The Failure of 21st Century Feminism: A Study in Preemptive Dhimmitude

Why do "feminists" side with misogynist Caliphators?

Dec 21, 2023

The following passage is the original version of a much abbreviated passage in my book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong?

Feminism, the product of a particularly Western form of discourse in which the powerful must listen to the complaints of the weak, arose because there were men willing to respond to women’s moral claims. Nor was this an easy matter. Men’s limbic captivity to honor, not in the eyes of their women, but of their male (warrior) peers, makes such attentiveness a sign of uxorious effeminacy, an extremely painful experience for many males. The urge to use force in order to reassert honor never goes away, and resurges whenever the memory of the humiliation resurfaces.[1] In this sense, feminism has relied on a powerful, enduring commitment of mature men, willing to accept criticism, some of it quite harsh, without striking back.

“Big deal,” respond feminists as if this were the norm, “you want us to give them brownie points?”

It turns out, however, that the more insecure and immature the man – riddled with jealousy, envy, and libido dominandi – the more women will be the target of their anger and violence, including various forms of rape. The twin phenomena of “crimes of passion” (killing an unfaithful wife), and shame murders (killing a daughter who shames the family) attest to the deadly power of male honor to claim the lives of women. A whole range of wife-beating comes from men who must punish and control their women (the mark of a man of honor), to prevent their women from shaming them, especially publicly. For feminists (and more broadly “empathic humanists,” beating women and children is – or should be – out of the question. In the feminist public sphere, now the Western public sphere, no man, guilty of beating women, can maintain his public honor. Indeed, the #MeToo movement has made any abuse of disparities in power in order to force women to grant sexual favors, absolutely illegitimate.

In the 21^st century, no culture, and within that culture, no religious movement, has been more hysterically immature, misogynist and oppressive of women than Caliphator Islam. Beginning in the 1980s/1400s in the Muslim majority world, there has been a widespread move to have Muslim women worldwide take the veil. This came from the most radical circles of Islam, almost a shibboleth for Caliphator dominion: Iranian modesty police required women to wear the hijab in public; the Taliban threw acid in the face of women who did not cover their bodies and faces entirely with the niqab; in Wahabi Saudi Arabia, girls were locked up to die in a burning school, rather than let out in public without hijabs.[2] Since 9-11, throughout the Ummah, including the West, there has been “a huge increase in the number of women, particularly among young women, who started wearing the hijab.”[3]

Some claim pride and invoke infidel hostility as their motivation for showing solidarity with their fellow Muslim “victims”:

I made the decision to wear the hijab after going on my own personal journey to learn more about my religion, Islam. The journey started a year before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, but my quest for knowledge accelerated after September 11th when the Muslim community around the world and in the UK were under intense scrutiny by the politicians and the media. It was then that I decided that I wanted to be a visible Muslim. I wanted people who walked past me in the street to know that I am a Muslim and that I am proud of my religion, heritage and culture. In many ways, I saw the hijab as an act of solidarity with Muslim women all around the world… Iraqi, Bosnian, Somalian or Palestinian woman…[4]

Progressive infidels are supposed to admire this bold self-assertion and reprove anyone so prejudiced and Islamophobic as to disapprove. They are not to wonder what’s going on in the head of a woman, who in response to members of her religion, in the name of her religion, committing a heinous act of terrorism that killed thousands of infidels and faithful, wants to advertise her adherence not just to Islam, but to practices enforced by that same 9-11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden and his Jihadi brethren. A perfect Rorschach for Y2KMind: “does this solidarity worry you, you Islamophobe? Or do you cheer on the woman’s admirable self-affirmation?”

The Worldwide Islamic Network of Women (WINOW) published a poem glorifying devout, proud hijab-wearing:

You look at me and call me oppressed,
Simply because of the way I'm dressed,
You know me not for what's inside,
You judge the clothing I wear with pride,
My body's not for your eyes to hold,
You must speak to my mind, not my feminine mold,
I'm an individual, I'm no mans slave,
It's Allahs pleasure that I only crave,
I have a voice so I will be heard,
For in my heart I carry His word,
"O ye women, wrap close your cloak,
So you won't be bothered by ignorant folk",
Man doesn't tell me to dress this way,
It's a Law from God that I obey,
Oppressed is something I'm truly NOT,
For liberation is what I've got,
It was given to me many years ago,
With the right to prosper, the right to grow,
I can climb moutains or cross the seas,
Expand my mind in all degrees,
For God Himself gave us LIB-ER-TY,
When He sent Islam,
To You and Me![5]

