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Abu Ghraib pictures are recruitment posters for Al Qaeda

Staff Report

Washington: Commenting on the shocking pictures of Iraqi prisoners being tortured, Dr Akbar Ahmed of the American University told a news service that the one that showed a smiling American woman soldier pointing at a naked, hooded prisoner, “will become the recruiting poster of radicals trying to attack the West. If Osama bin Laden had come to Madison Avenue and asked for an advertising image to help him recruit, this would be it.”

Dr Ahmed told the Newhouse News Service that in the United States, the full power of the images was only beginning to be realised, pointing out that so far the picture that seems to resonate most in the West is one showing a hooded and wired prisoner with his arms outstretched, like Christ suffering on the cross. But the image Muslims will have seared on their psyche is the photo of the female American soldier, because it depicts an interaction brazenly crossing spiritual, societal and cultural boundaries. “Here, you’re getting one person representing one civilisation pointing to the most vulnerable part of another person representing another civilisation,” he said, adding, “It’s gloating. It’s triumphant, with an element of sadism and stupidity.”

He said when Muslims learn that the prisoners were put in compromising sexual positions and forced to indulge in self-abuse, to the amusement of American soldiers, it’s nearly incomprehensible.If the prisoners had been killed instead of sexually abused, it would have been less inflammatory to many Muslims, he added.

Another academic, Ms Ingrid Mattson of the Hartford Seminary, said that particular image and others like it assault on a visceral level core Islamic values such as modesty and dignity while evoking feelings of humiliation that non-Muslims may not fully understand, say Mattson and other scholars of Islam. “This is definitely symbolic,” said Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies, “This soldier is symbolic of American force and the prisoner is symbolic of Muslim peoples. For the broader Muslim public, this will be a symbol of the subjugation and rape of Muslim lands.”

The image, readily available on the Internet, has already been published in Muslim newspapers and broadcast on television not only in the Middle East, but worldwide. The display of skin is shocking enough in cultures where women’s faces and sometimes entire bodies are customarily covered, and where men don’t wear shorts or T-shirts, but modest, loose-fitting clothing, even when it’s hot.

Ms Mattson said, “This is only going to reinforce the notion in Muslim countries that Americans have this kind of obsession with sexuality and sex. I’m just afraid that it’s going to be taken as a broader indictment of American society that somehow reveals something about what’s wrong with America.”

Ebrahim Moosa, co-director of the Center for the Study of Muslim Networks at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina said the abuse, which ironically occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison made notorious by Saddam Hussein, “highlights a widespread impression held by Muslims the world over that there is very little difference in the morality of the US-led forces and the Baathists they claim to have unseated.” He said blame must go to the top, to the people who created a climate that would allow for such abuse. “When the commander in chief uses self-serving and overheated rhetoric proclaiming that every means must be used to defeat terrorism and that all means are legitimate, why would the foot soldiers not understand it to be legitimate to torture `terrorists’ in Iraq?” he asked.

Agha Saeed, a lecturer at California State University at Hayward, who chairs the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, a coalition of nine national Muslim organisations said the images of prison abuse are so powerful they will not only turn many American Muslims against Bush, but might also discourage some from participating at all in American democracy. “There’s profound shock,” said Mr Saeed. “People thought things could go wrong, but not this wrong. People didn’t think U.S. forces could stoop this low. This will be a painful memory that will resonate and echo in the collective consciousness. What I fear for is further alienation of people in the Muslim world from the West and the United States. “What this has done is remove the fig leaf from the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Not only did it make the Iraqi people naked, but it made America naked in terms of its claims of abiding by the rule of law, maintaining human dignity, exercising self-restraint and having a government that’s accountable and transparent.”

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