Obama is not in favor with at least one blogger at the generally reliably dhimmi Economist. “Next time he would do better to remember, as the secretary of state famously put it, that women’s rights are human rights.” Indeed.
“Throwing women under the bus,” from The Economist Democracy in America blog, June 5 (thanks to all who sent this in):
In an effort to find common ground with Islam, Mr Obama posits a false equivalence between the struggle for women’s rights in the United States and the Muslim-majority countries he discusses. This is pandering at the expense of women and ignores a slate of human-rights offences from enforced veiling to stonings and honour killings. A blogger in Shreveport points to a speech made by the dread George W Bush in Egypt last year; even he manages to make a stronger argument on behalf of women:
Building powerful economies also requires expanding the role of women in society. This is a matter of morality and of basic math. No nation that cuts off half its population from opportunities will be as productive or prosperous as it could be. Women are a formidable force, as I have seen in my own family — (laughter and applause) — and my own administration. (Applause.) As the nations of the Middle East open up their laws and their societies to women, they are learning the same thing.
Do you all remember Laura Bush, the mild-mannered Methodist librarian? She was so cryptic that one intrigued novelist wrote an entire book imagining her inner life. Yet even Mrs Bush permitted herself to say that girls in Afghanistan should be allowed to go to school. Mr Obama should have been so bold.
The president went to Cairo to make an occasion. In this respect he failed to seize the occasion he had made. Next time he would do better to remember, as the secretary of state famously put it, that women’s rights are human rights.