Although Shaista and others assure us that “from what the women tell me, most do so by choice,” the obvious question arises, how many do so from submission, from a fear that not wearing it dishonors the woman, and leaves her open to justified male violence? How many “zones urbaines sensibles” became ~~no-go-zones~~ because the Muslim women in it had to wear hijabs in order to protect themselves, and infidel women without veils automatically became rape bait – uncovered, easy meat.[6] How many women were inculcated with the belief that if a man rapes them, they deserve it for not being sufficiently modest?[7] And given that being raped in many Muslim-majority cultures is a cause for shame-murder (talk about blaming the victim), it’s most wise for women surrounded by aggressive, patriarchal, triumphalist Muslims, to wear the hijab or even more. For every case we know about, how many more young women are murdered because they refused to wear the hijab, and so shamed their families?[8] And for every one of them, how many more wear the hijab to avoid that fate? Since enforcing wearing the hijab is a cornerstone of violent Islamism, and prelude to Jihad,[9] how much of the “I choose this on my own,” that Shaista reports hearing commonly, reflects a genuine defiance (of the West) and how much posturing to disguise submission (to triumphalist Muslim men)?

However one chooses to interpret the evidence, it’s beyond question that, by the standards of Western feminism of any wave, Muslim patriarchy – whether it first arises in the Jahaliyya period (shame-murders, vaginal cutting) and/or is enshrined in Islamic law (hijabs, vaginal cutting) – is as big and bad and actual as it gets, and that when it comes to matters of Apartheid, Islam has a long and worsening record of gender Apartheid against women (along with religious Apartheid against infidels). The question then becomes, how is it possible that Western feminists have not only turned away from their Muslim sisters, but in many cases, sided with their male oppressors?

The lines were laid out in the 70s already and reinforced in subsequent decades when post-colonial feminists, often from heavily patriarchal societies, argued that fighting the Western imperialists trumped fighting third-world patriarchy, and that Western feminist concern for female Post-Colonials was a form of imperialist condescension.[10] Cultural relativism became the order of the day, along with the we-too-ism it demands: honor killings are just part of the spectrum of domestic violence, found both East and West.[11] And they certainly have nothing to do with Islam.[12] On the contrary, some Post-Colonial feminists argued that Muhammad was against honor-killings, as he was against killing baby girls.[13] Indeed, anyone who suggests that Islamic culture has a high correlation with honor-killings gets accused of Islamophobia and peddling fake news.[14] The preferred technique was silence,[15] and sharp disapproval when others brought the issue to the fore, as in the case of the film about shame-murders in the Muslim world: Honor Diaries.[16]

Daphne Patai recounts the way in which this played out on a feminist list-serv, in the mid-aughts (shortly after the controversy around the Pope’s Regensburg Speech):

In October 2006 a typical exchange took place on the women's studies e-mail list (WMST-L) (which has more than five thousand subscribers) about white male violence. Great anger was displayed at the few women who wrote in suggesting there are worse problems among other groups - for example, violence in Muslim countries or the rates of murder and rape among blacks versus whites in this country… In academe, in particular, people object to generalizations about blacks or about Muslims or any other group that is nonwhite and non-Anglo. They rush to defend these groups because, as presumably oppressed or formerly oppressed groups, they have identities that nowadays exempt them from criticism. But the same reticent people are free with their generalizations about America being a “rape culture” or confidently assert that white male violence is the primary problem we all have to deal with. . . Thus, many feminists on the WMST-L “know” that white male violence is a constant threat to all women but somehow, they manage to think that worrying about Islamist fundamentalism is just a sign of racism and xenophobia. They have no patience, however, for any sort of defense of evangelicals or Christian fundamentalists at home. What seems to drive such a stance, in my view, is a compulsion to view the United States in a negative light, thus demonstrating one's proper “internationalist” credentials.1

This silence about specifically Muslim violence against women in turn conceals a wide range of relevant information for understanding the “clash of civilizations.”

