Saturday, February 05, 2005
The contempt of the feminists
The great silence by left-leaning Western feminists, and other large parts of the left, to human rights abuses carried out in the name of Islam is, to see it as its kindest, caused by an overdeveloped sense of tolerance or cultural relativism. But it is also part of the new anti-Americanism...
Dislike of George Bush's foreign policy has led to an automatic support of those perceived to be his enemies. Paradoxically, this leaves the left defending people who hold beliefs that condone what the left has long fought against: misogyny, homophobia, capital punishment, suppression of freedom of speech. The recent reaffirmation by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie has been met by virtual silence; as has the torture and murder in Iraq of a man who would be presumed to be one of the left's own - Hadi Salih, the international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. The hard left these days is soft on fascism, or at least Islamofascism.
While I agree that knee-jerk anti-Americanism is one cause of the moral contradictions that riddle the thinking of America's feminists -- the enemy of their enemy being their friend and all -- I think there is another cause that neither Bone nor Reynolds identify. The Western left does not hold Muslims responsible for these abuses of women because it has contempt for them -- it believes that Muslim and particularly Arab culture is so primitive that it cannot be held to the same standards of decency that we demand from Western societies. If Western feminists thought for a minute that Arabs were capable of treating women according to their norms, they would demand it. To them, though, Arab societies are so incapable of reform that it is naive even to speak the ambition that one day they might treat women humanely.
The Western left's contempt for the Arabs defines its opinions on other matters. Which side believes -- or at least asserts -- that Arabs are incapable of building democracies? Sure, they have cloaked this argument in the historically ridiculous argument that democracy cannot be imposed by force, but it is obvious that they really think that Arabs are incapable of democracy. Why does the left hold Israel to an entirely different set of rules than it does the Arabs that surround Israel? Because it expects more from Jews than it does Arabs. Indeed, there is virtually nothing that an Arab can do that is beneath the expectations of a Western leftist.
George Bush has, in another context, warned against the "soft bigotry of low expectations." In the matter of American policy toward Arab and Muslim countries, the soft bigotry of low expectations condemns hundreds of millions of people to lives of desperation.
1 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Mon Feb 07, 12:34:00 PM:
Hypocrisy is nothing new among the feminist elite of which you write. How can one forget the deafening silence regarding President Clinton's foibles? If a CEO of any company had been fiddling with an intern, the feminists would have tortured the fellow. Not so with Wild Bill.
So it should come as no surprise that in the matter of Islamic abuse of women, elite (or should I say elitist) feminists take a pass. They're all Raging Democrats. So they hate the current administration and anything it stands for -- kinda like Howard Dean I guess.
It actually becomes easy to figure out who to take seriously on these topics and who to ignore when you encounter such bold hypocrisy. It's why a guy like Hitchens has my complete respect. He isn't defined by his politics. He uses his brain.
I am not as willing to dismiss this hypocrisy as the product of disrespect for Arab Culture, by the way, or the curse of low expectations. It is plain Bush fury - an inability to credit Bush with anything proper, honorable, intelligent, etc, in my view. Just like it was Clinton love which prevented these women from going bananas on what was a clear clase of bad CEO behavior (sexual harassment).
To be overly fair to these hypocrites, there may be something else at work. I think for most American women, the degree to which women in radical Muslim culture (not Arab, but Muslim) are marginalized and abused is beyond experience and therefore comprehension. They don't know anybody who's been in the circumstance, and thus can't relate to them. Let's face it, do any of us go out of our way to interview a woman who is covered from head to toe in veils? There's been a tiny amount of press on it viz. Afghan women and schooling, but not much, and not for long. Christiane Amanpour, here's something useful for you to do...
But there is something powerful there, and the bad guys know it, because that's why they killed Theo Van Gogh. It's one of many soft underbellies to radical muslim political fascism. It's how you know it's really a very small minority that we have to identify and defeat.
