THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume IX, Issue # 204, October 30, 2007
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WESTERN FEMINISTS -- AT THE SERVICE OF RADICAL ISLAM:
The Full Story by Phyllis Chesler
WESTERN FEMINISM, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, & OTHER ACADEMIC THOUGHT DISORDERS: THE DOUBLE
STANDARD MAINTAINED IN COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WESTERN & ISLAMIST SOCIAL SYSTEMS -- CONDEMNING
AS PATRIARCHAL WESTERN INSTITUTIONS OF MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE, BIOLOGICAL MOTHERHOOD,
HETEROSEXUALITY & RELIGION, WHILE VIEWING ISLAMIC VEILING, THE HEAD SCARF, SECLUSION OF WOMEN, ARRANGED
MARRIAGE, & POLYGAMY AS SACRED RELIGIOUS RIGHTS -- TOLERATION OF MAJOR MISOGYNY, BARBARISM, & GENOCIDAL
VIOLENCE PRACTICED IN OR BY ISLAMIC CULTURES & COUNTRIES -- PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY PRESSES PUBLISHING
NON-SCHOLARLY WORKS, WORKS OF PROPAGANDA WRITTEN BY WESTERN FEMINISTS & LIBERAL LEFTISTS WHO ARE
ASSISTING THE ISLAMISTS IN THEIR GLOBAL WAR AGAINST AMERICA & THE WEST -- AIDING & ABETTING THE
ISLAMIZATION OF THE U.S.A. & THE WEST
BOOKS REVIEWED
Katherine Bullock (Editor). Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves. Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 2005. 215 pp. $22.95, paper.
Ann Chamberlin. A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East: The Veil in the Looking Glass. New York,
London, Oxford: Haworth Press, 2006. 298 pp. $39.95
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
One might expect Western feminists to take the lead in challenging Islamic gender apartheid, but, sadly, this is not the
case. Rather, they tend to be more concerned with Israel's "occupation" of Palestine or the U.S. "occupation" of
Afghanistan and Iraq than with the Islamist persecution of women. They consider it "racist" to condemn gender
apartheid of the most savage sort, and "racism" trumps concerns about gender.
Incredibly, those same Western feminists who condemn as patriarchal Western institutions of marriage, biological
motherhood, heterosexuality, and religion now view Islamic veiling, the hijab (head scarf), purdah (seclusion of women),
arranged marriage, and polygamy as sacred religious rights. Those same feminists who condemn Christianity and
Judaism for more minor (but still serious) misogynist practices only whisper about major Islamic misogyny, lest it be
viewed as politically incorrect criticism of a formerly colonized culture. Like other academics, feminists will not
characterize a culture as "barbaric," if it is an Arab or Muslim country, not even if that culture or country is perpetrating
genocidal violence against Muslims and what I call gender-cleansing, as is the case in the Sudan. Western feminists
and Leftists do not feel it is their right to condemn Muslim-on-Muslim violence.
Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves and A History of Women's Seclusion in
the Middle East: The Veil in the Looking Glass take such thought disorders to new Orwellian heights. Both books
are published by university or academic presses; both have many footnotes, and the latter volume has a long, somewhat
outdated bibliography. These academic trappings notwithstanding, neither volume is a scholarly work; but each is a
work of propaganda, in the latter case, of a rather fevered imagination. Both volumes illustrate the worrisome trend of
prestigious presses publishing non-scholarly works disguised as works of scholarship. (Other examples include the
University of California Press publishing Norman Finkelstein, Oxford University Press publishing Tariq Ramadan, and
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux publishing John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.)
When Bullock mentions Muhammad, she consistently follows his name with the phrase "peace be upon him" and refers
to "Muslim religious theology" as "the Islamic sciences." She views Muslim communities in North America as "under
siege" and condemns imaginary, omnipresent "Muslim bashing" and "hate crimes" against Muslims. In her view,
"covered" women are not oppressed because "many do positive volunteer activism." Paradoxically, however, Bullock
herself notes that many such "covered" and "non-oppressed" Muslim women in this volume themselves write about
"negative pressures" from within the Muslim community regarding a "woman's right to speak publicly, [and] be involved
in community decision making." Such women have only been able to resist community pressures with the "help of a
father or husband."
