The New York Times backhandedly notices that Leftist feminists have failed utterly to speak up for the rights of women in the Islamic world, and that only “conservatives” are doing so. “The Feminist Hawks,” by Virginia Heffernan for the New York Times, August 19 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. On a recent day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad for the Times. It can’t be bothered, after all, to look too closely at those awful “conservatives” and see what they’re really about. But despite her error about the third site, Virginia Heffernan is quite right about Jihad Watch and my colleague David Horowitz: we have taken feminists to task more than once not only for their failure to stand up for Muslim women, but for their active excuse-making for the oppression of those women.
See, for example, my article in FrontPage, “Feminists Betray Muslim Women,” on how the feminist writer Laura Briggs justifies the oppression of Muslim women.
See also “Two Women Stoned: Feminists Mum,” by David Horowitz, Janet Levy and me; “A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam,” by David Horowitz and me; and my article “The Conservative Vanguard of the Feminist Movement” in National Review.
Other articles I’ve written in FrontPage on issues revolving around women’s rights in Islam include “Covering Up the Plight of Muslim Women“; “There Must Be Violence Against Women“; “Muhammad Mended His Own Clothes!“; Open Season on Muslim Women“; “Women Are Treated Better in Islam?.”
Also there are my articles in Human Events, “Unveiled Women and ‘Uncovered Meat’“; “Media Ignore Abuses of Women in Islam.”
I also coauthored the monograph “The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam” (available as a pdf here) with my friend Phyllis Chesler, who weighs in on the Times’s ridiculous piece here.
In any case, it is very much a war on misogyny, and I am happy to take up the Times’s snark and declare that war, here and now. It’s a war against those who think they have a divine right to beat women (cf. Qur’an 4:34), and to devalue their testimony as if they’re deficient intellectually (cf. Qur’an 2:282), and to treat them as commodities, even allowing for sex with slave girls (cf. Qur’an 4:3).
Is it “hawkish” to stand against such things? Then I am proud to be a hawk.