Lara Logan: Why was she attacked?

I’m not saying she was asking for it, said Miranda Devine in Australia’s Sunday Telegraph. But is anyone really surprised by what happened to Lara Logan in Egypt? The 39-year-old CBS war reporter was covering the jubilant scenes in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the Feb. 11 ouster of President Hosni Mubarak when she was stripped, punched, savagely pinched, and beaten with flagpoles by a gang of up to 200 men. Many of them, I presume, saw the blonde, glamorous Logan as the ultimate symbol of “the decadence of the West.” Mercifully, Logan survived her ordeal, said Peter Worthington in The Toronto Sun, but let’s be honest: A “blonde white woman” with two young children at home “had no business” walking through a mob of amped-up Middle Eastern men. “Plain and simple, she should not have been there.”

“Is this really 2011?” said Judith Timson in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The focus on Logan’s looks, for starters, is woefully misplaced. Any woman, whatever she looks like, can be sexually assaulted. In a Muslim country or anywhere else, “working while blonde” is not a crime. “Blaming the victim” is, said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. The responsibility for Logan’s attack rests squarely, and exclusively, with “the monsters that committed the crime.” But “unconscionable” pundits of every stripe want to “advance their own agenda” by implicating Logan in her own assault. “Idiotic” leftist academic Nir Rosen rightly lost his job for tweeting that Logan was trying “to outdo” CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who’d been beaten by a mob days earlier. And the “execrable” Debbie Schlussel, a right-wing blogger, wrote that it “warms my heart” to see the “Islamo-pandering” Logan “get a taste of how ‘peaceful’ Muslims and Islam really are.”

I worry about the fallout from Logan’s attack, said Kim Barker in The New York Times. Editors would be drawing “the wrong lesson” if they now hesitated to send female correspondents into dangerous situations. As Logan has shown throughout her career, women “can cover the fighting just as well as men,” and in many cases our gender can be an advantage. Not only can we sometimes gain access where our male colleagues can’t because we’re perceived as less threatening, but it’s also much easier for us to get interviews with local women, who often feel uncomfortable talking to male Western journalists. The dangers balance out, said Susan Milligan in USNews​.com. Obviously, as female reporters we stand a higher risk of being raped than our male counterparts do. But to be perfectly blunt about it, we are far “less likely to be targeted for murder.” What happened to Lara Logan was awful, but I’d rather end up like her than like Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by al Qaida in Pakistan in 2002.

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At least Logan is safe now, said Mary Rogers in CNN.com. For millions of women still in Egypt, the constant threat of sexual assault and harassment “has not gone away.” According to a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, 83 percent of Egyptian women and a staggering 98 percent of foreign women living in Egypt have been sexually harassed. Not only that, said Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post, but 62 percent of Egyptian men actually admit to sexual harassment. That culture has to change. Mubarak may be gone, but until women can walk the streets of Cairo “without being groped and subjected to catcalls,” Egypt has no claim to being a truly “free society.”

Logan wasn’t attacked for being a woman, said John Guardiano in The American Spectator online. She was attacked for being a journalist. Reporters on the ground in Tahrir Square say that as the regime grew desperate, gangs of thugs were sent to infiltrate the protesting crowds; Vice President Omar Suleiman even went on Egyptian state television to incite “violence against journalists, especially foreign journalists such as Logan.” We don’t know for sure who attacked her, but the evidence I’ve seen points to a gang of angry “pro-Mubarak barbarians masquerading as protesters,” rather than to ordinary Egyptian men celebrating their hard-won freedom. “Bad elements” can show up in any large group, said Lindsey Hilsum in the London Independent. The bigger issue is that repressive regimes make targets of journalists because they want “to deny the reality of mass protest.” Which is why now, more than ever, we reporters “need to be there—men and women both.”