I wish I had a nickel for all the times I've said, "Where are the feminists?," but here's one. "Deborah Orr: It's all very well to be sensitive to Islam, but we cannot ignore the suffering of women," from The Independent (thanks to all who sent this in):
[...] There may no longer be much in the way of ideological enthusiasm for what can be described as multiculturalism. But in practice it gathers pace anyway, and there remains an unwillingness to take even a normative stance against it. Tony Blair may have declared that he considered the veil to be "a sign of separation". But there is little sign of any appetite for issuing any formal guidance that might suggest that such dress is not in keeping with the values and aspirations of modern British life. Anyway, as it was learned then, the venting of any disgruntlement over strict Islamic practice in Britain tends to give courage to those who prefer to vent their disapproval personally, and with little regard themselves for that beloved "rule of law".In a report for the now-defunct Equal Opportunities Commission in 2005, into some pilot projects investigating the practicalities of enforcing the public sector gender duty, it was noted that the rights of Muslim women might "be termed a high-awareness, low-action area". Never a more true word was said. The Independent on Sunday reported this weekend that the police estimate that there may be as many as 17,000 acts of violence perpetrated in the name of "honour" against Muslim women each year. Yet, for all its supposed commitment to the rights of women, the Government shied away from framing legislation designed to tackle so-called "honour" violence, even though the mainstream of Muslim opinion seeks to distance itself from such barbarism.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is headed by Trevor Phillips, who has sagely warned that if Britain does not get a grip on issues like these, we will continue "sleepwalking towards separation". But this week, when I requested information from the commission about the work it is doing or has done on the interplay between gender inequality and adherence to Islam in Britain, all that was available was an old report by the Commission for Equal Opportunities into the level of discrimination that Muslim women faced in the workplace. I was advised by a press officer that "we probably don't have enough of an evidence base to talk about this" and was referred to a global organisation called Women Living Under Muslim Law. Quite a different matter.
Meanwhile, a group called Empowering Muslim Women, under the auspices of the University of Oxford, was awarded a £3.75m grant by the Government in 2006 to run a five-year research project into systematic and sanctioned discrimination against women by political Islam. There is nothing to disagree with in this project, save to note that it is concerned only with Muslim women abroad "in indigenous contexts". It is clear that the same theological and cultural trap applies to women living here "under the rule of law" as well....
Indeed.
"It's all very well to be sensitive to Islam"
Why?
"But we cannot ignore the suffering of women"
No, we cant not, but why be sensitive to the "religion" that causes the suffering of women?
I agree - no, nobody has to be "sensitive" to Islam. In fact, Islam is evil, a hoax and a fraud, and it's "holy" book tells it's followers to kill everyone not Islamic if they don't convert. Islam commands "open-ended warfare," i.e. an eternal command. Islam needs to be repudiated 100%.
Darcy,
We are coming to that crossroad very soon.
The great thing about living in Western Societies is the freedom of choice and the exercise of free will.
The tragedy of being a Muslim women is that the religion denies her that choice and in its fundamental structure threatens her life if she fails to abide by its tenants under sharia law.
Can the British offer up much protection? actually there have been many safe houses established to protect Muslim women who choose to escape from sharia, but families seek them out and threaten their lives if they do not comply. Honor killings are more prevalent than we actually see in the media.
Here is one disgusting, horrific and descriptive example of a honor killing of a young woman.
http://www.forgetfoo.com/?blogid=8260
Darcy,
We are coming to that crossroad very soon.
Posted by: Elric66 at February 13, 2008 9:45 AM
Elric, let me tell you about something that happened the other night. My husband was using my SUV (a medium-sized one - not a behemoth!), upon which a sticker I ordered from this venerable site, JW, resides on the back, to wit: "Defeat JIHAD/JihadWatch.org." Well, on the interstate he became conscious of a few cars slowing down behind him, and he felt they were taking down the license plate number.
Well, it scared me a bit because I imagined these slowing-down folks could be Mohammedans. My address can be obtained from my license plate # if people know how to do that, which I'm sure many do. So, since I don't have the slightest doubt that an enraged Mohammedan is perfectly capable of committing violence against us in the name of his murder-god, allah, I did get a little nervous. That was a few nights ago, on the interstate.
Anyway, nothing's happened and the sticker remains.