Bullock's authors also propound some chilling ideas. Nimat Hafez Barazangi, born in Syria and currently living in Ithaca,
New York, views herself as a "feminist activist." But I see her as an Islamist exploring ways to use the American legal
system to wrest some separate-but-equal gender justice for Muslim women and girls (and only for them, not for other
groups of girls and women). I do not oppose such efforts, but they are far short of what Muslim women, even in Ithaca,
probably need. Proudly, Barazangi reports how she used Title Nine and the Fourteenth Amendment to persuade Ithaca
town officials to allow Muslim girls to swim separately from boys. However, she was unable to persuade Muslim families
to allow their daughters and wives to swim at all.
Gul Joya Jafri, a Canadian Muslim and self-described activist, worked with the Afghan Women's Organization. She
addressed the way in which the mainstream media portrays Muslim women. Her activism consisted of monitoring media
outlets and fighting against "anti-Islam" forces. Joya Jafri's activism does not find it incumbent to protest women's forced
wearing of burqas or women's mistreatment by the Taliban. Instead, she laments that the media chooses to portray only
these aspects and stories about Afghanistan. It is "true," she says, "but it doesn't need to be reported in that way." As a
high school student, Joya Jafri "dreamily quoted the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights: ‘Everyone has a right
to life, liberty and security of the person,'" but, as an adult, she focuses on a fair portrayal of Muslims in the media —
presumably, a portrayal that does not focus upon or condemn forced veiling, forced marriage, wife beating, female genital
mutilation and honor murders, but that, instead, focuses on a Muslim woman's right to practice Islam in a highly visible
and separatist way in the West. Like Bullock and Barazangi, hers is a faith-based perspective — one that does not focus
on a Muslim woman's right not to cover, become an "apostate," or to live in a way in which the separation of mosque and
state is viewed as an advantage.
Chamberlin's work amounts to a romantic hodgepodge moored in American feminism of the 1970s. In effect, she argues
that Western women who seek to integrate previously male-only space are far more "conservative" and "patriarchal" than
are American lesbian separatists or veiled Muslim women who live in purdah. She sees women-only religious rituals and
women-only space as equivalent to anti-patriarchal protest or resistance movements. She views purdah as a "feminist
defense against exploitation and as an empowering force." In truth, very wealthy women may have "ruled" other women in
the harem or household, but this is equivalent to a wife or mother-in-law ruling her female servants. Some may have
influenced their sons or husbands in ways that had far-reaching consequences; however, this paradigm describes only a
handful of Muslim women, not the masses at their mercy.
Chamberlin's approach is seductive and dangerous. It caters to a woman's desire to feel morally separate and superior,
valued, and safe. Chamberlin claims that slave women in the pre-Islamic and pagan Middle East were forced to work naked
and to be sexually available at any moment to all men. Thus, "covered" and secluded women were safer than slave or
"uncovered" women, mainly because they only had one male master, not many. The distinction is similar to that between
housewives and prostitutes.
The conclusions Chamberlin draws are zany. In her own words:
"X million tons of toxic waste created per year or an astronomical
national deficit are to the natural and economic resources of our
children what the abstraction and exploitation of the individual —
women in particular — are to their emotional resources. When
faced with exploitation similar to what American women — and
more gravely, their children — stand on the brink of today,
women in the Middle East, millennia ago, threw their veil over
their faces, put up a wall of mystified honor, and said: ‘So far you
may exploit, but by God no further.'"
The Islamization of America has begun. Pro-Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Jewish hate speech is protected on
American campuses by concepts such as academic freedom and freedom of speech. False and often paranoid allegations of
"Islamophobia" are taken seriously by Western intellectual elites who deny (or justify) the reality of the Islamist war against
infidels. Doctrines of multicultural relativism and unspoken fears about "death by lawsuit" or physical acts of violence make
it difficult for anyone to tell the truth about the Islamist war against Western values.
If Western feminists are not alone in appeasing Islamization, then, the postcolonial and postmodern feminist academy is very
much part of the problem.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The American Political & Cultural Left:
Liberals, Statists, Socialists, & Other Leftists
Political Correctness, Censorship, Thought Control:
Supression of Unacceptable Views & Opinions
The Fifth Column -- America's Internal Enemies:
Disloyalty, Subversion, Sedition, & Treason
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Phyllis Chesler is the author of fifteen books, including Women and Madness (Doubleday, 1972), and, most recently,
The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She is the
co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women's Health Network.
The foregoing bibliographical essay by Phyllis Chesler was originally published in the Middle East Quarterly, and
can be found on the Internet website
maintained by the Middle East Forum, a think tank which seeks to define and
promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam, working for
Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote constitutional
democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly asserting U.S.
interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
October 30, 2007
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