·      The way honor-killings serve as ways to raise the “us-them” walls and prevent the very “accommodation” to the West that so many progressive infidels count on, indeed, insist has already occurred.[17]
·      The high correlation between Muslim violence against women and Islamic terrorism.[18]
·      The exploitation of women vulnerable to shame murders to commit suicide terror attacks as a way to wash away their shame.[19]
·      The role that Muslim misogyny plays in their fear and hatred of a “feminized” West.
·      The fact that even before the Jews, Muslim women are the first and most successful targets of triumphalist, Caliphator Islam, whether in Muslim majority states or in the West.

All of this becomes “facts we’re not supposed to know,”[20] lest on the one hand, we realize the importance of fighting Muslim misogyny, and on the other, we realize what cowards we are for not defending Muslim women.

How did this happen? How did feminists go from outrage at vaginal cutting and honor-killings to embarrassed silence? Phyllis Chesler, one of the few feminists (and a radical one at that), argues a version of Charles Jacobs’ “Human Rights Complex”:

If the victims are women of color, especially if they are Arabs, definitely if they are Palestinians, or Muslims, their suffering and their deaths matter—but only if their abusers and murderers are white, European, American, or Israeli. If dark-skinned Africans or Muslims of color gang-rape, kidnap, sexually enslave, bury alive, immolate or stone women of color, including Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims, (in the West Bank and Gaza, in Afghanistan, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia), or if one Muslim denomination (Sunni) blows up the other, (Shiaa) in Pakistan and Iraq, it is simply not politically correct to say so. Muslim-on-Muslim crimes do not count in the same way that white European or American-on-Muslim crimes seem to matter.[21]

Thus, a post-colonial paradigm that privileges the fight against Western (white) imperialism, trumps the rights of individual Muslims (whose fate is left to their “communities”), especially where those Muslim men are fighting hard against the oppressive West, like the Palestinians fighting the Zionists. Indeed, if forced to acknowledge the deeply pathological aspects of Palestinian “masculinity” and the kinds of violence it directed at its women, post-colonial feminists will draw attention to the role of the Israeli occupation in exacerbating (if not causing) the problems.[22]

Chesler locates the Western feminist abandonment of Muslim women in the post-9-11 era, when not only did feminists join in the anti-American assault,[23] but elaborately avoided anything that might look like it was targeting Islam.[24] Indeed, Caliphator Da'īs cited feminists gladly to make the same point: no matter how odious the crime and no matter how prominent the Muslim identity of the male perp, it was somehow the West’s fault.[25] The same pattern emerges in the “human rights” community’s approach to Palestinian violence against their women: blame the occupation; sacrifice Palestinian women’s lives on the altar of the cult of the occupation.[26] All of reflects a principled respect for “others,” no matter how they behave:

“To help immigrants means first of all respecting them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment to their spiritual and religious roots.”[27]

We find here the same pattern of combined peer-group mimetic pressure and fear of Muslim violence that operates on so many levels in Y2KMind. In a section entitled “A Modern Form of Sacrifice,” Unni Wikan describes the factors that led well-meaning benevolent Norwegian authorities to sacrifice Muslim immigrant children on the altar of their self-esteem:

“Culture” is the coinage used to express and claim minority rights, and it is backed by hard sanctions. Physical force, or the threat of such, may not be necessary to compel compliance. A little word, just six letters long, does the job just as effectively: “Racist!” nor need the word be spoken. It hangs like a specter in the air, palpable if invisible, and frightens people into accepting acts that they deeply deplore… “Racist” has become a “deadly word.” It pierces the heart of the well-meaning Scandinavian, whose cherished identity is world champion of all that is kind and good… But there is a high price to be paid by such high morality, and it is paid neither by those who pride themselves on supreme tolerance toward immigrants, professed as “respect for the culture,” nor by those who cry “racist” to claim or enforce such respect. It is [dead at 14] Aisha and others like her…[28]

Hard to find a better description of moral narcissism: looking good trumps actual effects on others.

But, I would argue, the recourse to moral posturing, as with lethal journalists fighting for their underdog Palestinian victims, serves as a fig leaf to hide the fear of Muslim violence. The bullying began in earnest at a series of UN sponsored “International Women’s Day” Conferences that began in the 1975 and culminated with the demopath’s delight of Durban 2001. In the first conference, in Mexico City, a bloc of communist countries and Arab countries turned the event into a rampage of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist invective that culminated in the first UN Resolution to equate Zionism and Racism. The objections – largely ignored – of Jewish feminists was categorical about the hijacking of feminist issues:

that an international women’s conference should have been asked to endorse a view equating [Zionism and racism] is not only an outrageous distortion of history, but further evidence that the universal oppression of women has been negated and trivialized by those national and international organizations which sponsored it.