Good for her! Maybe now someone will start looking into the lives of oppressed British women, instead of letting Patriarchy be excused on the grounds of diversity.
Darcy and Elric66 - We are coming to that crossroads, though it might not be very soon.
I think that this article provides further evidence that if we continue to base our position on respect for basic human rights, and be crystal clear in our presentation that that is indeed the motivation, yes we'll shut out patriarchy-oriented conservatives like Dinesh D'Souza, but we stand to gain a lot of moderates (I'm one) and progressives, on this common ground.
The care with which Spencer especially puts the issues into words is superb and I hope more anti-jihad people will examine that and think about why he says things the way he does.
As for pro-patriarchy, pro-"voting makes it right" conservatives - I'm sorry but for all that I think people should make moral personal choices in the conservative sense, a power structure that permits and even encourages the murder of 17,000 women a year for the "crime" of making personal decisions the men in their lives don't like is NOT legit, no matter if it is claimed on the basis of religion, or desired by a majority of a commuity, or what.
Murder is murder and it is wrong, and a social structure which systematically encourages it (by not punishing it, for example) is wrong as well.
You can't make murder -- or willfuly letting murders get away with their crimes -- right by wishing it were so, even if the wishing is done with votes, or claims about religion! Whatever happened to *conservatives* being the people who stood by objective moral standards and individual rights???
Darcy,
That is quite scary. These people get enraged over the slightest thing. Of course it could of just been someone wanting to read what it said. You never can tell though. Just be careful and I admire your courage to stand for what you believe no matter the threat. The West could learn a lot form you.
Maybe I should get a Geert Wilder '08 bumper sticker. LOL
BTW is your bumber sticker a magnet or a sticky type. I wouldnt mind getting a magent one.
Darcy, good for you about the bumper sticker, but be careful. Your family is armed and trained in firearms use, I hope?
What I've heard is, they can make it look like it was just a robbery. Anyone who questions the small details that just don't add up is dismissed as an Islamophobe.
There's a lot of underground organization and money involved in the jihad.
Whoops to correct the stat - I meant the murder of many of the women victim to the 17,000 acts of violence a year.
Darcy,
That is quite scary. These people get enraged over the slightest thing. Of course it could of just been someone wanting to read what it said. You never can tell though. Just be careful and I admire your courage to stand for what you believe no matter the threat. The West could learn a lot form you.
Maybe I should get a Geert Wilder '08 bumper sticker. LOL
BTW is your bumber sticker a magnet or a sticky type. I wouldnt mind getting a magent one.
Posted by: Elric66 at February 13, 2008 10:18 AM
I appreciate your words very much, Elric. No, we don't know exactly what was going on with the slowing-down folks, and I wasn't in the vehicle. It's my husband's *impression* about the license plate theory. I got over my initial nervousness and, as I said, the sticker remains. Oh, the sticker is of "sticky" type. You can order them on the link above the photo of Beloved Oriana on JW.
Darcy,
Well darcy, if you wont stand for free speech, who will?
Just be careful. SJS is rampant
Also from the Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-rowan-williams-has-shown-us-one-thing-ndash-why-multiculturalism-must-be-abandoned-780710.html
"Yet many people feel instinctively uncomfortable when we talk about ditching multiculturalism – for a good reason. The only alternative they are aware of is the old whiter-than-white monoculturalism. This view, voiced most clearly by Enoch Powell and Norman Tebbit, believes that if people are going to live together, they need to look and feel similar, and have a tightly prescribed shared identity. They argue that the number of newcomers should be small, and need to be pressured to assimilate to the 1950s norm of a suburban white family, fast.
"Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: "By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it."
"When people talk about defending Muslim culture, ask them – which culture? The culture of Irum and Nasireen, or the culture of their abusive husbands? Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us. Would anybody lump me in with Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin as part of a "white community"?
"There is a better way for the state to understand and regulate human differences, beyond the old oppositions of Tebbittry and multiculturalism. It is called liberalism. A liberal society allows an individual to do whatever he or she wants, provided it doesn't harm other people. You can choose to wear PVC hotpants or a veil. You can choose to spend all day praying, or all day mocking people who pray.
"Where a multiculturalist prizes the rights of religious groups, a liberal favours the rights of the individual. So if you want to preach that the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of God to an illiterate nomad two millennia ago, you can do it as much as you like. You can write books and hold rallies and make your case. What you cannot do is argue that since this angel supposedly said women are worth half of a man when it comes to inheritance, and that gay people should be killed, you can ditch the rules of liberalism and act on it.
