Making the rounds on YouTube these days is a
film of a group of manly looking women preparing for and conducting a
“flash dance” in a Philadelphia food store. The crew of ladies, dressed in
tight black clothes and sequined accessories, arrives at The Fresh Grocer
supermarket, breaks into a preplanned chant ordering shoppers not to buy
Sabra and Tribe hummus and telling them to oppose Israeli “apartheid” and
support “Palestine.”
From their attire and attitude, it is fairly
clear that the participants in the video would congratulate themselves on
their commitment to the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth suffering
under the jackboot of the powerful. They would likely all also describe
themselves as feminists.
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But if being a
human rights activist means attacking the only country in the Middle East
that defends human rights, then that means that at the very basic level,
the term “human rights activist” is at best an empty term. And if being a
feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women
enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism too, has become at best, a
meaningless term. Indeed, if these anti-Israel female protesters are
feminists, then feminism is dead.
IN 1995, then first lady Hillary
Clinton spoke at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. There
Clinton seemed to embrace the role of championing the rights of women and
human rights worldwide when she proclaimed, “It is no longer acceptable to
discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights…If there is one
message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human
rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and
for all.”
Yet as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton – like her
fellow self-described feminists – has chosen to single Israel out for
opprobrium while keeping nearly mum on the institutionalized, structural
oppression of women and girls throughout the Muslim world. In so acting,
Clinton is of course, loyally representing the views of the Obama
administration she serves. She is also representing the views of the
ideological Left in which Clinton, US President Barack Obama, the human
rights and feminist movements are all deeply rooted.
Since the
height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in
the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of
whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the
oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression
of women than leftist women are.
But at its most basic level, the
feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about
preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been
about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western
societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal
rights and protections as “structurally” discriminatory against women in
order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those
societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women,
to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s
rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do
with women.
So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a
deception.
The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is
nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed
feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women
who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then
prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad
movement.
Gloria Steinem and her sisters should be leading to call
for the overthrow of the antifemale mullocracy in Iran and the end of
gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia.
Instead, in 2008 Ms. Magazine,
which Steinem founded and which has served as the mouthpiece of the
American feminist movement, refused to run an ad featuring then foreign
minister Tzipi Livni, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and then
speaker of the Knesset Dalia Itzik that ran under the headline, “This is
Israel.”
It was too partisan, the magazine claimed.
Leading
feminist voices in the US and Europe remain unforgivably silent on the
unspeakable oppression of women and girls in Islamic societies. And this
cannot simply be attributed to a lack of interest in international
affairs. Islamic subjugation and oppression of women happens in Western
countries as well. Genital mutilation, forced marriage and other forms of
abuse are widespread.
For instance, every year hundreds of Muslim
women and girls in Western countries are brutally murdered by their male
relatives in so-called “honor killings.”
Pamela Geller, the
intrepid blogger at Atlas Shrugs website, has steadfastly documented every
case she has found. This year she ran an ad campaign on public buses and
taxis in major US cities to bring public awareness to their plight. And
for her singular efforts in championing the right to life of Muslim women
and girls, she has been reviled by the Left as an anti-Islamic
bigot.
Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to
flee Holland and live surrounded by bodyguards for the past six years
because she has made an issue of Islamic oppression of women and girls.
The Left – including the feminist movement – has treated this remarkable
former Muslim and champion of women’s rights as a leper.
IF ALL the
feminist community’s policy of ignoring Islamic oppression of women did
was keep it out of the headlines it would still be unforgivable. But the
fact is that by not speaking of the central challenge to women’s rights in
our times, the organized feminist movement, and the Left it is a part of,
are abetting Islam’s unspeakable crimes against women and girls. It does
so in two ways.
Tyranny unchallenged is tyranny abetted.
And the first way that the organized feminist movement
and the Left abet the oppression of women by Islamic authorities is
signaling to those authorities that they can get away with it. This truth
is laid bare by the responses of Islamic authorities in the rare cases
where their oppression of women has received Western attention.
