This Tuesday I found an interview in the Guardian with the American "feminist" Phyllis Chesler, whose recent output - much of it on Front Page Magazine - seems to consist of attacks on Muslims and articles intended to stir up panic about anti-Semitism (like this one). Chesler's thesis is that feminism is affected by "a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid". She also accuses feminists of being "much more concerned about the occupation of a country that doesn't exist - namely Palestine - than they are concerned with the occupation of women's bodies worldwide". (Tags: phyllis chesler, jack straw, blackburn, condoleezza rice.)
Chesler's attitudes are shaped by her experience as the wife of a superficially westernised Afghan in the early 1960s. In the Guardian, she claims that she found herself "clapped up in very posh purdah", where she "wasn't supposed to go out without the chauffeur and without servants in tow and other women of the family". In FPM, she recounts the contempt she showed for local sensibilities by appearing on the verandah of her house (open to public view) in a bathing suit. (Bear in mind, Afghanistan is landlocked ...)
Chesler may have been a groundbreaking feminist in the early 1970s, but today she invariably parrots the FPM line, complete with its blindnesses and inconsistencies:
But are the Islamic nations as culturally monolithic as Chesler suggests? Wasn't Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take a particularly tendentious example, secular? And didn't it offer professional careers for women? "I don't think that makes any big difference. Saddam's regime gassed Kurds and perpetrated genocide. His men kidnapped women and prostitutes off the streets and subjected them to private rape sessions. So merely because his Iraq was religiously secular, and women had certain rights, doesn't mean that we as intelligent western publics should be condoning genocidal states."
I would actually dispute that Saddam Hussain committed genocide; it has taken this long, when the country has been occupied, for accusations of genocide to become commonplace. We all know what he did to suppress Kurdish and Shi'ite uprisings, and that he used nerve agent on civilians, but brutally suppressing an uprising is not the same as the organised massacre of a population with the intent to wipe it out or at least reduce it drastically. The fact that western military action has made matters in Iraq worse for a lot of people, including a lot of women by encouraging the rise of Saudi/Taliban-style moral vigilantism, does not seem to occur to her.
The phrase "gender apartheid" is fairly typical of the "terminology hijackings" we regularly see from FPM types; the reference is obviously to South Africa, in which blacks and whites were separated by whites who objected, among other things, to race mixing. It also pushed blacks off their own lands and onto infertile patches so they would be forced to do cheap labour for whites to survive. It was certainly not "posh purdah", and is not the same as maintaining some degree of separation between the sexes to avoid temptation or trouble (keep in mind, in many Muslim societies cousins routinely marry). In some places the separation is more rigid than in others, but in any upper-class home, in any culture, you are likely to be required to respect some unfamiliar and (to you) onerous customs if you come from an average family which, for example, has never employed servants of any sort. (The hypocrisy is also clear: these people are also very fond of accusing other people of drawing inappropriate "moral equivalences" - witness their rage whenever someone compares America, or Israel, to their enemies.)
And the situation of women in the western world right now - that is, middle-class women, for the most part - is not the result of being vilified or attacked by foreigners, but of a progressive movement lasting a hundred years which started as a reaction to the appalling situation women were in in the Victorian age in which they could not even protect their own property. Supposed attempts to advance women's rights in the Muslim world have generally been the work of local rulers, not western colonisers, and has often purposely excluded religious women. To take an extreme example, female genital mutilation persisted in Somalia (as in Egypt) throughout the British and Italian occupations and has started to decline only in the last couple of decades, on the population's own initiative. We all know the attitudes some Muslims have towards western women, but given that western women do not change their behaviour on account of these attitudes (I do not mean avoiding certain cafés, but changing the way they dress in general), it can hardly be expected that Muslims change theirs in response to the dictates of arrogant foreigners either.
I missed my chance to blog on the Jack & Condi tour when it was news because I was busy and then away, but I find it quite understandable that Condoleezza Rice was not welcome in any mosque in Blackburn. It is not only the Iraq war the Muslims object to, but to such matters as speeches about crusades and an enemy named Satan, their kidnapping of Muslims to Guantánamo Bay, their abuses of inmates there, in Abu Ghuraib and in Afghanistan, and to the various abuses which have affected Muslims in the USA itself. Muslims do read the news and some of us get the CAIR email circulars, so we're aware of the way Muslims were treated by vindictive police after 9/11 (such as Dr Taha Alwani). The likelihood is that whoever issued the threats had no intention of carrying them out (would the police not have been able to stop an invasion of the mosque in any case?), but did so because they did not want Jack Straw and Condi Rice in the mosque, regardless of how buddy-buddy the local Muslim leaders are with Jack Straw or what favours Straw has done the local Gujaratis.
I agree with you that if you choose to live in a country which has different standards of dress, you should respect them - and so if I were to go to Afghanistan, I would cover myself up because that is what women do there.
