Tuesday, May 01, 2007

What DOES give with Western Feminists?

Dymphna of The Gates of Vienna has a new piece up at The Global Politician today and boy oh boy, she packs a wallop with it.

What gives with Western feminism? Families of Muslim women rape, torture, behead, crucify, and hang them in public squares - all because they have committted the truly mortal sin of being female - yet the silence here on the behalf of these victims is deafening.

Compared to the suffering of their Islamic sisters, the indignant chatter about 'oppression' emanating from women in the West is obscene.

Feminists in the U.S. claim that girls in school do less well than boys, and this happens because "America today is a girl-destroying place. Everywhere girls are encouraged to sacrifice their true selves...girls come of age in a misogynistic culture in which men have most of the political and economic power, and girls sense their lack of power." Misogynistic? Girl-destroying? Is America, the destroying place for girls, a recognizable country?

For contrast, try these cautionary tales:
In Sudan women who refuse to convert to Islam from Christianity are gang-raped, their breasts are cut off. Then they are left to die.


In Pakistan laws are structurally biased against women, especially since the advent of the Hadood Ordinances in 1979. Now when coerced sexual assaults cannot be proved, the victim becomes an offender, one who enjoyed illicit sexual activity. She is therefore liable to punishment. Safia Bibi, a blind eighteen year old was raped, subsequently becoming pregnant. Since there was insufficient evidence to prove rape ("sufficient" evidence being eye-witness testimony of four adult Muslim men), the pregnancy itself was evidence of her immoral behavior. Thus she was sentenced to three years in jail and fifteen lashes for having sex outside marriage.

In Yemen on learning that his daughter had eloped with a man from another clan, a father gathered sons, brothers, uncles and cousins, and headed a convoy of twenty cars to storm the bride's new home. Upon retrieving her, she was thrown into one of the cars. As the convoy returned, and reached the edge of her village, her father hurled her to the asphalt and had every car drive over her.

In Jordan, a man received a six-month prison term for stabbing his younger divorced sister thirty times. The murder, termed a misdemeanor by the tribunal, was minimized because the father of both brother and sister dropped charges against his son. The defendant was also sentenced to one week for intoxication and to two months for carrying a knife.

In Palestine a sixteen year-old was raped by her younger brother. Once her pregnant condition became known in the wider community it fell to her older brother to kill her in order to avenge the family honor. "She made a mistake," said one of her male cousins. "She had to pay for it."

Ah, the absolute power of Muslim women, holding Islamic men by the short hairs; indeed the old Arab saying is true: "a man's honor lies between a woman's legs."