Thursday, October 30, 2014

HuffPo Puff Piece on Egyptian Woman

Once again, the Huffington Post put up a puff piece missing substance, but full of inference which really infers very little.

The writer and videographer of this post wanted to recreate the discomfort for viewers which Egyptian women face in Muslim countries:
                                     
What It's Like To Walk Alone If You're A Woman In Cairo

Really?
File:Women in Egypt.jpg
Two Women in Egypt (Source: Yareite)
The stories relating what women experience in Islamic nations should make any Western feminist or civil rights activist boil over in rage.

Yet very rarely do militant feminists in the West say anything to defend Arab women.

Now, homosexual activists are teaming up with Islamic advocates, too, even while ignoring the fact that individuals practicing that form of conduct face stiff penalties (including death) in Islamic countries.

When I was looking this Huffington Post column highlighting the plight of women in Egypt, however, I found much ado about nothing.

The readers watch a video of her walk for five minutes along a Cairo bridge. The American who filmed this piece writes:

Today we will be filming what it's like to walk down the busiest bridge in Cairo as a girl," says American-born filmmaker Colette Ghunim, introducing the short clip, above. From that point on there are no more words spoken -- just the leering gazes from almost every man Ghunim walks by.

Yes, there are men who look at her, young and old. There were also women in the footage, too, and they looked at her.

This kind of emotionally charged content is not journalism, hardly scientific, and not meaningful.

I would not call it journalistic malpractice, but irrelevant and unrevealing.

This blurb might explain why a number of men were looking at her:

Colette walked down the Kasr El-Nil bridge, secretly recording with an iPhone. She held it by her mouth with headphones plugged in and pretended to talk on the phone. She pretended to be deep in conversation, looking straight ahead of her. Whenever she felt eyes on her, she turned the phone slightly towards them. The clip was filmed in a single 5 minute walk around sunset, as people often gather on the bridge after the temperature cools down.

She was talking loudly on a phone, or rather pretending to talk on the phone. Such behavior can give the impression of mental illness, in that she was obviously not talking to someone, and the dialogue she was improvising probably sounded disjointed and strange.

Then this passage follows:

She also noted that the purpose of "Creepers on the Bridge" is not to denigrate Egyptian, Arab or Muslim men, but to call attention to a problem facing women around the globe.

This hyperbole commands no respect. What data suggest that women around the globe are harassed by streets of men looking at them? A five minute video does not indicate an epidemic of leering men, not even in the Arab world.

This HuffPo puff piece is one more example of manipulative liberalism masquerading as unbiased journalism, and does a disservice to the cause of helping women who are assaulted and discriminated against in certain countries around the world.

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