Dangerous insanity

Do read this article by Phyllis Chesler. She may be going over the top in her fear for Israel and Jews in general but, equally, she may not be. As it happens, I think Obama's call for those 1967 borders is not going to be supported by a sufficient number of countries. Indeed, it has already been expunged through Canadian efforts from the G8 statement. I should like to think that our own government lined up on the right side in this matter but, I fear, that as ever, the Boy-King is bending with what he thinks is the prevailing wind (to quote Captain Renault). I would accept the argument that the Prime Minister of this country should not be seen to be a Patron of any charity that might be construed as being political (though I would like to see a list of those he is linked to) if he had also announced that no more taxpayers' money was going to Hamas. Let them find their own money to spend in those brand new shopping malls.

Whether her fears are fully justified or not (after all, the intent to kill all Jews and, presumably, other Israelis is there) the notion of "Queers for Palestine" is so monstrous as to defy description. Quite apart from Jews (and many of those Queers are probably Jewish), do these people not care what happens to people like them in Palestine and other Islamic Arab states?

More from Phyllis Chesler

This piece is well worth reading though as it describes the non-sensational struggle of somebody who tries to speak the truth about the position of women in Islam. Of course, she also has to fight genuinely misguided and unimaginative "liberals" and "libertarians".

True, as I suspected, I had to share the time with a burqa-wearing woman (who remained unnamed) and with a pro-hijab ex-parliamentarian from Turkey. She kept insisting on the right to wear hijab (the headscarf) and I kept repeating that the French ban on the burqa (the face-veil) in public concerns only the face veil not the headscarf and that I do not oppose the headscarf. Nevertheless, the Turk turned out to be something of a closet Islamist and a believer in the false concept of “Orientalism,” which concept she wielded as a club meant to shame me into silence. It did not work. I referred her to the work of Ibn Warraq which has utterly demolished Said’s claims, and I talked about Islam’s long history of racism, imperialism, colonialism, white slavery, black slavery, and apartheid. Reasonably, I pointed out that the West is not the only culture which has engaged in extremely bad behavior and that Muslim-majority countries may have actually surpassed us.

“Why don’t you busy yourself in criticizing how badly the West treats women before you start criticizing a culture you know nothing about.”

Ah, dear lady: For more than 40 years, I have specialized in criticizing discrimination against women worldwide and have challenged much else under the sun. What I refuse to do is to limit myself to Western culture only. In fact, I said, “the new colonialism consists of westerners abandoning the concept of universal human rights. It’s a way of saying: ‘Let them (Muslim women, Muslim homosexuals, Muslim free thinkers and Muslim truth-tellers) eat their barbarian cake.’ They are not worthy of any universal human rights.”

She then proceeded to lecture me about how women are treated as sex objects in the West. I pointed out that face-veiling women in Muslim-majority countries does not prevent those very same women from being routinely battered, raped, force-married, and honor murdered; that sexual slavery and prostitution are very much alive and flourishing in Muslim-majority countries; and that the “good girl bad girl” dichotomy that veiling creates justifies an even more open aggression against naked-faced women. I conceded:

“Half-naked Western women, unwed teenage pregnancies in the West (a point she raised) are far from ideal—but is the solution to throw a garbage bag over a woman’s head or to keep her entirely hidden at home?”

As I said, read the whole piece.

Phyllis Chesler on the irony of those protests

Women are fighting in the streets of Paris. Alas, they are not fighting against Islamic gender apartheid—they are not protesting arranged marriage or honor killings. Instead, they are fighting for the right to veil their faces. On April 11th, two veiled women were arrested for participating in an illegal demonstration about this issue. Sixty-one people were arrested for the same reason this past weekend. It is the 21st century, and people are protesting the French government’s ban against the niqab and burqa (full-face veil) which just went into effect.
Vive La France!

It is important to note that France has not banned the headscarf (hijab) and that the French ban is not specific to Islam. The French law is ethnicity- and religion-neutral and refers only to a generic “face-covering.” In 2004, France became the first European country to legally restrict all religious clothing in public schools: veils, visible Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps, and hijab were forbidden in public schools.

What does this ban mean for the West?

