One might believe that the feminist agenda is one pushed by women who come from the ‘masses’. This actually is not in particular the case. Almost all of its prominent figures come from elite backgrounds. Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine, went to Smith. Cecile Richards, the longtime head of Planned Parenthood, went to Brown. Her mother was governor of Texas. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is worth more than $1 billion and went to Harvard. Roxane Gay’s parents came from Haiti, so she was hired by the New York Times, adding diversity to its large stable of feminist opinion writers. Gay herself went to boarding school at Phillips Exeter. The next time you see someone on TV discussing feminism you can be confident she’s not a former home health aide with a community college degree. Not surprisingly, affluent feminists tend to lack perspective on oppression. Some speak as if the cruelest fate that can befall a woman is to be patronized by a man, or trapped in a soulless suburb doing laundry and microwaving dinner. But in the world beyond Santa Monica or Martha’s Vineyard, there are greater threats to women.
But let us not keep these threats secret. Here are just a few of the atrocities women face around the world. How much do the American feminists care? Where are their efforts on matters that really count?
– Imagine a place where women are punished for being raped. A place where women are murdered…many times by public beheading…for having affairs. Where women lack equal access to basic healthcare… not just abortions. Where women can’t use public swimming pools. Where women are required to have a male guardian without whose permission they cannot travel, obtain a passport, or even get married. This is not the plot for a Hollywood movie…it’s a real place called Saudi Arabia. It is a major sponsor of conservative Islam worldwide. While travelling from UK to Saudi Arabia I witnessed young women in western ‘garb’…jeans and T-shirt…slowly migrate to the lady’s room about an hour out and emerged in a black outfit covering all but their eyes. In Saudi Arabia every woman is subject to the authority of a “wali”, a male guardian who is typically her husband, father, or other family member. Almost anything of importance requires the wali’s permission and a woman who disobeys can go to prison. Why do we do business with countries like this? Where are the feminists on questions like this?
– But not to worry…it gets worse. Other countries governed by Islamic law and customs follow similar principles, only distinguished by a greater level of violence. In 2016, a social media celebrity named Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother in an honor killing in Pakistan. Her crime? Posting pictures of herself on-line. There were at least 1000 honor killings in Pakistan that year…and, every year. Perpetrators are rarely punished, possibly because they enjoy nationwide support. And these attitudes can travel. London, home to a high number of Pakistani immigrants, recorded more than eleven thousand “honor crimes” between 2010 and 2014, including eighteen murders. Where are the feminists who I would think would be picketing the Pakistani embassy?
– Like I said, it doesn’t stop there. In 2016, a reporter for the Guardian visited a genital mutilation ceremony in Indonesia, an annual event. Hundreds of girls, some infants, lay on desks at a local school and waited to have their genitals mutilated with scissors. A local Islamic organization gave parents seven dollars and a bag of food for every daughter they brought in. It was done to ‘protect’ the daughter’s chastity and beauty. The UN estimates that about 200 million girls have undergone this mutilation…virtually every woman in Somalia.
– Thanks to mass immigration, these customs have arrived in the United States. In July of 2008 a Pakistani man living in the suburbs of Atlanta strangled his 25 year old daughter with a bungee cord because she wanted to end an arranged marriage. Before a judge he declared he had done nothing wrong. An Iraqi immigrant in El Cajon, California, in 2014 beat his wife to death because she wanted a divorce. A DOJ study in 2015 estimated that there are dozens of ‘honor killings’ in the United States every year by immigrants. Virtually all victims are women who have become “too Westernized”.
– Uncontrolled immigration has had its negative impacts on Europe in the form of a wave of sex crimes. During New Year’s eve celebrations in Germany at the end of 2015, hundreds of women in Cologne were groped and sexually assaulted in public by mobs of men, almost entirely of Arab or North African origin. Police initially reacted by ignoring the attacks entirely. In the British city of Rotherham, a group of Pakistani men abducted, sexually abused, and raped more than 1,400 children, primarily teenage girls, for more than a decade. Police and local government knew about the crimes but did nothing. Why? Fear that singling out the Muslim community would be decried as racist. Similar abuses were uncovered in Rochdale, Bristol, Derby, Halifax, Keighly, Newcastle, Oxford, and Aylesbury.
One would think that feminists would see traditional Islamic views of women, and the increasing prevalence of those views in the West, with concern. These medieval customs from the Islamic world would appear to be the most significant threat to the advances women have made since the 1960’s. Where’s the alarm one would expect to hear? It’s not there. These feminists still see the threat to their not being able to ‘murder’ the unborn as the greatest threat. In fact they tend to support immigration without any limiting conditions. More about that next week.
I will close out this week with a personal opinion. If I were a Christian…which I am…and I saw Christians committing abominable acts in the guise of the Bible, I would quit being a Christian. Likewise, if I were a Muslim and I saw Muslims committing abominable acts in the guise of the Koran, I would quit being a Muslim. Oh, but I forgot, quitting being a Muslim is punishable by death. This nation had best wake up…and soon.
– Bob Munsey
Geezer Politics 