"These pictures are not acts of obscenity. Quite to the contrary: these are gestures of innocence incarnate. Obscenity is the exposure of human body and soul in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, Guantanamo Bay, the dungeons of Isareli prison cells, all the way to Kahrizak and other subterranean cells of the Islamic Republic. That is obscenity, not these innocent children baring their soul in protest. Obscene is the shape of the world that we, as parents, have handed to our children. Obscenity is the degeneration of civil society and common civility to detention camps in the US and barefacedly robbing people of their most basic civil liberties in the Islamic Republic - and as the two belligerent states pose to fight each other, they rob their respective citizens even more of their civil liberties. That’s the obscenity."

— Hamid Dabashi, in an opinion piece titled, “La vita nuda: Baring bodies, bearing witness”.