldiers, and is now recovering in the hospital in the United States. A brave and persistent reporter, Logan had already been expelled from Cairo once by the government while attempting to cover the uprising. Surely she was braced for trouble coming from the regime, but undoubtedly less prepared for attacks from the supposedly peaceful demonstrators in the in the square.
While Logan deserves support right now, there is another journalist who deserves nothing but condemnation. Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security who writes for an array of publications, released out a stream of tasteless tweets regarding Logan — as if her physical attack wasn’t enough. (He has [since tweeted] http://twitter.com/nirrosen numerous apologies, but the damage was done.) Rosen is from the far left, another blogger attacked Logan from the far-right in what The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dubbed the “Lunatic Left-Right Harmonic Rape Convergence Theory.”
I guess this means that the tendency to blame the victim of sexual assault knows no ideological bounds.
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