Descriptions of the events feature the Muslim women’s contingent, accompanied everywhere by their men, essentially playing the mouthpiece for the “Palestinian” cause. It wasn’t just that the women – alleged feminists – had been (gloriously) sidetracked into a post-colonial struggle, but that they had been hijacked by some of the worst patriarchal misogynists on the planet.[29]

What we have here, is a particularly unfortunate example of Moynihan’s law: the number of complaints about human rights (here women’s rights) violations is inversely proportional to the actual violations. Unpacked, it means that in oppressive societies, where violations are the (legal) norm, and repression of complaint in order to save face (honor) is common, the complaints are only a tiny fraction of the incidents worthy of complaint. On the other hand, in a civic polity, where criticism does not elicit bloodshed, and complaints can not only be voiced, but gain attention and approval, the volume of complaints can sometimes magnify to a deafening roar… at which point the tears of the white men who listen to their women flow in rivulets while the rivers of tears shed by the women in pre-modern, honor-shame cultures, flows in mighty, unseen streams. As Mick Hume put it in 2002: “Protesters find it easier to feel morally worthy when they are guaranteed to get an apologetic response from the authorities.”[30] How tedious, when not dangerous, to make moral demands of Muslim patriarchs.

Feminists, as some argue, depend on men who have at least partially pulled themselves out of limbic captivity. In the current world, that’s primarily white men and Jews (who are, intersectionally defined as white, not 50 years after being nearly exterminated as a colored race). Without a culture that values criticism, feminism has no purchase, and since women will (and have) lost the physical battle for hundreds of millennia, there can be no feminism as we know it… feminism must be part of a moral discourse, the one that, according to the simple meaning of the Jewish myth of origin, Eve introduced to human life by getting Adam to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of what’s right and wrong.

So, like the French journalist in 2003 who proudly explained to me how “true courage is attacking the strongest, and America’s the strongest,” feminists chose to heap their criticism on the West/US – i.e., where their discourse had purchase, and there was little retaliation – and avoided criticizing the Muslim world, where the retaliation was common and brutal. Psychologists have all kinds of explanations for it: identification with the aggressor, Stockholm Syndrome, authoritarian personality, narcissistic personality disorder. It boils down to what Christopher Lasch described as the narcissist’s dilemma: always eager to please those who do not approve; contemptuous towards friends… and results in the classic moral narcissism of virtue-signaling one’s tolerance and embracing of the other, even as it effectively empowers the enemy. For example, faced with the desire of female UN employees to complain about the sexual abuse they suffered from the men, Robin Morgan appealed to them to remain silent: “How would it look for white western feminists, even if black African feminists joined them, to confront a black African man?”[31] Checkmate.

Of course, I’m not the first to point out the role of intimidation in the “noble generosity” of progressives. Faced with accusations that they refuse to criticize Islam out of fear of reprisal, some feminists insist that they are not intimidated, and that they won’t be bullied by conservative, white, male, Islamophobes into doing so.

I won’t do it. I won’t take the bait of a patronizing call for feminists to set aside their goals in America to address problems in Muslim theocracies, and I won’t take the bait of an anti-intellectual call for atheists to denounce an entire religion simply because a handful of atheist leaders prescribe it. I will exhibit more caution and conservatism in my judgment, and here’s why.[32]

Brave words. The reasons? All predictable, all indignant at having some white mansplainer tell her what to do. I know lots of fine peaceful Muslims (so what?); it’s not right to single out Islam (even today?); the totally ignorant idea that women “over there” have it worse than us (huh?), so we should stop complaining (invented directive); it’s unprofessional of me to take on a cause about which I am completely ignorant (why are you so ignorant?).

It should go without saying that, as a feminist, I stand by anyone anywhere who wants equal rights — but I will do it on their terms, not on the terms of white, male, secular American pundits.

