I vehemently disagreed with her defence of the burqa as apparel that represents a woman's right to choose whatever she wishes to wear. I pointed out that not only does this humiliating, imprisoning, stifling sunlight-depriving tent represent male ownership and oppression of women, but that it deprives the wearer's unborn babies of vitamin D, and that if animals were made to peer at the world through a muslin grill there would be a general public outcry against cruelty involved.
Needless to say, most (not all) of the commenters on that social media thread, male and female alike, seemed to prefer her position to mine. (The unborn babies, I was reminded, have the benefit of vitamin D-added cow's milk in bottles.)
I write "needless to say" because the commenters are largely left-leaning and in some cases members of the so-called "Progressive" strand of Judaism, whose 21st-century male and female rabbis and zealots seem keen (riding roughshod over any dissension) to commit that strand to the espousal of every fashionable political cause under the sun, but who, when it's a choice between condemning Islamic misogyny and remaining shtum, will remain shtum or berate as "racist" those who do sprak out. But the "misogyny" of Orthodox Judaism, especially strictly Orthodox Judaosm? Fair game, of course.
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| Read all about this insanity HERE |
As I've pointed out before, the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia was set up originally to fight antisemitism. But like the ADL in the United States it has expanded its remit to fight all forms of racism and discrimination. And not only that. It's an avowed promoter of "diversity". Its logo proudly proclaims so.
As this splendid article by Nick Cohen in the UK Spectator puts it:
'People talk about their commitment to equality and diversity so readily they must assume there is no conflict between the two. The phrase falls off the tongue as if it were an all-in-one package, and people can ‘celebrate diversity’ and support equal rights without a smidgeon of self-doubt. Until, that is, they have to make a principled choice. Then, whether they admit it or not, they find that they can believe in equality or they can believe in diversity, but they cannot believe in both....' [Emphasis added.]
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| Read the outrageous facts HERE |
But what contradictory positions such an approach can lead to, one of the most obvious being, of course. the loggerheads course between denouncing Islamophobia and championing the rights of women.
As pointed out by Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator here, there are signs that, in recent atrocities against westerners, females have been singled out for slaughter:
'....The Islamists are deliberately targeting women because in their minds they represent empowerment and enlightenment, and also immodesty. Three young women were among the eight people stabbed to death during the London Bridge attack in June, and many more were wounded, including an Australian, who recalled her attacker screamed “Stop living this life” as he slashed at her throat.
In the hundred years since female emancipation began gaining momentum in the West, there have been significant reactions in the Islamic world. The first was the creation in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, its founder, Imam Hassan al-Banna, demanding an “Islamic renewal” faced with creeping Western influence. Al-Banna wasn’t a fan of the West, especially not Mae West, nor Jazz or bobbed haircuts, raging against the importation of “half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims.”
American feminist Professor Phyllis Chesler is a woman of wisdom and integrity, whose latest article deserves a wide readership. A feminist since the 1960s who deplores the double standards of today's "feminists", she has much to say on various aspects of the double standards syndrome and its consequences.One of the Brotherhood’s most influential figures in the post-war period was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who went to the USA on a year’s scholarship in 1949 and returned home radicalised. Another World War had imbued a fresh generation of young western women with confidence and Qutb was disgusted by the female students he encountered in Colorado. He wrote of attending a dance where “the room convulsed with the feverish music…dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips”.' (See also here)
Inter alia:
'Our original feminist vision was radical and transformative. We believed in universal human rights. We envisioned multicultural diversity but we were not multicultural relativists....
Like other American radical feminists, I was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements. Unlike other feminists, I had “once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.” This is the opening line of my book, An American Bride in Kabul. Quite unexpectedly, I lived in a polygamous household in very posh purdah—which meant I was not allowed out without a male escort. Quite surprisingly, my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children—facts my Westernized husband failed to mention during our long American college courtship.
When I was 20, I saw Afghan women stumbling around in burqas—sensory-deprivation isolation chambers, ambulatory body bags. These ghosts were forced to sit at the back of the bus. This was long before the Taliban arose. I remembered that sight even when I critiqued American sexism, racism, homophobia—and imperial overreach....
In the early to late 1970s, I delivered feminist speeches in Israel, began working with Israeli feminists; led a delegation of left-wing and feminist journalists to Israel; obtained signatures opposing the UN’s “Zionism=racism” resolution; co-organized a press conference and then a legendary conference about feminism and anti-Semitism and about women and Judaism; co-founded the first feminist Passover Seder which we held in my Manhattan apartment—and created Jewish-feminist life-cycle events. I also worked with Muslim dissidents and artists from Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran, Lebanon, etc. During this time, I published three more feminist books....
I can tell you that anti-Semitism—Jew-hatred—is not new among feminists. I first encountered it in the early 1970s among radical feminists and lesbians and ... immediately began exposing it.
However, a new and what I describe as a “faux feminism” has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism as the greatest danger to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason; an intersectional “faux feminism” that condemns only Western imperialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism, and religious and gender apartheid; a “faux feminism” that is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, minds, and genitalia world-wide–including those women who are being forcibly face-veiled, death-threatened, and honor killed in the disputed territories.
Read an interview with Phyllis Chesler HERE
Women’s studies associations, national feminist organizations—many feminist Jews—are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with FGM, forced face-veiling, honor-based violence, polygamy, child marriage, and honor killing in the West. Not only have faux feminists betrayed the Jews—in the name of anti-racism, they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu feminist dissidents, both in the developing world and in the West.
And that’s the tragedy—that so many Western feminists have become such conformists. They are no longer independent thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historic enslavement of black Africans, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, is exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including Jew-hating bomb makers and terrorists with blood on their hands.
Fundamentalists are trying to destroy what feminists have accomplished....
The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for Western values. It is a necessary part of true democracy. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the 21st century is joined.
.... Like many people, I had assumed that the world’s hatred of Jews had ended, that Jewish history would never again repeat itself. I was wrong. Those who still believe that Jewish history can never again repeat itself must dispense with that illusion. Jewish history has always repeated itself and may continue to do so until the coming of the Messiah.
One of the things that’s new about the “new” anti-Semitism is that it is coming to us both from the Islamic world and from the Western intelligentsia—and this time it’s global, and 24/7, via videos, the internet, cable vision, doctored footage, etc.
....In 2003, I published the first edition of The New Anti-Semitism. I wrote that anti-Zionism is the new-Anti-Semitism—and I held the Western intelligentsia responsible for their alliance with Islamic-style Jew-hatred. My Berkeley-based editor fought with me about this. Back in 2003, what I was saying was considered heresy. It still is.....'Read Professor Chesler's entire article here
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