The Follies of Feminism

Jeff Jacoby hits on an unintended consequence of abortions that my feminist sisters are curiously silent on.

THE UNFETTERED "right to choose" is a progressive value, we are instructed by the abortion lobby - one indispensable to the empowerment of women. But a new study in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) prompts an awkward question: How exactly are American women empowered when abortion is
deployed to prevent the existence of American girls?

This something that conservatives have long been concerned about. Our concerns have also been long pooh-poohed by our feminist sisters..."oh abortion will never be used for that..." they tell us.

Population experts have documented for years the use of abortion for sex selection in regions of the world where sons are more highly prized than daughters.

But is that really happening here in the US (as Jacoby claims)? A pro-life organization says "yes".

The practice of sex-selection abortions is most commonly associated with the cultural mores of Asian nations like China or India. But a new report indicates the influx of immigrants to the United States has brought the grisly practice here and census data is beginning to show a slight gender imbalance as a result.
Asian culture values sons as they are looked to for carrying on the family name and inheriting property and possessions. In India, girls are seen as an expense that poor and middle class families can't afford due to costly dowries.

Emphasis mine. I want my feminist sisters to take note of the above paragraphs. These immigrants...these cultures do not value women in the same way that you want the average white male to "value" them. Like Islam, women can't inherit possessions and property and can't carry on the "family name" so they are considered to be disposable.

So my challenge to my leftward leaning sisters....talk about these issues. Talk about the subrogation of women in Islam. Talk about the fact that women are treated, by many cultures, as second class citizens. Talk about the issues that impact ALL women all over the world! Then maybe you will speak for conservative women like me.

One nightmare is over

I have not discussed the Duke Lacrosse issue, mostly because so many others who were closer to the situation have covered it so very well. However, now that it is done I am wondering what will happen next. What will happen to the three young men whose lives were torn apart for the last 13 months? How will they get their lives and their reputations back?

"Mr. Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David F. Evans no longer face the threat of prison time. But after spending a year vilified as symbols of racism, sexism, and class privilege, they cannot return to their lives of 13 months ago, before the fateful off-campus party.

What will happen to the coach who resigned under pressure? Who will give him his livelyhood back?

"Mr. Evans, his voice breaking at one point, said the players were "just as innocent today as we were back then. Nothing has changed. The facts don't change."
The Bethesda-raised player also got emotional when thanking coach Mike Pressler, who resigned less than a month after the party, saying his coach sacrificed everything. "Sixteen years he spent building up a team to fall on a sword so that we could continue as a team at the university he loved," Mr. Evans said. "We owe him everything."
At a press conference in Rhode Island, the former Duke coach struggled to contain his emotion when asked about Mr. Evans' comments. "A lot was taken from us," Mr. Pressler said. "

Will the teachers and students who convicted these students before the legal process even got started apologize to the students?

"After initial press reports of the March 13, 2006, incident, Duke's lacrosse team was denounced by several commentators -- including Raleigh News & Observer columnist Ruth Sheehan, who urged the university to "shut down" its lacrosse program. Durham Mayor Bill Bell made a similar demand. The university did exactly that -- suspending and then canceling the season for the lacrosse team. Duke students and faculty members also condemned the lacrosse program. English professor Houston A. Baker Jr. accused the university of fostering a "culture of silence that seeks to protect white, male, athletic violence," and 88 faculty members signed a full-page ad in the Duke student newspaper calling the incident a "social disaster." At one of a string of campus protests, Duke student Meenakshi Chivukula said she was "outraged that legal rights are used to quiet this issue." According to a Raleigh News & Observer account, a poster at that same demonstration read: "The DNA will talk, even if the cowards of men's lacrosse won't."

And when the DNA DID talk and it said that the lacrosse players did NOT have sex with the accuser, where were the apologies?

These young men were treated horribly by the University, the DA's office and the Raleigh/Durham community. Where are all of the cries of outrage at the way that these athletes were treated?

At least Don Imus apologized. I doubt these young men will ever get the same - and they certainly deserve it as much as the Rutgers ladies basketball team does.

One step forward, one step back

A positive step in Eritrea.

