Category: Feminism (Page 2 of 3)

Another fine article by Bill Whittle at NRO. Comment thread at Bill’s site.

Bill’s back on PJTV too!

More from Phyllis Chesler: on Ahmadinejad’s upcoming U.N. address, and Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s “The Stoning of Soraya M.”:

What is the point of this heartrending story? Namely, that as Muslim women are being tortured and stoned to death, the Islamist-terrorists, the silent moderate Muslims, and the multi-culturally correct American and European leftists and progressives, including feminists, are de-constructing and justifying the face veil and the head scarf—and strongly opposing American “colonialist” intervention in the Muslim world.

Their view, and they may not be entirely wrong: Rather than shedding American and Western blood in vain and thereby incurring the hatred of the world, let’s give up on the Islamic world and leave them to devour each other as they have always done. Let them stone their women to death. No matter what barbarism they engage in, invading or “interfering” would be worse. The western elites hold that this view is savvy, cool, politically correct, multi-culturally sensitive, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, even feminist, and so on.

Read the whole thing.

Though I fully realize that — Bill Whittle’s hopeful “cheering her from the rafters” comment notwithstanding — there are plenty of anti-war, or anti-“conservative”-economic-policy, or otherwise differently ideologically disposed feminists who will not be jumping enthusiastically on the Sarah Palin bandwagon, Phyllis Chesler’s point about the dilemma a few feminists face strikes a definite chord with me:

Do we vote to keep abortion legal and to stop the anti-Choice conservatives from taking over the Supreme Court–or do we vote to make sure that the American military is allowed to stop the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in their tracks? Can we really achieve both goals by voting for one candidate? If not, then what is the more pressing priority? For ourselves, for our country, for the world at this moment in history?

If American women retain the right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term–in my view, a prerequisite to female human freedom, what does this mean if the jihadists bomb the country back to the seventh century? If the jihadists triumph, American women will be forced to convert to Islam, to wear veils or burqas (body bags), and risk being stoned to death, hung, or honor murdered if they want to choose their own husbands, attend college, dress like modern American girls do, or convert to another non-Islamic religion.

…

Mind you: Senator Obama’s eloquence is thrilling and the good old laundry list, beginning with abortion, matters a great deal to me. But jihad is here and here to stay and I would need to be persuaded that Obama and Biden really understand that. Also, since anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism has arisen today on the Left, not the Right, as has the academic feminist betrayal of a universal vision of human rights for everyone, everywhere, including Muslim women and dissidents, I would need to be assured that voting for abortion does not mean that I end up voting against Israel, against the Jews–and against Muslims who are under Islamic seige.

Camille Paglia has plenty of disagreements of her own with Palin’s positions, but is nonetheless cheering her nomination. As something of an apostate myself in relation to contemporary mainstream feminism, with its strong ties to progressive-left ideas about justice, equality, and economics, I for one find it refreshing and heartening to hear from someone who thoughtfully breaks with the regnant orthodoxy, and is inclined to think about individual issues independently of whether her conclusions fit with a particular party’s monolithic, take-it-or-leave-it platform.

On a related note, Neo-neocon made some interesting observations about the anger Sarah Palin’s nomination has provoked in some conventional feminists:

It’s synergistic; something about Palin’s combination of brains, charm, beauty, conservative viewpoints, and proletarian pastimes has brought out an almost unprecedented verbal viciousness in women who by all rights should be proud of her achievements as the second female Vice-Presidential nominee in history. Is this not a goal for which the woman’s movement has labored for so long? Apparently not—if she’s a conservative, and a charming and beautiful one at that.

This seems to be experienced by some as an almost unbearable dilemma, leading a few of Palin’s critics to deny Palin’s very identity as a woman even as they proclaim and deride it. This makes a certain twisted sense: if a feminist defines herself as being for women, and if Palin is a woman with unacceptable views who nevertheless is on the verge of achieving power, then it solves a knotty problem to declare her to be an unwoman.

Thus we get Wilson’s bizarre opening salvo,”Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.” Wilson and her sisters get to define the parameters of womanhood, you see, and to ban those who don’t meet their PC criteria.

Among the seemingly sparse ranks of contemporary feminists who’ve dared to raise a warning lantern regarding the deeply antiliberal tendencies of Islamic fundamentalism, it was not that long ago we lost Oriana Fallaci to cancer. (Additional tributes at neo-neocon and The Economist (login required).)

Now Pamela Bone has passed on. I linked a truly remarkable article she wrote for The Australian back in August of 2006 (Muslim sisters need our help). If what I saw therein was at all typical of her work, what a great loss her death will be for the cause of freedom.

There’s an obituary for Pamela in The Australian.

My kind of feminist!

At Tim Blair’s (hat tip: Instapundit)

This story has been deservedly getting a good deal of attention lately. Thirty-nine-year-old Iranian-American success story Anousheh Ansari, who with her family sponsored the Ansari X-Prize competition that Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne team won in 2004, is about to become the world’s first female space tourist on September 18th — something it’s exceedingly unlikely she’d ever have been able to achieve in her native Iran, due not only to technical and economic limitations, but to cultural restrictions on the choices available to women as well.

The front page of the X-Prize Foundation website says Ansari will be blogging the experience from space.

Good for her, I say, and good for this new era of space travel that we’ve begun to see unfold. Three cheers for freedom, science, and the human spirit of adventure!

UPDATE 9-16: Anousheh’s weblog can be found at http://spaceblog.xprize.org.