Supping With The Devil: The shame of today's synthetic Sisterhood

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.

Read all about this insanity HERE

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.]

Read the outrageous facts 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.

 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.

Read an interview with Phyllis Chesler HERE

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

"Islamophobia" & The Not So Mighty Pens

Professor Phyllis Chesler has written an incisive piece regarding a number of writers and intellectuals who oppose tomorrow's PEN award to  the survivors of the carnage at the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

She writes, inter alia, 

'....[O]ne hundred and forty five authors have decided to shame PEN—publicly, and at the last minute—in order to make an “anti-Islamophobic” political statement which renders every critic of Islamic gender and religious apartheid, and every critic of Islamic terrorism, that much more vulnerable....

[Distinguished American Jewish n]ovelist Francine Prose, has written in The Guardian:

The ‘narrative’ of the Charlie Hebdo murders—white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists—is one that feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East. The First Amendment guarantees the right of the Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois but we don’t give them an award.

But she is wrong about Charlie Hebdo’s alleged “Islamophobia.” According to two French sociologists, a review of “523 covers of Hebdo over 10 years found that 485 dealt with politics, economics and so forth. A total of 38 involved religion; of those, Christianity was the exclusive subject of 21, and Islam of seven.” ....

Some of these distinguished signatories include the biographer of a Jewish-American woman who converted to Islam and who became the leading propagandist in Pakistan for radical Islam ....

Those who may be greatly talented are not spared the most vulgar prejudices of the day. Their foolish protest is a betrayal of the very civilization that has allowed them to flourish.'

Read the entire piece here

Meanwhile, more Islamic antisemitism, this time from an Egyptian imam comparing Jews to a "malignant tumour" which must be rooted out:

"A Woman Is A Thing You Keep At Home"

The article to which, with a characteristic dig at the United States' Middle East policy, the anti-Israel vicar of Virginia Water (seemingly an inveterate apologist for Islam, like his equally anti-Israel followers) links, is by Dr Faheem Younus, a physician who is the Baltimore president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and a senior fellow at the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics at the University of Baltimore.

Dr Younus writes, inter alia, regarding the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by the misogynistic barbarians calling themselves Boko Haram:

'.... It’s not Islam but savage bearded men who are scared of little girls. Inserting “Islam” into the equation is a distraction; it augments the agenda of Boko Haram, who are craving religious legitimacy. Deny them that.

I am a father of two girls. What anguish the parents of over 200 abducted girls must be experiencing is beyond me. I cannot comprehend why the world is not acting swiftly to unite 276 innocent girls with their families, or why a “coalition of the willing” is not removing the localized tumor of Boko Haram before it metastasizes into a pan-African cancer.

What I do comprehend, however, is the common thread of ignorance and hatred between Boko Haram and Islamophobes. Both know zilch about the true Islamic teachings; their ignorance is directly proportional to the number of words they utter. Both hold blanket hatred for the other: Boko Haram hates all Western ideas (hence their name, which translates roughly to “Western education is a sin”), and Islamophobes like Pat Robertson compare Islam to Nazism. And both resort to a “buy one, get one” sales strategy: Buy into this narrative of ignorance or hatred and you get to use or bash Islam – depending upon your location – for free....

 .... When my daughter returned from school today, she described how one of her Jewish classmates lamented the obvious practice of specifying the "Muslimness" of an extremist act in the headlines. See how apparent it has become?

So end this sensationalism, please. Let's bring the filthy thugs of Boko Haram to justice, yesterday. And let's stop elevating their status by linking them to Islam in our headlines from tomorrow.'

On the BBC's "Dateline London" program, Al Beeb's old mate and frequent panellist Abdel Bari Atwan (notorious, though not, of course, among the Beeboids, for declaring that if Iranian missiles hit Israel he'd dance for joy in Trafalgar Square), insisted that Boko Haram are not genuine Muslims, a line of argument pursued by CAIR and other Islamist-apologist groups, who fail to face up to the fact that (while not all Muslims are terrorists) most terrorists in the world today are Muslims.  Anyone who points out, as does the American satirist and political commentator Bill Maher in the following video, this "elephant  in the room", is promptly labelled a racist and an "Islamophobe".

Israeli blogger Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was killed in Jerusalem at the age of fifteen, one of the victims of an atrocity carried out by a female suicide bomber (who now walks free),  wrote of Michelle Obama's televised condemnation yesterday of the abduction:

'From the official text of her speech, it's hard not to notice that she uses the word "terrorist" three times in describing the Islamists of Boko Haram who have openly taken credit for the kidnappings.

But not once does she use the words Boko Haram or Islam or Islamist.

There's a flip-side to this. Although Michelle Obama herself (or her speech-writers, if one were to be coldly pedantic about this) calls them terrorists, the ever-delicate – and hugely influential – BBC does not use the word even once in its coverage of her speech. ... Oddly, they have no problem inserting Boko Haram and Islamist into their report, though Mrs Obama's speech does not mention either term. She does call them terrorists, but to the oh-so-doctrinaire BBC, they're militants.

As for Mrs Obama's perfectly justifiable outrage at grown men "determined to keep these girls from getting an education", we wonder if she is aware of the other unconscionable atrocities for which this group has taken responsibility.... 

