Anti-dhimmitude from Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian (thanks to Web):
HER voice shaking, the young woman in the hijab sitting about five rows back from the podium was clearly angry with me. As were other women in the audience, some in hijabs, one wearing a nikab, only her eyes visible through a narrow slit. Angry with me for writing about Muslim women.
It was late one Friday afternoon a few weeks back and I was speaking at a conference on The Journalist and Islam at NSW Parliament House. I asked them what I had done to offend them so.
Was it that I had written about the many Muslim women in Arab and other Muslim countries who are treated as second-class citizens and the many Muslim women in the West who are similarly mistreated in the shadow of Islam?
Apparently, white Christian girls should not write or speak about such things. My error, they said, was to presume to speak on behalf of Muslim women. But, of course, I had done no such thing. The role of the media is to expose and debate. No apologies for that. And in doing so, a journalist is no one’s spokesman. When I pointed out that a more open debate depended on Muslim women talking honestly about the problems of radical Islam and the consequent inequality inflicted on women, there was only silence.
And that silence is the problem. So again, in that vacuum, a white Christian chick will write on this issue because, in an enlightened world, the inequality of the sexes should transcend race, ethnicity and religion.