Recently, on social media, I was engaged in a rather heated, albeit polite, discussion regarding the wearing of the burqa and whether it has any place in western society. The topic of a burqa ban (and how racist such a ban's proponents are) had been raised by a staunch feminist who's been president of a non-Orthodox Jewish congregation, is a women's rights crusader and a supporter of the leftist cause generally, including the whole anti-"Islamophobia"
shtik.
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.
It's
a lamentable characteristic of left-liberals that in "promoting
diversity", non-western cultural norms are tolerated, even when they run
counter to liberal values and women's rights. (Just look at the ultra-crazy path paved in
whacko Sweden!)
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.]
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.
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.”
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)
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.
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.
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