Clearly – though Mrs Obama's appeal today gives zero hint of it – there are some powerful religious forces at work in the unfolding Nigerian tragedy which no amount of reportorial spin or speech-writing acrobatics can fully hide. That however doesn't stop them trying....

Excising the Islamist dimension from their understanding of what is happening dooms some of the most influential people in our societies to continue seriously misapprehending the goals of Hamas, of Boko Haram and of the rising tide of terrorism-addicted savages with Islamist passion in their hearts. Ultimately, we all pay a price for this, and it's unconscionably heavy.' [Emphasis added]

So, if free and forceful discussion of the issue is ever to be properly vented,  it must be pointed to those who attempt to silence criticism with the "Islamophobe" label out that there are Muslims who have acknowledged the presence of the elephant in the room, notably Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, who wrote in 2004:

"Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.

What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence…

Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims… We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims. We have to realize that we cannot correct the condition of our youth who carry out these disgraceful operations until we have treated the minds of our sheikhs who have turned themselves into pulpit revolutionaries who send the children of others to fight while they send their own children to European schools."

(Hat tip: HW)

Nor must the grotesque misogyny inherent in Islam and so much of Islamic society be downplayed.  (Australian television viewers glimpsed that misogyny, raw and ruthless, this evening in a refreshingly candid-about-the-matter documentary on the ABC's Four Corners program regarding the endemic sexual abuse of young children in Pakistan: one serial rapist of little boys, who like others in the transport industry regularly sodomises homeless boys as young as eight at the Peshawar bus station, explained contemptuously that "a woman is a thing you keep at home", and the studio anchor stressed that, although the documentary focused on the rape of little boys, little girls are also victims, particularly in their homes.)

Especially compelling are the words of Professor Phyllis Chesler:

'The world media calls this a “kidnapping” in Nigeria. It is not a “kidnapping.” It is the face of Jihad, the way of Jihad. Boko Haram are not holding these girls for ransom, they are not willing to return them for money. They already view the girls as their God-given booty, and as sale-able property.

The girls are between the ages of twelve and fifteen. The Christian girls will be raped, converted to Islam, and then, like the Muslims girls, “married” to one of their captors. Some will be trafficked into the sex trade, which is pandemic throughout Africa and the Muslim Middle East. Sharia law allows men to purchase the sexual favors of a female child or a young woman for one hour, a week, or a month. Private and public brothels exist as well.

Please understand: Boko Haram are the Nigerian Taliban. Like their Pakistani and Afghan counterparts, they oppose education for girls and would rather marry and impregnate them instead--for Allah’s sake.

This behavior is absolutely par for the course in Islamic history. Anyone who is surprised or shocked by this latest outrage in Nigeria simply does not know the facts.

Boko Haram’s behavior is typical of any armed Muslim force beginning in Mohammed’s time. The Prophet’s warriors went on raids and systematically massacred the Jewish tribes in Arabia. The men who refused to convert were beheaded – and then the Prophet divided the women, children, houses, and chattels among the Muslims. The women were forcibly converted and kept as “wives” or slaves.

Thereafter, Muslim warriors in search of power, land, and gold, did much the same thing.

Contrary to the politically correct intelligentsia, who focus only on Western sins, Islam also has a long and ongoing history of imperialism, colonialism, conversion by the sword, sex slavery, (of both boys and girls), polygamy, sex trafficking, and the brutal subordination and cyclical massacres of religious minorities. 

Westerners either do not know this, do not want to know this, don’t care all that much, or misunderstand this.

Some, including journalists, still believe that Boko Haram and other such groups are crying out against injustice and poverty, against government corruption and ineptitude--all of which exist.

But that is not Boko Haram’s major concern. They want to assert an Islamic state in Nigeria, similar to that which exists in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and now, Brunei. These Muslim extremists, both Sunni and Shiia, want Sharia law to dominate public and private life. This means that the state will have the power to stone people to death for adultery and apostasy, to amputate for theft, to lash and jail for “blasphemy,” to tax and hold hostage, jail, murder, or exile infidels.

Oh, yes – male polygamy will be legal, marriage will be forced, women will be veiled, normatively beaten and raped without recourse, honor killed for the slightest perceived disobedience. Women are breeders and housekeepers – an education would ruin them....' [Emphasis added]

 And as Ayaan Hirsi Ali observes:

'The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists' mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls' education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as "Islamophobes" than to stand up for women's most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers?....

Organizations like Boko Haram do not arise in isolation. The men who establish Islamist groups, whether in Africa (Nigeria, Somalia, Mali), Southwest Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), or even Europe (U.K., Spain and the Netherlands), are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities....'

She warns:

"I am often told that the average Muslim wholeheartedly rejects the use of violence and terror, does not share the radicals' belief that a degenerate and corrupt Western culture needs to be replaced with an Islamic one, and abhors the denigration of women's most basic rights. Well, it is time for those peace-loving Muslims to do more, much more, to resist those in their midst who engage in this type of proselytizing before they proceed to the phase of holy war.

It is also time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy; their fate reflects a new wave of jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the rights of women and girls. If my pointing this out offends some people more than the odious acts of Boko Haram, then so be it." [Emphasis added]

See also BBC Watch here and Mark Steyn here

Meanwhile, a video released by Boko Haram shows that the girls appear to have been forced to convert to Islam: