G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
There was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting.
There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case.
It became clear that it wasn't facts, but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case.
(Lapresse / AP Photo)
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior.
A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with.
Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it.
Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was 'mistaken' and she didn't have AIDS.
Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine "pieta."
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity.
She was "dirty on the inside."
Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge.
Tabloid reporters from Britain concentrated on the few instances where she appeared to have sex on her mind — when she wrote about the fan letters Italian men sent her in jail, for example. They ignored pages she filled with details about being sexually harassed by a prison guard.
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun.
But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind.
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers.
The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and whores.
IMO, if the Italian courts decide to retry her, the American government should refuse to allow the Italians to extradite her.
Fuck the Italians and the America-hating Brits.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burleigh-knox-20111004,0,2921659.story
There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case.
It became clear that it wasn't facts, but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case.
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior.
A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with.
Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it.
Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was 'mistaken' and she didn't have AIDS.
Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine "pieta."
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity.
She was "dirty on the inside."
Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge.
Tabloid reporters from Britain concentrated on the few instances where she appeared to have sex on her mind — when she wrote about the fan letters Italian men sent her in jail, for example. They ignored pages she filled with details about being sexually harassed by a prison guard.
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun.
But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind.
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers.
The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and whores.
IMO, if the Italian courts decide to retry her, the American government should refuse to allow the Italians to extradite her.
Fuck the Italians and the America-hating Brits.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burleigh-knox-20111004,0,2921659.story