You go, woman. Speak truth to power. And just why are the only people taking the side of Muslim women white, male, secular, pundits (and some Muslim women)? And how can ignorance be an excuse, even a proud one?[33] Sounds a lot like the “lack of ‘intellectual curiosity’ and engagement’ with the cause of women’s freedom,” that so many Iranian feminists had noted in their Western sisters.[34] Why do you, who confess to complete ignorance on these matters, dismiss as “totally ignorant” the claims that women “over there” have it worse than you? Have you really thought this through or are you hitting all those notes that will have your good friends nodding in approval?

So much easier to run with the arguments of Arab women who place their tribal identities above their commitment to women’s rights, who dismiss Western feminist concerns as “clearly about establishing Western domination and not about liberating Muslim women,” and who reject any feminist critique because “it calls for a form of cultural conversion at a time when the West is seen by them to be a dominating force.”[35]

After all, one need just read realistic best-sellers like Reading Lolita in Teheran, and The Kite Runner. Here, for example, Khaled Hosseini describing life in Kabul under the Taliban.

In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadiums, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here .... The savages who rule our watan [country] don't care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzana jan [his wife] to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and naan. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days but what could I do except stand and watch my wife get beaten? If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly!

This is, of course, mild compared to throwing acid in the face of women who don’t wear burkas (hijab too immodest), of murder, stoning, rapes (in the name of honor and modesty), torture, mutilations, a reign of terror that confined Afghan women to their homes and their burkas.[36]

Somehow all of this – better they not know – pales for feminists like Brink and Marcotte and so many others, before the devastating damage of the right-wing assault on abortion rights. So instead of solidarity with Muslim women, we get what Kanan Makiya called, The Cruelty of Silence.

As Muslim women are being tortured and stoned to death, many multi-culturally correct American and European feminists are deconstructing and justifying the face veil and the head scarf – and strongly opposing American intervention in the Muslim world. Such feminists are also silencing and demonizing all other views on intervention in academic journals, in the media, and on feminist listserv groups.[37]

Aayan Hirsi Ali and Feminist Dhimmitude

Nothing better illustrates the Moebius strip of Y2KMind than the “feminist” reaction to Aayan Hirsi Ali, a tremendous role model, almost the dream candidate for world feminist poster child.[38] A black Sudanese woman who was genitally mutilated by her grandmother, who grew up in two deeply patriarchal and misogynist cultures, who escaped being the victim of an honor killing at the hands of her family, made it to Holland, where, quick witted as she was, she learned Dutch,[39] became a politician (where she first saw men apologizing – ! – for their errors), and fought for women’s rights, especially in the lands whence she came. Who better exemplified all the transformative power of empathy, education, civic discourse? What could hold out more hope for women around the world that they too can escape from the repressive conditions under which they live, and become emancipated full participants in a society that respects women with independent minds? Instead, when Brandeis University wanted to give her an honorary degree in 2014, the faculty – led by the women’s studies faculty – petitioned the president to disinvite her; and the president complied – a successful attack that made the front pages of the NYT.

Why? In short, because the male chauvinist pigs she criticized were Muslims, who constantly invoked their religion to justify their behavior, and she earned her success according to the fair rules of Western meritocracy. In other words, she was everything that LCEs imagined, when they spoke of moderate, peaceful Muslims who enrich the societies in which they dwell. Therefore, she had to go. As Andrew Anthony put it dryly: “she is loathed not just by Islamic fundamentalists but by many western liberals, who find her rejection of Islam almost as objectionable as her embrace of western liberalism.”

The faculty petitioners denounced her “virulently anti-Muslim public statements” that unquestionably “sent a horrible message… to Muslim and non-Muslim communities.” To document her inacceptable hostility to Islam, the petitioners found comments, all from late 2007 when her first book, Infidel came out. At that time, she had just been chased out of Holland by Muslims who, after killing her colleague Theo Van Gogh, put a price on her head, and made her 24/7 security so onerous, that both the government in which she served and her neighbors told her to leave.[40] Once in America, at the conservative think-tank, AEI (no progressive places offered her shelter),[41] she ran into other Muslim leaders who condemned her for her “poisonous and unjustified” statements about Islam, that “created dissension in the community,” and considered that her deliberate “defaming the faith,” qualified, “by the laws” of Islam, for which the “punishment is death.”[42] Reflecting this experience, she publicly voiced her conclusions – based on widespread experience of “variegated” Islam (Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, USA) – that Islam is “inherently violent” (the Regensburg Lecture); that not just extremist Islam, but “mainstream Islam is fascist,” “totalitarian,” and “inspires Jihadism and terror”; and that Islam “cannot be reformed.”

