Nawal El Saadawi Quotes
Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
El Saadawi, Nawal. Woman at Point Zero. Translated by Sherif Hetata, Zed Books, 1983.
Description of one of his experiences in the Spanish American War.
These battles with the Irish—in this case the MacDonnell clan—were brutal atrocities where the winners of the battle killed all the losers and the women and children with them in the case of the Irish.
A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.
Nawal El Saadawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. Described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and "Egypt's most radical woman", she was the author of several books on the oppression of women in Islam, including the practice of female genital mutilation; She wrote and spoke to ban it. She also wrote and spoke to ban male circumcision.
