In a brazen attempt to skew public opinion and exploit the fears of
women, the New York Times recently ran an article on intimate partner
violence. Cleverly titled "Sweden Boldly Exposes a Secret Side of
Women's Lives," the essay suggests patriarchal beatings have become as
commonplace in Sweden as driving a Volvo station wagon.
Of course, research paints a completely different picture -- that women
around the world are equally
likely as men to engage in partner
aggression, and that men represent
38%
of all persons who suffer an injury as a result of the
incident.
But that didn't stop NYT reporter Lizette Alvarez from quoting Swedish
politician Gudrun Schyman's description of domestic abusers: "It's every
man and in every class of society."
Forgive the comparison, but the insight of that remark rivals the
paranoid rants of persons who used to claim, "Jewish bankers control the
German economy" and "The Trilateral Commission is conspiring to take
over the world."
In order to understand how responsible journalism at the Times morphed
into this egregious example of gender-bashing, we need to go back to
2001.
That's the year Irene Khan took over at the helm at Amnesty
International. In addition to being a lawyer and former UN career
bureaucrat, Ms. Khan is an ultra-feminist.
Four years later, Khan has now proven how easily a respected human
rights organization can be turned into a breeding ground for the radical
feminist cancer.
Pay a visit to the AI web page at
www.amnesty.org, and you will learn
about the "greatest human rights scandal of our times." No, Amnesty is
not referring to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of
persons in the Darfur. And it's not the trampling of civil liberties in
Communist countries.
The greatest human rights scandal is -- get ready for this, "violence
against women."
That claim is sheer nonsense. The fact is, men are far more likely to be
harmed by violence. The World Health Organization reports that
twice
as many men die from violence-related causes as women.
Part of Amnesty's fem-socialist strategy is to promote women's activism
at the local level. And that includes advocacy research. Which brings us
to Ms. Alvarez' recent contribution to impartial and balanced
journalism.
The centerpiece of the NYT article is a "stinging Amnesty International
report" on domestic violence that "set off a national reckoning" in
Sweden. But it turns out the article, filled with suggestive innuendo
and alarmist claims, has more holes than a hooker's fishnet stockings.
The article claims that the number of police reports for assaults on
women increased by 40% in the 1990s. But police files are a notoriously
unreliable source of information about partner assault because of the
problem of under-reporting - especially by male victims.
A bigger hole is that Alvarez never gets around to telling us the actual
name of this report. After extensive searching, it turns out the
document is not even posted on Amnesty International's website. The
paper, "Men's
Violence Against Women in Intimate Relationships," can be
found only on the website of Amnesty's affiliate in Sweden.
Strange that a New York Times reporter would write a column about a
ground-breaking report, but never reveal its title or tell us where to
find it. It's almost as if Alvarez didn't want us to read it.
Maybe that's because a perusal of the document reveals it is larded with
neo-Marxist slogans about the "gender power structure" of society.
Or perhaps because the report never defines the word "violence," a word
that is subject to the broadest of interpretations in the hands of
feminist advocacy researchers. Indeed, we don't learn until page 25 that
their all-inclusive concept of "violence" includes men's "controlling
behavior" -- whatever that means.
Based on that hyper-inflated notion of violence, the AI account notes
that in 85% of incidents the woman didn't even bother to file a police
report. Why? Because in most cases, the event was "too insignificant" to
the woman who had been "abused."
But the truth finally slips out on page 33. That's where we learn that
at the Swedish Federation for Gay and Lesbian Rights, half of the
hotline calls concern violence in intimate relationships.
Lesbians being beaten up by their partners, their lavender lady-friends?
You mean to say, women are also capable of instigating domestic
violence?
All the News That's Fit to Distort -- get it now at the New York Times.