Now anyone saying similar things about Christianity or Judaism or Western culture would not get such a reception. When, for example, John Carroll wrote his devastating critique of Catholicism, Constantine’s Sword, he received extensive praise for his honest self-criticism, not insistent censure for his hate-filled phobias. It’s hard to imagine the Enlightenment, had the Catholic Church managed to shut Voltaire out of the public discourse of Europe. But here, the petitioning faculty, upon reading such opinions were “filled with shame at the suggestion that the above-quoted sentiments express Brandeis's values.” So, an African woman was internationally shamed as “someone who [does not] truly meets the standards and upholds the values of this university.” The president acceded to the furor, and disinvited her.

What were the stakes here for the petitioners? Why the excited language – “virulently anti-Muslim,” “horrible message,” “filled with shame”? Why the imperious commands to rescind the invitation immediately? What was the emergency? Why the moral panic at the mere thought that Brandeis might honor this woman?

The petitioners acknowledge Ali’s claim that something wrong is going on in the Muslim world:

We fully recognize the harm of forced marriages; of female genital cutting, which can cause, among other public health problems, increased maternal and infant mortality; and of honor killings.

“Fully” here, however, sounds a bit hollow, especially when the next sentence changes the topic dramatically – one might even say, inverts the problem. And here we find the nut of the problem, which lays bare the betrayal of the women suffering precisely from the above list of woes.

These phenomena are not, however, exclusive to Islam [so what? they are certainly disproportionately present - rl]. The selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests [prepare for attribution] to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World [did she say that?], thereby obscuring [?] such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus [we-too-ism targeting white men].[43] It also obscures [?] the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition [Muhammad the first feminist[44]] and are effective at achieving it [?[45]]. We cannot accept [!] Ms. Hirsi Ali's [?] triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.

In other words, hiding behind the (weakly stated) PC assertion that Islam has nothing to do with these matters, the petitioners make it clear that ‘we will not allow on our campus, a champion of Western values, someone who makes [largely accurate] generalizations about the treatment of women in Islam. We will not have a frank discussion about the problems of Islam and Muslim male violence against women, and certainly not one that entertains the possibility that these problems are structural to Islam.’

Note how certain and insistent this petition is about the radical un-acceptability of a “triumphalist” Western discourse, predicated on a claim to have solved some key problems that traditional societies have not, among which is a dramatic lowering the degree to which women are physically at men’s mercy. These “essentialist” positions, which the petition attributes (inaccurately) to Ali, are actual inverted projections of their own form of PostModern-PostColonial masochism. Filled with horror at the suggestion that something negative might be systemic, built-into Islam – ‘Islam structurally violent? Impossible. Unspeakable!’ – they are filled with rage at the what they consider the unchallengeable assertion that the US is a systemically racist society and polity.

As Daphne Patai argued (cited above), by 2006, at least in Women’s Studies, it became impossible to oppose the under-dogma that the West was bad, and the rest of the world must not be judged (certainly not, judged unfavorably in comparison with the West). Just as Martin Amis asked his audience of British glitterati, who among them felt they were morally superior to the Taliban, can anyone with a moral compass not recognize that “we’ve come a long way, baby,” where “we” is the West and the way includes learning to treat our women with a great deal of respect and a renunciation of our recourse to “might makes right.” Is it a total transformation? No. Is it better than cultures where women live in radical insecurity that their own family will kill them for “shaming them”… for even just “seeming” to shame them?[46] Yes.

Is it a moral disorientation of cosmic proportions for a society that provides rape victims with safe spaces lest words inadvertently upset them, to insist that they are no better – nay worse! – than a culture in which a rape victim is in real danger of being killed by her family because the community demands it?

Do these cultures still have a long way to go when it comes to how they treat their women? Sure. Is it possible to tread that path? Sure. Will it help bring Islam into compliance with a tolerant, diverse, global community, and not a global Caliphate? Yes.

