So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:
- One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
- The IDF translated that as “women who can get pregnant”
- Basically the whole world got up in arms about the translation, and rightly so
What was missing from the discourse IMO was the procession on to step 4: Someone comes in and explains exactly what the word actually does mean, and why even just bringing it up in this context was an important thing, neither of which are trivial questions.
This article does a pretty good job of that, hitting the high points of:
- IDF’s wildly inflammatory translation aside, it is a word with explicit associations to sexual slavery, which has been resurrected in the last 10 years after it had basically disappeared as the common practice of slavery had waned, and its use in this context is an important window onto Hamas’s rank and file’s mindset
- While of course bearing in mind that one random soldier saying one fucked-up thing isn’t indicative of anything other than that soldiers (especially ones deployed against civilian populations) sometimes do and say real fucked up things
Obviously the full article has lots more detail, but that’s the TL;DR
I am downvoting bc of the exceedingly clickbait title with absolutely zero follow-up details except for a link. This post is therefore “advertising” - like spam in my inbox alerting me to an “opportunity” (to save on car insurance or printer ink, ignoring whether or not I even have one of those devices, or whatever), it takes up all of our attention. Which at currently 37k subscribers to this community, measured at a one minute each, is collectively 617 hours, or 15.4 work week time periods, i.e. 3.9 months total.
The article itself might even be good, or it might not be but at this point I am indisposed to click the bait in order to find out. And my point above stands either way.
Possibly you mean well OP - I have had troubles posting articles myself, assuming that details would be auto-populated like I see elsewhere, but then it did not happen - I am just offering my unasked-for opinion, in case it helps.:-) Especially since others I see are likewise downvoting so I wanted to add an explanation at least from my own POV.