In much of the academic community, everything is boiled down to the triumvirate of the left: race, gender, and class. (And lately, sexual orientation.) So I read articles like this, and I have to hope that the paper is being quoted out of context:
Yes, a lack of rape is because those Israeli soldiers hold Arab women in such utter contempt. But if there was a lot of rape going on--that would also be a sign that Israeli soldiers hold Arab women in contempt. This sounds like one of those papers that started with the result--Israeli soldiers have dehumanized Arabs--and then looked for a way to twist the data to match that result.(IsraelNN.com) A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers' committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.
The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that "the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."
The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."
The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.
I'm sure that if this same author were examining al-Qaeda's use of power tools to torture people to death, that would be a sign of al-Qaeda's fundamental respect for the humanity of the victims--that they were important enough to torture.
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