But instead, the most powerful voices in Muslim communities in the 21^st century, drive backward, into a medieval tradition of legitimate violence and radical legal apartheid against women in most all matters of sexuality, marriage and divorce. Instead of subsequent generations of increasingly psychologically secure Muslims accepting that not everyone has to be Muslim, that they don’t have to dominate others, just in order to feel good about themselves as Muslims, we see an aggressive Muslim community, especially in Europe, which combines compulsory hijab and shame-murders, as a way to discipline Western Muslim communities, and enforce the kind of masculine al wala’ w’al bara’ in which Muslim women suffer the most.[47]

Feminists, “women’s studies” faculty, systematically blinded themselves to this, dismissed it unjustifiably negative and “Orientalist” (“not exclusive to Islam”) as less significant than the sins of the West (“such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus”).[48] Really? Any shame-murders on Brandeis campus?

Worse, they forbade – shamed – anyone who tried to draw this to their attention. So rather than defend the real victims of Muslim male violence, they sided with the aggressors, and shook a mean fist at anyone who criticized the very culprits. Apparently, the people who submitted, rather than laughed, at the spectacle of Muslims rioting violently to protest the Pope’s ~~not~~ calling them violent, had, a decade later, taken over the asylum at Brandeis.[49] And they were yelling at those who still got the joke.

One sad, but perhaps not surprising post-scriptum: Jytte Klausen is among the first signers of the petition. She, the poster-woman for academic Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism, gets swept up in a moral panic – the administration is committing horrible deeds!… or was it a mimetic panic at the thought of transgressing the prime directive? OMG, you’re pissing them off. This must stop!

No matter how you wrap it, “objectively” as Marx would say, these feminists, these activist-scholars, were doing the bidding of the very Muslim men of the Caliphator generation, who so effectively lay down their patriarchal interpretation of Sharia law, first and foremost among Muslim women, if necessary with daily blows. Are they brave, feminist warriors, fighting a civilizational battle for decency, or are they Muslim Aunt Jemimas, betraying their sisters by following orders from the very men they claimed to oppose?

And in so doing, they preside over a massive deterioration in the status of Western Muslim women. Western Muslims had not always imposed archaic practices on their women, and needed these folks to patiently chip away at the mountain. On the contrary, Muslim women in the West enjoyed much greater freedom before 2000, and while these activists have been doing their “hard work on the ground” for the past 20 years, Muslim women in Western societies have dramatically lost ground to Wahabi Caliphators. The very fact that Muslim scholars and feminists wanted to ban Aayan Hirsi Ali, tells us which side of the coin these “feminists” and their colleagues land: they have adopted enemies designated such by radical Muslims who have put a price on Hirsi-Ali’s head. They have contributed to the submission of their fellow Muslim women, by shrieking at anyone who would criticize their tormentors.

Who did these feminists fear? Not the white male president of Brandeis to whom they speak imperiously. Not the black female dissident, whom they shame horribly. But yes, they fear the radical Muslims who want to, and occasionally do, kill blasphemers.

And if Khadija Lynch, Brandeis student representative to African and Afro-American Studies, is any example of the kind of “feminism” these “activists and scholars” encourage, then we can understand the post-colonial program they work so hard to realize: nurse hatred, show no empathy, urge on violence in the name of a revolution that will bring down the USA and its intersectional racism: “amerikkka needs an intifada. enough is enough.”[50]

Linda Sarsour and the Hijacking of American Feminism

If Aayan Hirsi Ali is an epitome of what feminists wrongly reject; Linda Sarsour is the epitome of everything they wrongly embrace. Like a meteor, Sarsour first appeared on the screens of most Americans in 2016, right after the election of Donald Trump, as one of the four leaders of the women’s march, a massive cross-country event that, like the great global demonstrations against Bush and Sharon in 2003, drew millions of people, primarly women of all colors and kinds, out in the street to protest. It was a march that said, “hear me roar! I am not happy with our new president. It featured a variety of sometimes bizarre symbolic dress – the pussyhats – and was led by a coalition of actresses and activists. It veritably crackled with energy.

