The insult, the injury and the indignities of empire

To deny historical experiences and current political realities allows one to miss the point entirely: that the offence caused by the steady flow of anti-Islamic cultural production is quite literally adding insult to injury. And it is much easier for all of those involved to focus on the insult rather than the injury.

The sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison elicited universal outrage but the notion that an illegal occupying power could arrest and detain Iraqi citizens at will was not cause for concern or protest. When it emerged that American military personnel had urinated on the corpses of Afghan citizens, generating protests throughout the country, the US government was quick in its condemnations of this desecration, but few people if any wondered why there were so many dead Afghans in the first place. More here.