Merf. Thinking is Hard.
The story talks about the difficult conditions under which the Navy special warfare community (Navy SEALs) have to train, including simulated conditions in which they go through rooms that are designed to resemble “a mosque, bank, post office, market and residential compound. In one section, nine chairs painted in primary hues sit behind desks in an elementary school classroom.”
The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye: the image that they are using for target practice is unmistakably that of a Muslim woman wearing hijab, with what looks like Qur’anic inscriptions behind her on the wall.
These houses are called “kill houses.”
The person who designed these so-called “kill houses” touts their high technology: Larry Pacifico, “who manages the complex, said instructors will control each scenario using an iPad to adjust the lighting and movement of the targets. Cameras will record the action, so SEALs will find out where the bullets they fired came to rest, he said, down to specific bones and organs.”
Apparently the Navy has enough concern about technology to want to know which bones and which organs the Navy SEALs would be hitting, but not enough concern to know that they are taking target practice shooting at Muslim women.
Yeah, we are not at war with Islam, they keep telling us.
We just train our most skilled soldiers to kill Muslim women.God have mercy on us.
It’s not so much that this looks bad.
This is bad. It’s rotten to the core.
Can the folks in charge at the NAVY not see how this contributes to the dehumanizing of Muslims, not just Muslim women, not just Muslim civilians, but all Muslims?Dear white people: go fuck yourselves with a hot soldering iron and shove it up your asses.
WWWTTTFFFFFFF
Uhhh, at least the Muslim woman in the hijab is also like, pointing a gun at them?
This is a training ground for Navy SEALs, the elite of the elite, the whole point of the sprawling facility is to prepare them for as many possible combat scenarios as possible, especially the unexpected and unlikely. That’s just good training. And while undoubtedly not that common, this scenario is at least plausible. If a soldier is going to see combat today or over the next few years, it’s likely going to be in a Muslim-majority country, and female hijab-wearing combatants do exist. You can blame the people who make our foreign policy for that, not the people running this training ground who are just trying to do their jobs well.
The scenario from the picture is probably just one from a ton of different rooms depicting wildly different situations and the editor who chose the photo probably picked it out of a ton of different pictures the photographer took of the complex. The most bigoted thing about this whole story is that the paper chose to run THAT photo knowing the kind of message it sends to its readers.
Honestly having a beef with the military using cardboard cutouts of Muslim women for target practice is missing the forest for the trees. The beef should be with our foreign policy and our military aggression.
i hate how your url is so fitting right now
this whole shit is just as offensive as foreign policy
FUCK YOU for missing the fucking day to day pain and tryina tell folks to look at the bigger picture that likely dont affect you either
you aint enlightened for trying to tell people to NOT be fuckin horrified of how theyre used as targets
youre just the average fucking asshole
BD’s bolded commentary because fuck anyone who tries to justify this in any way, shape, or form.
fuck them in the eye with something hard & sandpapery.
holy fucking shit shamelesshipsterscum you really ARE scum
(via mermeanie)
