Sisters Just Doing It for Themselves
Via Professor Reynolds, have a look at Pamela Bone’s excellent essay in today’s The Australian on the sad subject of the Western feminist’s abandonment of women living under the yoke of Islam (emphasis mine):
The question is why so many Western feminists do not speak out about the cruelty that blights the lives of millions of women in Islamic countries and would do the same to women everywhere else should the Islamists succeed in their stated aim of creating a worldwide caliphate. “On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say,” [Sarah] Baxter writes. Says [Phyllis] Chesler: “Women’s studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They did not.”
The reason, as writer Fay Weldon has said, is that these days racism is a much worse sin than sexism: a consequence, perhaps, of the success of the women’s movement in the West. Women who would speak out don’t because of a (justified) fear that they will be branded racists. Chesler has been ostracised by many of her old friends in the women’s movement. It has been said she has become paranoid or gone mad or, worse, turned right-wing.
I think Bone’s is probably the most insightful explanation of the abandonment issue —which I absolutely take for granted— that I have yet read. And it is part and parcel of the larger failure of the so-called Liberal West to advocate exactly those policies to the Muslim world that would sooner lead to the resolution of the struggle between our civilizations.
Because, in the end —by any empirical standard worth observing— the triumph of Western values is self-evidently justified. And that Western women, especially, cannot seem to bring themselves to advocate reproductive choice, suffrage, marital and property rights, and any number of other things to the wider world is an inexplicable tragedy —which arises, ironically, from the fault of unearned privilege.
You know, ladies, Oprah can’t do it all by herself.
