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May 16, 2007
The Subjection Of Islamic Women And The Fecklessness Of American Feminism
Topics: Dhimmitude
One would think women in the West, and especially feminists, would recognize by now that the condition of Muslim women may be, as Christina Hoff Summers describes it, "the most pressing women's issue of our age"; but for most feminists, this clearly isn't the case. I'm not aware of a single word having been heard from the feminists on this issue. The feminists have no problem criticizing America, marriage and family, and Christianity; so why not the brutalities in the Islamist world against women?
Christina Hoff Summers addresses this question in the Weekly Standard (hat tip - 3 Quarks Daily:
One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.Continue reading here ...If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.
It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women's groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women's issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not? The feminists have no problem attacking
The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is--by tendency and sometimes emphatically--antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.
... Too many fashionable gender theorists, ... have lost their dedication to the public good. Their "hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil."
... One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the "underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.
Posted by Richard at May 16, 2007 8:38 PM
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