The Feminist Deception by Caroline Glick

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.
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.
The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren't a hollow term, then prominent feminists would be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement. Gloria Steinem and her sisters would be leading the call for the overthrow of the anti-female mullocracy in Iran and the end of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia.
Instead, in 2008 Ms. Magazine, which Steinem founded and which has served as the mouthpiece of the American feminist movement, refused to run an ad featuring then foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and then speaker of the Knesset Dalia Itzik that ran under the headline, "This is Israel." It was too partisan, the magazine claimed.
Leading feminist voices in the US and Europe remain unforgivably silent on the unspeakable oppression of women and girls in Islamic societies. And this cannot simply be attributed to a lack of interest in international affairs. Islamic subjugation and oppression of women happens in Western countries as well. Genital mutilation, forced marriage and other forms of abuse are widespread.
For instance, every year hundreds of Muslim women and girls in Western countries are brutally murdered by their male relatives in so-called "honor killings." Pamela Geller, the intrepid blogger at Atlas Shrugs website has steadfastly documented every case she has found. This year she ran an ad campaign on public buses and taxis in major US cities to raise public awareness of their plight. And for her singular efforts in championing the right to life of Muslim women and girls, she has been reviled by the Left as an anti-Islamic bigot.
Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to flee Holland and live surrounded by bodyguards for the past six years because she has made an issue of Islamic oppression of women and girls. The Left - including the feminist movement - has treated this remarkable former Muslim and champion of women's rights as a leper.
IF ALL the feminist community's policy of ignoring Islamic oppression of women did was keep it out of the headlines it would still be unforgivable. But the fact is that by not speaking of the central challenge to women's rights in our times, the organized feminist movement, and the Left it is a part of, are abetting Islam's unspeakable crimes against women and girls. It does so in two ways.
Tyranny unchallenged is tyranny abetted. And the first way that the organized feminist movement and the Left abet the oppression of women by Islamic authorities is by signaling to those authorities that they can get away with it. This truth is laid bare by the responses of Islamic authorities in the rare cases where their oppression of women has received Western attention.
For instance, in 2006, an Iranian Islamic court found Mohammadi-Ashtiani guilty of adultery and sentenced the ethnic Azeri kindergarten teacher and mother of two to death by stoning. She was later also found guilty of murdering her husband. Ashtiani's confessions in both cases were extracted under torture. She has already received 99 lashes for her reputed initial crime. Not a Farsi or Arabic speaker, when her adultery trial ended, Ashtiani didn't even know she was convicted or what her sentence was.
In recent years, Ashtiani's children assisted by Iranian émigré and non-leftist human rights groups launched a courageous campaign to save her life. Over the past year, the campaign was covered in the Western media and garnered the support of notables such as the French and Canadian prime ministers' wives as well as international film stars like Lindsay Lohan, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Robert Redford and Juliette Binoche.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International got on board this past summer and decried her treatment. Clinton herself gave a half sentence condemnation of Ashtiani's persecution in August. Indeed, the international attention focused on Ashtiani may have been the reason the Obama administration belatedly voiced opposition to Iran's election to the new UN women's rights council. Iran was elected by acclamation in April, but later defeated by India when a roll call vote was called.
Reeling from this criticism, Iranian authorities began backtracking. First they claimed Ashtiani's death sentence would be cancelled. Then they said she would be hanged rather than stoned. Today her fate remains unclear and her life is still in grave danger. But if pressure on Iranian authorities keeps up, there is a reasonable chance that Ashtiani's long ordeal will end in life, rather than death.
Ashtiani's case is proof that when the West makes the barbaric abuse of women an issue, the Islamic world attenuates its abuse of women. Pressure works. In contrast, an absence of pressure empowers the oppressors.
THE SECOND way that the feminists and the Left they are a part of abet Islamic oppression of women is through their animosity towards Israel. When the Shariah- besotted leaders of the Muslim world see the Western Left devote its energies to attacking Israel - the only human rights and women's rights protecting country in the Middle East - they see there is no reason for them to reconsider their willingness to tyrannize their women and girls.
Take Indonesia for example. In 2003, then Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri agreed that as part of a ceasefire agreement, the separatist Aceh province was allowed to institute Shariah law as the law of the province. In 2009, the Aceh parliament passed a law making adultery punishable by stoning. On the central squares of the province that is home to 4 million, people are routinely publicly whipped for offenses against Islam.
For example, just last Friday Anis Saputra, 24, and Kiki Hanafilia, 17 each received eight lashes in a public ceremony outside a local mosque for being caught kissing in October. The two are reportedly married to other people and they apparently were given lashes rather than stoned to death because they had yet to consummate their alleged romance.
Last year the province also forbade women and girls from wearing pants. A France 24 investigation of Shariah in Aceh showed a traumatized 14 year old girl who was beset by Islamic police on her way home from school. They cut her jeans off in the middle of the street.
Yet rather than criticize Indonesia for these appalling developments, last month Obama visited Jakarta and waxed poetic about Islamic tolerance of differences and applauded Indonesia for its commitment to democracy. And while ignoring Indonesia's repressive Shariah-ruled province where Islamic oppression is the rule not the exception, Obama devoted his criticism to attacking Israel for allowing Jews to build homes in Jerusalem.