"The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote "difference" for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people."
The problem with that is that the author doesn't get that conservatives are actually more interested in assimilation, not to make little perfect suburban clones, but because they fear that without limiting immigration, getting newcomers to assimilate to a *liberal* society is almost impossible. And then you'll just get more honor crimes, death threats against artists and authors, and so on - so many that free speech, and other core liberal values, will be in real danger.
But other than that, she's right on.
It would be interesting to get a response from a psychologist to find out the underlying reasons that the hard-core feminists have remained silent on this issue. The feminists should be championing the rights of Islamic women. They are not. Why? Is it because their leftist-socialist agenda trumps the feminist agenda? Or is it because the feminists hate these women who are traditional wives and mothers and therefore feel no need to support them?
S,
I don't think it is as simple as reduction to psychology. I think you have to look at social systems and ideology to explain it.
There are hardcore feminists in the sense that they are really motivated by women's rights and (rightful) fear of or hate of oppression by men, first and foremost. They're probably fairly suspicious of the injustices against women perpetrated in the name of Islam, or were, or would be, but have been mostly convinced by the intellectual leaders of feminist social action that they and the Muslim perpetrators of oppression against Muslim women have a common enemy that it is yet more pressing to confront - that phantom ultra-capitalist, homophobic, white, Christian conformist "Amerikkka". The internal politics combined with lack of information available within the community and community-approved publications to do the trick.
The psychology at the root of this is the psychology of anybody who thinks they've found the right group to stand for their genuinely-felt interests and concerns, and then -- often unwittingly -- procedes to let their information and opinions be shaped by the leaders of that group. It isn't unusual or restricted to feminists or the left at all.
This of course just scoots the issue over to their intellectual leaders, the academic feminists. They may have once been of the first group, but many have over the years, given life within the academy and its norms, become something very like ideological Marxists, which adds a very important twist.
Recall that the core of Marxism is that systems of rules which are often claimed to be good, or to promote freedom, and so on, and which would appear to do so if looked at singly, often in conjunction actually work in such a way as to create, in action, systems of horrible oppression. This is what Marxists claim about Classical Liberal economic rights regarding private property. (I don't buy it fully but that's the argument.)
Well, what happened is that basic approach has been adopted by people who purport to be concerned with discrimination and injustice perpetrated on the basis of race and gender.
This perspective is combined with, first, major social and ideological overlap between women's studies and post colonial studies, and second with a post-modern view of culture and of the individual. Ultimately individuals are constructs of larger social processes, and while their "agency" may be of importance insofar as they may "transform" the larger processes, they, as individuals, no longer provide the basis for moral reasoning that individual rights approaches depend upon. The cultural processes are more fundamental, and attacks on those processes are seen, within this ideological framework, as deeply oppressive, even if those attacks are framed in terms of individual rights.
There was a woman, an academic, in the news a few months ago, who was promoting female genital mutilation on grounds of this sort, which made the general position very clear.
The example is as follows: In many communities, women are the people who take the children to mutilators and who perform the mutilation. The mutilation is seen as a cultural practice that empowers the women within their community and that is legitimate to the women enacting it. Western ideas about individual rights threaten this practice that exists within a community of women, who see themselves and their grandmothers has having and having had legitimate authority to do this. The Western constructs of individual rights are threatening this system which grants legitimacy to a form of female authority.
Of course it is all crazy. It is complex and systematic and requires smart people to master this complex academic discourse and political positioning, but there is something deeply dishonest in terms of which facts and which issues and which systems and which analyses are adopted and focused on.
This is where psychology gets involved. By following the most immediate reasons for behind the popularity of the status quo in academic feminism, The critical psychologcal factors in my opinion are susceptiblity to peer pressure and/or power lust, as well as the authoritarian/hierarchical psychology that results from taking seriously the social BS you typically have to take in and dish out to rise in the academy.
All of these factors, what they have largely (but not exclusively) behind them is a sort of insecurity, a sort of belief that you depend for what you are and what you can do on other people, on status, on community, and not on yourself or your beliefs, or your capacity -- fundamentally rooted in yourself as an individual -- to do the right thing and make an impact and be a worthwhile human being, without necessarily being part of a group or special club.