"Eritrea has banned the life-threatening practice of female circumcision, the Eritrean information ministry has said. "

Female circumcision is a barbaric, painful proceedure that is common in Africa and the Middle East. There has been a large push to get this practice stopped and every country that abolishes this barbaric practice is one more country moving into the 20th century (in terms of womens rights).

Now the step backward.

"Though Christmas is 8 months away, the traditional celebration of the birth of Christ in Italian school districts has become a raging controversy.
Parents of pupils at the Casa del Bosco nursery school in the multi-ethnic Oltrisarco district of Bolzano have been informed that at the school's Christmas concert, the students will not be permitted to sing "Tu scendi dalle stelle" [From Starry Skies Thou Comest].
Ths school's teachers singlehandedly made the decision to eliminate the carol to placate Muslim and other foreign born children, though they celebrate Chinese New Years and "learn about the significance of Ramadan."

Sigh.....I have no problem with the school learning about ALL religious celebrations. Bring on Ramadan, bring on the Chinese New Year, bring on Passover, Easter and anything else! BUT you are wrong, wrong WRONG when you allow the children to celebrate every religion BUT ONE!!! That is discrimination, that is bias and that is government entities promoting one religion over another.

The teachers overstepped their boundaries - the local imam even said so (I'll give credit where credit is due). Rather that trying to justify their actions they should just rescind the decision and move on. What will they do?

How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam

I'm not going to editorialize this one. I'm just going to let this brave lady speak for herself. Some emphasis added.

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.
When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.
In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.
In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.
I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).
Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.
Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.
However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York

Sure they care.

Phyllis Schlafly brings our attention to this lovely gem floating around the halls of Congress.

"Feminists have cooked up a new plan to raid the U.S. Treasury for more feminist pork. They want Congress to pass the International Violence Against Women Act.
They are using a report issued in October by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called "In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women." The report is said to be based on interviews with 24,000 women conducted by the World Health Organization.
Who better to introduce the act than Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the leading advocate of ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women? Biden never saw a U.N. treaty or a radical feminist spending bill that he didn't like. "

As a child of the 1970's, and a woman whose parents raised their girls to not be second fiddle to anyone, I am not afraid to stand up for "my rights" when appropriate. Because I have a position where I can, I am obligated to speak up for women who can not - which is why I write so much about the treatment of women in Islam. With all that said, the last thing women in this country need is a UN dictate that is overseen by countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, India and Columbia.

"Pakistan has ratified the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. That's the country where a tribal council ordered a young woman gang-raped to avenge her brother's crime of being seen with an unchaperoned woman from another tribe. Gang rape is common in Pakistan.
Nigeria has ratified the convention. That's a country where women are stoned to death for the crime of adultery. Islamic law, called shariah, calls for death to women who commit adultery, but a lesser punishment for adulterous men.
Saudi Arabia has ratified the convention. That's the country where 14 girls died inside a Mecca school that went up in flames. Religious police kept rescuers from entering the building because some of the girls were not wearing their head coverings.
Colombia has ratified the convention. That's a country where thousands of women a year are sold into sex slavery. Similar outrages take place in India, Nepal and Thailand, which have also ratified the convention.
All these countries are eligible to sit on the convention's monitoring committee of 23 "experts" who monitor "progress" and order compliance. All U.N. projects to improve the lot of women follow the feminist model: Break up the family, force women into the work force, and send kids to day care. "

Shoot - with that kind of a track record, I'm surprised that Iran isn't on the list.

Ms. Schlafly gets to the dirty little secret of this bill.

"The International Violence Against Women Act is based on the lie that violence against women is the same problem in all countries. Many non-Western countries have social norms that justify abuse (such as genital mutilation, forced marriage, and polygamy), and "international standards" would vastly diminish the rights and benefits U.S. women now enjoy. "

Women here in the US don't need the kind of help the United Nations is offering here. The women that do ned help need help get it from the various church, government and mentoring programs that are available. The truth is, American women are the most fortunate of women in the world. Rather than bring ourselves down to the level of the rest of the world, let's elevate the rest of the women of the world to our level. Let's insist that those societies that treat women as objects and chattel join America in the 21st century when it comes to the treatment of women.

(H/T reader J Ewing)