And one of its leaders was Linda Sarsour, a striking figure in her stylish hijab and strong makeup. Linda was a Palestinian feminist, the director of the Arab American Association of New York, and a master of the demopathic discourse: Islamophobia is everywhere, American Muslims are its victims – “[Muslim] kids are being executed (?![51])” – the police unjustifiably surveil us, we need Sharia law to practice our faith, anyone who criticizes Muslims is an Islamophobe, she does not stand with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre since they they were "bigot[ed] and a racist" for publishing images of the prophet that "vilif[ied] my faith, dehumanize[d] my community [and] demoralize[d] my prophet.”[52] She promotes Shariah in clever ways (my hijab is my hoodie); openly admires Louis Farrakhan, tries to make pro-Palestinian feminist a tautology, and Zionist feminist an oxymoron.[53]

Speaking at the American Muslims for Palestine conference, she explained her exclusionary, us-them politics:

We have limits to the type of friendships that we're looking for right now, and I want to be friends with those whom I know have been steadfast, courageous, have been standing up and protecting their own communities, those who have taken the risk to stand up and say – we are with the Palestinian people, we unequivocally support BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctioning Israel] when it comes to Palestinian human rights and have been attacked viciously by the very people who are telling you that they're about to stand on the front line of the Muslim registry program [?]. No thank you, sisters and brothers.

As for Muslim and Arab women who either support Israel or criticize triumphalist Muslims?

Brigitte Gabriel=Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s asking for an a$$-whipping. I wish I could take both their vaginas away. They don’t deserve to be women.[54]

On the subject of Muslim violence, she rejects any help from “White women to save us from our men.”[55] Asked to comment on the movie Honor Diaries she responded: “We don’t need Islamophobes to talk to us and tell the stories of oppressed and abused Muslim women.”[56] That might be a defensible position were Sarsour to tell their stories and deal with their oppression and abuse. On the contrary, rather than tackle honor-killings in her community, she prefers to accuse the infidel. In the case of the shame-murder of Shaima Alawadi by her husband Kassim Alhimidi, Sarsour blamed infidels for the murder and screamed Islamophobia.[57] Indeed, there’s little she won’t do to cry Islamophobia, including victimize a mentally ill homeless man as a violent racist.[58] When a women in her organization, harassed by a “pious” Muslim man, appealed to her, she acted in classic “mean-girl” fashion, protecting the man and fat-shaming the woman.[59] If one were to invent a parody of a character who embodied the faux-feminist, Da’ī Caliphator, one would fall short of the real Linda Sarsour.[60]

And if one were to invent a parody of a character who embodied the moral narcissist, Western dupe, one would fall short of the array of women who have glorified her, called, at her bidding, everyone who criticizes her a Zionist Islamophobe, who have thrown their fate in with hers, made her the star of the anti-Trump women’s movement, and excused her every verbal excess, no matter how much more distasteful and offensive than Hirsi-Ali ever pronounced.

Susan Sarandon

✔@SusanSarandon

.@lsarsour: a strong voice advocating for women’s rights & understanding what Muslim women face. Haters will not divide us. #IMarchWithLinda

11:22 PM - Jan 23, 2017

AmnestyInternational

✔@amnestyusa

#IMarchWithLinda because @lsarsour embodies the spirit of a true activist. Stand up against hateful rhetoric. Do not let fear win.

12:28 AM - Jan 24, 2017

Russell Simmons

✔@UncleRUSH

#IMarchWithLinda because she is an inspiration for the kind of leadership this country needs. Compassionate, selfless, loving and inclusive.

9:13 PM - Jan 23, 2017

Mark Ruffalo

✔@MarkRuffalo

@lsarsour You are the best of what America is. Multicultural, compassionate , committed, sincere and human. Don't let anyone get you down.

5:56 AM - Jan 24, 2017

Complete moral, emotional, cognitive, disorientation… and yet, it apparently feels too good not to indulge. Solidarity, sister! And anyone who suggests these folks are useful idiotic infidels is… you guessed it, an Islamophobe. The results will go in one of two directions: either the wider Women’s movement, rejuvenated by Trump’s victory in 2016, will be hijacked by alleged feminists who lead it down the paths identity politics and violent revolution, or the split between the dupes and those who cannot abide this idiocy, will destroy what could have been a powerful movement. Either way, women and their causes around the world lose. (How dare this privileged white Jewish man tell me what’s good for my movement!)

How do allegedly intelligent and committed people get so easily duped by a Da’ī Caliphator who calls for an American Intifada, for Sharia, and a Jihad on the POTUS? How can they repeat pablum and trite rejoinders with such unaware conviction? On some level, they’re caught here between stupidity and malice. The only alternative is the warm feeling of solidarity one gets by joining the lemmings in their mimetic drive off the edge.

rlandes’s Substack

Discussion about this post