For
instance, in 2006, an Iranian Islamic court found Sakineh
Mohammadi-Ashtiani guilty of adultery and sentenced the ethnic Azeri
kindergarten teacher and mother of two to death by stoning. She was later
also found guilty of murdering her husband.
Ashtiani’s confessions
in both cases were extracted under torture. She has already received 99
lashes for her reputed initial crime. Not a Farsi or Arabic speaker, when
her adultery trial ended, Ashtiani didn’t even know she was convicted or
what her sentence was.
In recent years, Ashtiani’s children
assisted by Iranian émigré and non-leftist human rights groups launched a
courageous campaign to save her life. Over the past year, the campaign was
covered in the Western media and garnered the support of notables such as
the French and Canadian prime ministers’ wives as well as international
film stars like Lindsay Lohan, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Robert Redford
and Juliette Binoche.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
got on board this past summer and decried her treatment. Clinton herself
gave a half sentence condemnation of Ashtiani’s persecution in August.
Indeed, the international attention focused on Ashtiani may have been the
reason the Obama administration belatedly voiced opposition to Iran’s
election to the new UN women’s rights council. Iran was elected by
acclamation in April, but later defeated by India when a roll call vote
was called.
Reeling from this criticism, Iranian authorities began
backtracking. First they claimed Ashtiani’s death sentence would be
cancelled.
Then they said she would be hanged rather than stoned.
Today her fate remains unclear and her life is still in grave
danger.
But if pressure on Iranian authorities keeps up, there is a
reasonable chance that Ashtiani’s long ordeal will end in life, rather
than death.
Ashtiani’s case is proof that when the West makes the
barbaric abuse of women an issue, the Islamic world attenuates its abuse
of women. Pressure works. In contrast, an absence of pressure empowers the
oppressors.
THE SECOND way that the feminists and the Left they are
a part of abet Islamic oppression of women is through their animosity
towards Israel. When the Shariahbesotted leaders of the Muslim world see
the Western Left devote its energies to attacking Israel – the only human
rights and women’s rights protecting country in the Middle East – they see
there is no reason for them to reconsider their willingness to tyrannize
their women and girls.
Take Indonesia for example. In 2003, then
Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri agreed that as part of a
ceasefire agreement, the separatist Aceh province was allowed to institute
Shariah law as the law of the province. In 2009, the Aceh parliament
passed a law making adultery punishable by stoning. On the central squares
of the province that is home to four million, people are routinely
publicly whipped for offenses against Islam.
Just last Friday, Anis
Saputra, 24, and Kiki Hanafilia, 17 each received eight lashes in a public
ceremony outside a local mosque for being caught kissing in October. The
two are reportedly married to other people and they apparently were given
lashes rather than stoned to death because they had yet to consummate
their alleged romance.
Last year the province also forbade women
and girls from wearing pants. A France 24 investigation of Shariah in Aceh
showed a traumatized 14-year-old girl who was beset by Islamic police on
her way home from school. They cut her jeans off in the middle of the
street.
Yet rather than criticize Indonesia for these appalling
developments, last month Obama visited Jakarta and waxed poetic about
Islamic tolerance of differences and applauded Indonesia for its
commitment to democracy.
And while ignoring Indonesia’s repressive
Shariah-ruled province where Islamic oppression is the rule not the
exception, Obama devoted his criticism to attacking Israel for allowing
Jews to build homes in Jerusalem.
There is no doubt that attitudes
that discriminate against women exist today in Western countries as well
as in Israel.
Women in the free world have unique challenges to
overcome because of our gender.
But a sense of proportion is
required here.
These challenges are not overwhelming, systemic or
in most cases life-threatening.
On the other hand, hundreds of
millions of women and girls throughout the Islamic world are terrorized
daily by everyone from their families to their judges. They have no reason
to believe that if challenged their rights – even their right to life –
will be protected.
The fact that the ladies in Philadelphia decided
to take their stand against Israel and that Clinton and Obama attack
Israel for building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria while
they all ignore the suffering of the women of Islam speaks volumes about
the degradation of the West under the Left’s social and political
leadership.
It also tells non-leftist women in the West that being
pro-women’s rights and being a feminist are increasingly mutually
exclusive.
caroline@carolineglick.com |