Having said that, as I understand it, those Western women who speak out against the way in which women live in other countries do so because the women in those countries have said that they are not happy and would like to live differently and more freely. In other words, they are trying to support the women in those countries. It isn't as if they are trying to drag legions of happy women out of a lifestyle that suits them down to the ground for their own nefarious purposes.
Phyllis Chesler's a real piece of work. She makes Melanie Phillips seem honest and genuine by comparison.
She's just another one of these ex-Jewish leftists who've joined the pro-zionist anti-islam faction. She's like Melanie Phillips in that sense. Melanie Phillips though at least sounds intelligent. Chesler doesn't really sound like she knows anything about anything. Look at her website. All the articles are almost exactly the same.Theres a trend now that people who are pro-war and anti-islam will be given attention and air time regardless of how relevant or even accurate what they say is. In one of articles she states that the middle east is a "jew free" zone outside of Israel even though this is a factually incorrect statement.
Front Page Magazine is a webzine for Islamophobic hacks who are too extreme for the mainstream media. For example, they gave refuge to Ann Coulter after she was fired from National Review.
Good point about "ex-Jewish leftists" (I'm assuming this is code for "Trots"), they've simply transmogrified their belief in World Socialist Revolution (spread by force) into a belief in World Liberal-Capitalist Revolution (spread by force).
Good point about "ex-Jewish leftists" (I'm assuming this is code for "Trots"), they've simply transmogrified their belief in World Socialist Revolution (spread by force) into a belief in World Liberal-Capitalist Revolution (spread by force).
A lot of them seem to be former Trotskyist. I don't know if that's true for Chesler though
"a progressive movement lasting a thousand years which started as a reaction to the appalling situation women were in in the Victorian age"
A thousand years?
*Yusuf: sorry, my mistake, I meant a hundred.*
//Having said that, as I understand it, those Western women who speak out against the way in which women live in other countries do so because the women in those countries have said that they are not happy and would like to live differently and more freely.//
Katy, it may be surprising, but shouldn't be, that when we hear about these "women's voices" from these countries, where they're begging Big Daddy West to liberate them, those women are often part of a highly educated, urbanized, and Westernized elite. Are they as "real" as any other woman in their country? Sure, but they don't speak for the majority. Their complaints may have grains of truth in them, but we first have to realize that if we're hearing from (example) women with post-graduate degrees from Western universities who speak French / English and live in a villa... they're not representing the average middle class, working class, or rural woman. It really galls me that I sometimes read about some "feminist activist" from some country who wants to liberate "her people" and it turns out that this person doesn't even speak the native language, but speaks French or English as her first language. It's sort of like how Chalabi declared himself the true representative of the Iraqi people and certain people ate that up (although he at least speaks Arabic).
Well said Shamil and George. The word you're looking for is neocon. Chesler is nothing when compared to the likes of fellow FPM nutter Jamie Glazov. Is he Serbian?
Great points UZ.
The word you're looking for is neocon.
Except they're not really conservative. I think the term neo-con is itself deceptive. Many of their biggest flag wavers are socially liberal. Most old school conservatives oppose them.
Chesler is nothing
I'd say so judging by the breadth of knowledge displayed in her articles.
Anyone who uses the term "Judeo-Christian" to refer to people (as opposed to writings, Bible etc) is either ignorant or deceptive.
George Carty,
Now I know that I use the word stupid quite often with regards to comments made on blogs, but some of the people of FrontPage Magazine are geniunely stupid. At some point, your readership does reflect badly on your blog.
Bikhair: I don't actually believe they are stupid. I think they are brazen, and will continue repeating the same lies over and over again regardless of how many times they are exposed. What Kaufman has done with Danya's blog, and the other literature he has selectively quoted, is a good example.
DrM,
Jamie Glazov is in fact a Soviet dissident who emigrated to Canada in 1975 (even though he advocates US annexation of Canada).
Yusuf,
I was speaking specifically about the readership of magazines like Front Page. People generally arent readers so you cant expect them to know much.
Remember when you spoke about an article on FPM about Islam and the clitoris? Well I actually read that article and come to find out, it wasnt about ISlam but an anecdote about some Muslim women, or Muslim women who have to endure this ritual of sexual depravuty after she is married.
I imagine that if the author heard that Muslim had to jump off a roof before eating dinner she would similarly right about Islam hatred of legs or ankles. Its weird.
I think that a posting on the SIXTIES-L discussion list by Jeffrey Blankfort, a San Franciscan critic of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, best sums it up:
Jamie Glazov is the latest proof that virtually every public person who was characterized in the West as a "prisoner of Zion" in the USSR was little more than a fascist, and in this case that term applies to the offspring. Hopefully, an accounting will be written one day about these folks, the most notable being Natan Shransky, the head of the right-wing racist Russian Jewish immigrant movement in Israel which supports Sharon's hard line on the Palestinians.