THERE IS NO doubt that attitudes that discriminate against women exist today in Western countries as well as in Israel. Women in the free world have unique challenges to overcome because of our gender. But a sense of proportion is required here. These challenges are not overwhelming, systemic or in most cases life-threatening.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of women and girls throughout the Islamic world are daily terrorized by everyone from their families to their judges. They have no reason to believe that if challenged their rights - even their right to life - will be protected.
The fact that the ladies in Philadelphia decided to take their stand against Israel and that that Clinton and Obama attack Israel for building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria while they all ignore the suffering of the women of Islam speaks volumes about the degradation of the West under the Left's social and political leadership. It also tells non-leftist women in the West that being pro-women's rights and being a feminist are increasingly mutually exclusive.

Philly BDS Flashdance!

This century's nazi freaks ....... do these women know that lesbians are executed in Muslim countries? Do these women know that the jihad in Israel is about Islamic antisemitism, not land? Do these women care about the gender apartheid in the Muslim world?

Why aren't they chanting against this or this or this? (and all of those "thises" were just from yesterday.)

Thanks to David who sent this in and wrote:

These are Princeton students protesting the sale of SABRA & Tribe hummus at a Philly supermarket as part of Israel Apartheid week (or is it month?). As YouTube poster brabon1 wrote: "I have never seen such a conglomeration of more unattractive women in my life".

Greg Gutfeld, host of Red Eye, also points out that SABRA isn't even a product of Israel; the company started here in the US and was recently bought by PepsiCo.

Anyway, the net result of dumb, anti-Semitic uggo's riffing on Lady GAGA just made me want to go out and buy some SABRA and Tribe hummus for the first time in my life. David

Peace Activists Abducted and Raped by Arabs

The hypocrisy of the left is limitless.

Prof calls fellow academics ‘sanctimonious bigots’

The refusal of women’s studies professors to publicly condemn honor killings, or academic advocates of gay rights to speak out against the treatment of homosexuals in Muslim countries, is just about as hypocritical as it gets. Their loathing (dare we call it hate?) of the UN-created Jewish state is so deep that it “trump[s] their professional interests,” leading them into a “ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making,” Prof. Gottheil added.

Leftists so cling to their Jew-hatred that they will sacrifice their women, their bogus "sanctity," their non-existent humanity, to advance their hate and genocidal aspirations. This report defies any semblance of reason or compassion:

Arabs Harass Female 'Peace' Activists; Left Silences Victims

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes.

Roni Aloni Sedovnik, a feminist activist, penned an article in News1 – an independent website run by respected investigative reporter Yoav Yitzchak – under the heading “The Left's Betrayal of Female Peace Activists Who were Sexually Assaulted.”

“A nauseous atrocity has been going on for a long time behind the scenes at the leftists' demonstration at Bil'in, Naalin and Sheikh Jarrah [Shimon HaTzaddik],” she writes. “A dark secret that threatens to smash the basic ideological values upon which the demand to end the occupation of the Territories rests.”