The burqa is not a friendly garment. Surely, wearing a headscarf and dressing modestly would constitute a far friendlier face of Islam in the West. And, a more egalitarian face as well. Muslim men, both religious and secular, wear modern, Western clothing. Why do Muslim women alone have to bear the burden of representing 7th century Islam? Why is Paris, of all places, looking more and more like Mecca, Teheran, or Kabul? Hasn’t just such “multi-culturalism” been pronounced a failure by many European leaders?

Read the whole piece. Well worth it.

After International Women's Day

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women's Day and it is, therefore, pertinent to ask why stories of young girls being sold into marriage "in our own backyard" as Phyllis Chesler says, should be of so little interest to the media and the various feminist organizations.

Each to their own

Phyllis Chesler describes an encounter:

I recently spoke at length about Islamic gender and religious apartheid in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. This was, perhaps, the first time that anyone had ever focused on this subject at this distinguished Ivy League university.

I described both the level of poverty and illiteracy in the Arab and Muslim world and the absence of a free press, independent judiciary, human rights, and of the increasingly savage persecution of women, infidels, dissidents and homosexuals; about the prisons teeming with thousands of Muslim political prisoners who had been kidnapped and were now being tortured for “thought crimes.”

I described a culture in which women were arrested, whipped, gang-raped, and then either hung or stoned to death for alleging rape or for daring to leave dangerously abusive husbands; a culture that has spawned death-eating terrorists who have exposed Muslim and Arab civilians to permanent, bloody danger; and about how these cunning, brazen jihadists have now expanded their global reach and unleashed their bombs and suicide killers against the entire world.

I argued that, in effect, the demonization of Israel by the media, by governments, international bodies, human rights organizations, and university professors allowed the world to self-righteously bypass, minimize, avoid, utterly disappear Muslim-on-Muslim and Muslim-on-infidel tyranny and torture. Scapegoating Israel is what focuses attention away from the larger suffering in the Middle East and in the Muslim world in general.

And then a young, well-spoken, earnest, curly-headed college student asked this question: “You are talking about diverting attention away from the real issues, right? But, if we focus on the absence of freedom or the absence of women’s rights in the Middle East won’t that divert our attention away from the Settlement issue?”

One can, of course, argue about those Settlements but it is perplexing that a reasonably intelligent (one assumes) and well-meaning young man should consider the issue to be more important that the absence of freedom and the absence of women's rights in the Middle East. Yet he is not alone either in not ever bothering to hear that side of the story or in dismissing it as soon as he has heard it. I can only suppose that deep in his heart this young man (and many others like him) do not think such matters are of any importance when it applies to Arabs or Iranians (who, as it happens, do not mind being called Persians). Because they are not like us, see?

Canada stands up for the rights of ALL women

The admirable Phyllis Chesler reports that the Canadian government has changed the rules whereby citizenship is granted to immigrants.

The document is titled “The Rights and Responsibilities of Canadian Citizenship.” According to Canada’s National Post,

“In Canada, men and women are equal under the law,” the document says. “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation or other gender-based violence. Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada’s criminal laws.”

And about time, too, you might say and I have to agree.

In the past I have contended that there was no need for special legislation to make honour killing or forced marriage illegal. After all, murder is murder and forced marriage (not arranged marriage, which is a different kettle of fish) involves kidnap, unlawful imprisonment, grievous bodily harm and rape. Why not simply try the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them?

Sadly, this has not worked in Western countries. Ms Chesler praises Britain for slowly beginning to act on these matters but the truth is that until recently hardly anybody was prosecuted for "honour killings", otherwise known as murder of young women; that nobody has been prosecuted for genital mutilation though it is known to be carried out; that forced marriages occur all the time and women who escape from them are handed over by the police to advisers from "their own community", which results in the unfortunate victim being taken back to the abusive family.

It is almost as if giving well-known crimes culture-specific crimes our society washed its hands of the victims and of any concept of law and order. If that is so, we need to name those crimes quite specifically. If those guilty of "honour killing" are not to be tried for brutal murder then we must make "honour killing" a separate crime. We must make forced marriage a separate crime if we cannot put those who kidnap, imprison, maltreat and rape young women (and sometimes young men) in the dock.

