The Silence of the Feminists

I have variously had occasion, at times when women were being mistreated, to point out the silence of the feminists. For reasons yet to be discerned, we often see feminist leaders take a pass when women are being abused, exploited and mistreated.

To be more obvious than need be, on October 7 Hamas terrorists raped and mutilated Israeli women. And the presumably feminist presidents of major universities like Harvard, Penn and Columbia, refused to condemn them and their supporters. 

If you cannot denounce terrorists who decapitate babies, burn children and rape women-- how do you dare claim that you are defending women’s rights?

Of course, there are exceptions. They prove the rule.

As feminist Phyllis Chesler points out in a New York Post column, feminism has been hijacked by a “‘woke’ death cult.” After all, Hamas has brutalized and exploited the women of Gaza. American feminists, Chesler explains, are up in arms in favor of having trans women in women’s locker rooms, but, when it comes to defending oppressed women, they fall silent, like lambs.

She makes the case:

Those American feminists left standing, including the icons among us, primarily favor gender over sex identity; are pro-trans rather than pro-biological-womankind; and are more obsessed with the alleged occupation of a country that has never existed (Palestine, Gaza) than they are with the occupation of female bodies in Gaza — where girls and women are forced into child and polygamous marriages, made to veil and, together with male homosexuals, “honor” killed by their families.

And most feminists have been notably silent about the massacre in Israel. Chesler explains:

At this horrifying moment in history, when Hamas, an ISIS-like, Taliban-like terrorist group, has savagely and sadistically murdered, tortured, mutilated, raped and burned Israeli civilians alive, including babies, young women and grandmothers, I note a terrible silence, a moral failure, among those women, including women activists, who live in freedom in America.

You would think that they would be marching against rapists. Not so fast:

We cannot believe feminists’ almost absolute silence after Hamas launched its terrorist attack against Jews this month — which included raping young women next to their dead friends and then parading them, bloodied between their legs, through Gaza streets.

Rape in a war zone is considered a crime — as long as the victims are not Jews.

As for the evidence, Chesler has saved us all the trouble of thumbing through the feminist websites:

A quick survey of surviving feminist websites, including Ms., Women’s eNews, Jezebel, Slate, Salon, Lilith, etc. revealed nothing that specifically condemned Hamas for raping, kidnapping and mutilating women.

Why?

The failure to even grapple with this subject speaks volumes.

And that’s not all:

Eleanor Smeal a former National Organization for Women president and head of the Feminist Majority Foundation (which publishes Ms. Magazine), campaigned from the 1990s through last month on behalf of Afghan women; I cannot find anything she’s written condemning the rape and murder of Israeli Jewish women.

Not a word from Christian F. Nunes, NOW’s current president; nor from Equality Now, founded by Jessica Neuwirth and Navi Pillay (the latter of United Nations anti-Israel infamy); Laurie Adams, Women for Women International chief executive officer; or Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood president.

UN Women, “the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women,” says it “condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls.”

But its statement doesn’t mention Hamas at all — and calls Israel’s efforts to have civilians evacuate Gaza so it can root out the terrorists “extremely dangerous.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps calling for a cease-fire and declared a key problem between Israel and Hamas is . . . Christian fundamentalists and Donald Trump.

This confirms that the feminist movement I once knew, but long ago, has lost its moral compass.

What should feminists do?

Feminists — we all — should be calling for a Nuremberg-like trial here, extraditing Hamas leaders who have murdered and kidnapped Americans as well as Israelis and citizens of other nations or ordered it.

This is why I favor showing all the images of the atrocities.

Can American military might and Israeli military intelligence unite to find and free the Israeli hostages?

Can we capture and put the Iran-backed Hamas fiends on trial?

Force Egypt to open the Rafah crossing and other Arab and Muslim countries to welcome Gazan civilians?

Can we finally wrestle with the existential and global threat that a nearly nuclear Iran poses to both America and the Middle East?

Feminists aren’t grappling with any of these questions.

Their silence speaks volumes.

Were you to ask how it happened that feminist leaders chose not to denounce Hamas atrocities, the answer pops off the page. Feminism belongs to the revolutionary vanguard that is mobilizing against patriarchy and capitalism. Feminists might not know that the origin of Western patriarchy lies in the religion of the patriarchs, but they act as if they do.

Modern feminism comes to us from the fevered brain of one Friedrich Engels, the number 2 communist roader. In his late nineteenth century book, The Origin of the Family Engels argued that women are an oppressed class, like the proletariat.

They are oppressed by the family structure, by the system of private property and by the state. By his reasoning, they need to make themselves independent of men, with their own wealth and their own careers.

Does that sound familiar?

They can only do so by taking political action, by leading a revolution against the patriarchal capitalist order. If so, they must join together with the other oppressed groups, the better to form an intersectional vanguard.

One recalls, from a post a couple of days ago, that feminist firebrand Judith Butler, agitator for gay rights among other things, drools on about how wonderful it would be for Gazans to have a Palestinian state. Berkeley professor Butler is not smart enough to know that Hamas and its satraps would not exactly welcome her into their midst. Since she is notably gay, they would hang her from a lamppost.

It would be a small sacrifice in order advance the cause of worldwide revolution. 

Some people believe that modern feminism does not arise from Marxist deliria, but, truth be told, it has never shed its root cause.

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