This more basic thing is probably why the incarnation the biases end up taking are not just randomly determined by whichever direction group flow happens to go, but instead systematically in favor of individual rights getting a raw deal, and why it is so popular to focus on applying Marxist theory to social relations in societies which, by and large, respect human rights in their individualist incarnation -- so much so that the do systematically produce, on individual rights ground, liberal successes like voting rights for women, bans on laws against sodomy, and so on.
Of course you still need all the layers of ideology and social relations to explain why this plays out quite the way it does; you certainly can't reduce the situation to this psychological factor.
And then of course there are some really honest feminists of the sort I wouldn't want to disparage in the least, who are working in the tradition of genuine basic human rights, and who I think deserve to be looked up to. They are in the long run are on our side insofar as, and because, they are on the side of the abused women; on the side of what is moral. The author of the article seems to be one. There was a U. Rhode Island prof in a discussion with Spencer on FrontPageMag a while ago, she qualifies as well.
But they're not mainstream within feminism, to my understanding, at least not yet. They do, however, have a good chance of using facts to eventually win over more of the "hardcore" feminists, who at any rate are, in my opinion, largely motivated by genuine concern for women.
"Love Letters in the Sand",
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFFT-4IxE3I
There may no longer be much in the way of ideological enthusiasm for what can be described as multiculturalism.
You would think that is the case. However, in the UK the PC brigade state quite openly that we are a multicultural society, in fact they thrive on saying in every situation where they are demanding special treatment for their own group. Apparently the government has turned its back on multiculturalism, it's just that no one has told anyone yet.
Interesting now that it is inevitable that there will be a liberal in the White House that the liberals finally become concerned about the fate of women under Islam.
Darcy,
Well darcy, if you wont stand for free speech, who will?
Just be careful. SJS is rampant
Posted by: Elric66 at February 13, 2008 11:15 AM
Well, yes, I'm standing.
What is SJS?
SJS = Sudden Jihad Syndrome.
I can tell you why feminists are fairly silent on this issue. I'm a caucasian feminist in New Zealand. I used to be fairly politically active, and the other politically active feminists subscribed very heavily to the multiculturalist ideas.
Whenever I expressed concern that Maori or Pacific Island cultures encouraged sexism, including violence against women, I was told, by Maori, PI and caucasian feminists that this was none of my business because I was the wrong colour. I was told that for Maori and PI women the priority was racial equality and cultural recognition, and gender issues would be sorted out by them later - once white oppression had ended.
"Whenever I expressed concern that Maori or Pacific Island cultures encouraged sexism, including violence against women, I was told, by Maori, PI and caucasian feminists that this was none of my business because I was the wrong colour."
Of course. You came up against the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist paradigm, which is dominant and mainstream througout the West. And according to this paradigm, "respect" and "tolerance" for Third World peoples and their wonderful rainbow of cultures trumps all other liberal values -- including feminism, child abuse, animal abuse, homophobia; you name it. (If General Sir Charles Napier tried to implement his eminent rationality today, he would be fired and his career ruined at best; arrested for "hate crimes" at worst.)
Enter Muslims -- the Poster Children of the Third World. No matter what atrocities Muslims do against modern liberal values, our "respect" for their "cultural values" trumps all other concerns. And when anybody criticizes Muslims and Islam, they are vilifed as "bigots" and "racists". And the vilifiers don't give a fig about the rational mantra that "Islam is not a race". All they see is the fact that most Muslims are brown and lovely Third World peoples wearing cool ethnic clothes. And that makes Muslims special, and forever privileged, and eternally protected from all substantive criticism.
Correction: when I wrote "liberal values -- including feminism, child abuse, animal abuse, homophobia..." of course I meant "liberal values -- including feminism, and outrage against child abuse, animal abuse and homophobia..."
'All they see is the fact that most Muslims are brown and lovely Third World peoples wearing cool ethnic clothes. And that makes Muslims special, and forever privileged, and eternally protected from all substantive criticism.'
Succintly put, cantor. New Yorkers seem, ironically, given 9/11, to have this disease in vast numbers.
SJS = Sudden Jihad Syndrome.
Posted by: Concerned Citizen at February 13, 2008 10:04 PM
Got it. Thanks, Concerned Citizen.
P.S. Love your Nasseem imitation!