It turns out, she explains, that when female peace activists from Israel and abroad come out to Judea and Samaria and demonstrate against the Israeli “occupation,” they are assaulted sexually by the Arab men whom they have come to help. These are not isolated incidents, Aloni-Sedovnik stresses. Rather, this is an “ongoing and widespread” phenomenon that includes verbal and physical abuse. She accuses the 'peace' camp of purposely covering up the trend so as not to offend “the Palestinians and their heritage, which sees women as sexual objects.”

Media cover-up
Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.”

The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the 'occupation.'

The second case involved an Israeli activist who took part in the demonstrations at Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, where the High Court ruled that Jewish families may move into homes that they have owned for generations. This woman filed a complaint with the police but retracted it after “severe and unfair pressure” from the demonstrations' organizers, according to Aloni-Sedovnik. Furthermore, the organizers appealed to demonstrators to dress modestly when they come to the Arab neighborhoods and suggested that they wear head scarves.

Aloni-Sedovnik accuses the Israeli media of complicity in the cover-up.

“How is it that we do not hear the voice of the radical feminists who repeat, day and night, that occupation is occupation, and it does not matter if it is a nation that is doing the subjugation, or a man who is subjugating a woman?

"It appears that there is a gap between the radical-leftist feminist theory about the active resistance to the occupation of the Territories, and the stuttering self-annulment in the face of the violent conquest of women.”

The Umm Salmona case was reported in Haaretz as an attempted rape but does not seem to have made it beyond the blog pages.

Foreign women raped and subjugated
Earlier this year, a blogger and literature buff named Yehudah Bello, who writes in various venues about history and the theory of evolution, wrote a blog post with the striking title: “The Female Leftist Activists are Raped Day after Day, Night after Night.” Bello is no ultra-nationalist, and he supports the creation of a PA state – a fact which makes his claims all the more believable.

Most female leftist European activists, writes Bello, are brainwashed in their youth into hating Israel, and then sent directly into Judea and Samaria, without spending a single night in Tel Aviv, lest they see civilian Israeli society for themselves and find that they like it. They are whisked off to Shechem, Jenin and other PA towns and housed in Arab educational or cultural facilities, or private homes. Local Arab girls are sent to befriend them and they have no choice but to trust them.

It is is easy, explains Bello, “to carry out a sexual crime against a foreign girl, in her first days away from her family, in a place where no police have ever visited. And this is what happens, and has happened.”

"I was told of such rape cases by women who are not Jewish: a female European leftist activist, a female Red Cross volunteer and a young Arab woman from Yafo,” he says. He says that he met these women when he carried out IDF reserve duty, and met them afterward as well. “They told me what goes on there, in the Palestinian villages, far from any prying eye.”

"These are not just cases of rape carried out to satisfy lust,” he writes. “Usually, they are carried out systematically in order to make the girl pregnant and then take her as a wife – after she converts to Islam, of course. We know about this system from the stories of women who underwent a similar process within Israel and escaped to Europe. But it is hard to escape from the Palestinian territories. Sometimes these women – some of whom are no longer young – are never allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied, in order to forestall their escape.”

If someone were to compare the list of foreign female activists who enter Judea and Samaria to the list of those who leave, Bello claims, the magnitude of the phenomenon would be proven. “Everyone knows about it, but no one dares talk about it. The Palestinians have been turned into martyrs. In the Middle Eastern television channels, IDF soldiers are represented as the brutal rapists, who rape Palestinian women.”

New Israel Fund involvement
The reports by Aloni-Sedovnik and Bello are of particular interest because feminist groups have been spearheading leftist activism in Israel for many years. According to Gila Svirsky, the former director of the New Israel Fund in Israel and founder of NIF-sponsored Women's Coalition for Peace, “women’s peace organizations, known collectively as the Israeli women’s peace movement, became the most vibrant and persistent part of the peace camp in Israel.” These groups espouse an ideology which equates militarism (by Israelis) with male domination of women. Far from being a fringe element, leftist-feminists of this ilk are a dominant force in the Israeli academic world, the press, the Knesset and the judicial system.