As Ms Chesler points out, an old case was recently reopened in Britain with the mother of the victim, astonishingly, giving evidence against her husband. A growing number of girls and young women as well as the occasional young man, run away from forced marriages even when these happen during a "holiday" in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and successfully claim assistance from officials and dedicated organizations.

For all of that, I approve the Canadian government's attitude. It needs to be stated quite clearly that what applies to some, applies to all and Muslim women (it is usually Muslim though there is the odd case of Sikh and Hindu "honour killing") have all the rights that others possess.

When we have sorted that out we must turn our attention to those girls' and women's education.

This is what I want to be

The redoubtable Phyllis Chesler has a column on Pajamas Media, entitled "Feminist Hawks Unite!" Sounds good, I thought and read it.

The name came from the New York Times that has suddenly discovered that there are feminists out there who feel strongly about the way women are treated in the world of Islam. Well, they sort of discovered it as they appear not to have realized that one of the most outspoken feminists on the issue is Ms Chesler herself.

So here’s what puzzled me. In their infinite wisdom, The Paper of Record decided that there is only one “feminist hawk” in the entire universe and his name is…David Horowitz of Frontpage magazine. Actually, this is a giant step forward. Usually Horowitz is demonized as a Traitor who left Ramparts (both the magazine he edited and the faux-fighting American left which it represented) in the dust and became a born-again, fire-breathing conservative.

Here, he is credited not only for publishing the work of “feminist hawks” but for being the only “feminist hawk” they could find to name. The article gets even more peculiar when it presumes to tell us that the “feminist hawk” phenomenon is mainly a “hybrid” invention of the “internet,” one that has “borrowed left-wing shibolleths as one way that conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere.”

Well, you can see the argument: if we dismiss the whole movement by pretending that only very few people, male or female, are part of it and these are all either nasty conservatives or traitors to the left-wing cause, we can pretend that this is all a quaing distraction from the all-important issue of Obama-worship.

Ms Chesler, understandably, will have none of it and, to be fair to him, neither will David Horowitz, who thinks she should adopt and proudly use the name. Here is what Ms Chesler says on the subject:

Among the writers concerned with women’s rights are: Frontpage editor, Jamie Glazov; Anat Berko; Tammy Bruce (who was once the President of Los Angeles NOW); Nonie Darwish; Brigitte Gabriel; Professor Donna Hughes; Nancy L. Kobrin; Robert Spencer, Wafa Sultan; and countless others. I will be adding more names to this list.

I know, I know: Many of the above writers are conservatives, not liberals. Some are new-comers, others not. But, they are all, myself included, “hawkish” on the subject of the war against women and a) will not engage in cultural relativism to avoid being called “racists” or “Islamophobes;” b) will not be held hostage to one of two political parties; c) will not sacrifice Israel, America, the West, Muslim democrats/dissidents–or the truth–in order to remain politically correct and aligned to social, political, and funding networks.

OK, so why won't the New York Times list these authors and, in particular, why will it not give Ms Chesler her due?

How, dear reader, did I ever fall afoul of the New York Times? What daring deeds did I commit that has led to my almost utter “disappearance” in their pages? That is a long story, meant for another day. Hint: Try exposing sexism among feminist leaders, then expose anti-Semitism both among western intellectuals and jihadists, and top all that by exposing an utter failure of principle and nerve among western progressives in terms of human rights in the Islamic world–and see where that lands you on the left-liberal radar.

I admit it: I did all that in my last three books: Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, (2002) The New Anti-Semitism, (2003) and The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom. (2005).

I regret nothing.

I actually do not care whether the NYT, which knows nothing about my existence, ever mentions me or not, though in Ms Chesler's position I probably would. But I agree with all the above, adding only that it is hard to imagine anything uglier than the vicious misogynistic attacks the left-wing, so-called third-wave feminists directed at Sarah Palin. (Sticks and stones - the lady is doing fine.)

Anyway, my point is this: I want to be a Feminist Hawk. In fact, I am going to be a Feminist Hawk, the first Feminist Hawk (after Margaret Thatcher) in Britain. Right, that's decided then.