Feminists Against Women's Rights

Sometimes the pull of ideology is so strong that well-intentioned zealots end up supporting regimes whose actions violate everything they pretend to hold sacred.

If love is blind, so is ideology. With love, your actions only effect yourself. With ideology, your behavior can influence policy that hurts millions.

Great thinkers supported Communism, even after they had learned of Stalin’s predations. Great philosophers supported Naziism, and their followers have defended them.

Today, serious intellectuals, many of whom label themselves feminists, have been supporting regimes that commit terrorist acts and oppress women.

It’s all about reality. And reality is not about how intoxicated you are with the latest trendy idea. Reality is who you support. Reality is taking sides.

This week, Caroline Glick called out the human rights advocates and feminists who have taken up the Palestinian cause. Parroting the party line, they condemn Israel as a racist, apartheid, fascist state while defending and condoning Islamic regimes that systematically violate everyone’s human rights and that submit women to the worst forms of oppression. Link here. Via Instapundit.

In Glick’s words: “But if being a human rights activist means attacking the only country in the Middle East that defends human rights, then that means that at the very basic level, the term ‘human rights activist‘ is at best an empty term. And if being a feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism too, has become at best, a meaningless term. Indeed, if these anti-Israel female protesters are feminists, then feminism is dead.”

It’s not about what you believe, or which goddess you worship. It’s about whose side you’re on.

If you oppose a democratic country that guarantees women’s rights and defend countries that practice honor killings you are nothing more than a “useful idiot.”

If you fail to support the only nation in the Middle East that practices liberal democratic principles, then you should not become indignant when someone accuses you of not supporting liberal democracy. And when, after denouncing a democratic country, you stand up for groups that practice honor killings and that imprison rape victims, you are simply showing your true colors.

We’re not just talking about radical feminists here. We are also talking about the Obama/Clinton foreign policy.

The staunch feminist who is leading American diplomacy spent most of her first two years in office trying to smear Israel as the obstacle to Middle East peace. Not once did she place the onus on a Palestinian leadership whose deathly embrace of terrorism and tyranny has been the only real obstacle to peace.

As it happens, she has now acknowledged that this policy “reset” has failed. We can only hold our collective breath to see what is going to come next.

And then, as Glick notes, our pro-women and pro-human rights president went to the world’s largest Islamic nation and said nothing about the way women were being brutalized under Shariah law in the nation’s Aceh province. Instead, in a grand gesture of weakness, Obama took the opportunity to criticize Israel as the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Was he speaking truth to power? Not at all. Caving in the pressure? Perhaps. Wanting to ingratiate himself by telling people what they want to hear? Surely.

This will not come as news to readers of this blog, but Caroline Glick explains well what feminism has become: “But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as ‘structurally‘ discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.

“So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.”

Behind its airy rhetoric and gauzy proclamations, feminism has promoted leftist ideology whose proximate enemy is the Republican party, but whose true enemy is Western capitalism and democracy.

If they are not, then we are all waiting for them to stand tall and proud with the only capitalistic democracy in the Middle East.

To remain true to their principles, feminists should systematically denounce the oppression of women in Islamic states.

Perhaps they think that they are standing up to Islamophobia, and thus that they are establishing themselves as vigorously anti-racist. In truth, they have been cowed into submission and into silence by a religion whose name means submission.

As Glick points out, international protest movements often have a salutary effect. As the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The more people draw attention to the way women are oppressed in Islamic countries, the more those countries will be shamed into mitigating their oppressive tactics.

As Glick writes: “Tyranny unchallenged is tyranny abetted.”

As of now the feminist movement is far too preoccupied with its war against Republicans and the Tea Party to worry too much about what happens to women in the rest of the world.

Of else, the movement is being directed by strong women who are afraid to offend Muslim sensibilities.