Which torture victims receive narrative voice reveals whose humanity a theorist recognizes

Evidence

The only example that Ignatieff can come up with is “Jean Amery, a Belgian resistant” who was “arrested in Brussels in 1943 for distributing tracts in German urging soldiers of the German occupation to desert. He was tortured by the SS in a Belgian jail in 1943, before being shipped off to Auschwitz”. Not an Arab, not a Muslim, not one of the current victims of torture that Ignatieff has dehumanized with George W. Bush and his cabal by labeling them “terrorists”. To have a Palestinian tell what it means to be tortured by Israelis in Tel Aviv, or an Iraqi by Americans in Abu Ghraib, or an Afghan by Americans in Kandahar would risk giving them back an iota of their humanity. The small dignity he might restore to thousands of tortured Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans at the threshold of the twenty-first century he awards to a Belgian in 1943. The European becomes the voice of the tortured body. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 303

Categorization

• SHARE: The Amery example and its selective deployment is a striking case worth sending to anyone interested in rhetoric of torture discourse.