The Failure of Feminism to Fight Muslim Misogyny
I was pointed to this excellent essay by erudito in his post "Clive James on the Veil of Silence" (http://erudito.livejournal.com/872182.html).
From "A Veil of Silence," by Clive James in Standpoint (http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2042/full)
Clive James first details the extreme misogynistic cruelty of Third World cultures in general and Muslim ones in particular. He gives shocking examples of violent crimes being effectively excused not only in Jordan and Pakistan but also in Britain, and points out:
By this time the words "community" and "culture" are starting to sound like what they are: weasel words for institutionalised sadism, which the naïve onlooker is likely to suspect might have something to do with the religion, whether it be Hindu, Sikh or Islamic.
Indeed. And what's more, a denial of the legally-enunciated rights of the individual victims in favor of the vague alleged rights of a "culture" which receives those rights primarily as a gift for being non-Western.
He pours deserved scorn on the notion that shari'a somehow protects women by demanding witnesses to an "honor crime" before the woman involved can be killed:
The requirement that the culprits should be killed goes unexamined. No doubt, if it were examined, the community would be placed in danger and the culture begin to fray. But surely, if moderate Islam is to hold its own against its extremist wings, then fraying, in that one respect at least, is exactly what the culture needs to do. There are more than a billion Muslims who are not engaged in jihad against the West, and not likely to be. We should try to remember just how few people are trying to kill us, even when they feel sorely provoked. But if the non-fanatical majority can't find a voice to condemn the few among their fellows who see nothing wrong with killing their own women for imaginary crimes, then they either condone that attitude or are afraid of those who hold it: either way, not a very encouraging start towards the more liberal Muslim future that we have been promised.
The West is uncritically accepting the monstrous assumption that it constitutes justice to murder women for the "crime" of surviving a rape or of simply daring to enjoy the life of a free adult human being, instead of committing suicide or remaining obedient to her male relatives even once she reaches the age of majority. We would not accept such a code of conduct for our own mothers, wives, daughters, or female friends -- still less (if female) for ourselves. Why do we consider it reasonable to allow such a code to be imposed upon Muslim women?
There is a possible reason, but it is one unflattering to modern Western feminism. It is that, by virtue of their Muslim origin, these women are less than Western women -- they do not deserve the same human rights as do those born of Christian or Jewish families. But this theory requires religious bigotry of the vilest order, disguising itself as religious tolerance.
What is worse, by tolerating the oppression of Muslim women, we are maintaining the integrity of the very cultural system which produces the jihadists. Furthermore, if we imagine that this denigration of female status will remain confined to Muslim women, we delude ourselves: already there have been many examples in Europe of whole neighborhoods becoming unsafe to any women who act on the assumption that they have normal Western civil rights. A rape gang or lynch mob does not generally ask for one's identity card before attacking.
James then discusses the importance of the rule of law:
We had also better believe that where men alone decide what women's rights are, the results are rarely good. Western liberal democracy, or a reasonable imitation of Western liberal democracy when it comes to the rule of law, is still the only kind of society we know about where women are not at the mercy of systematic injustice - that is, of justice conceived of and maintained as a weapon of terror. Where women are concerned, countries like Japan have climbed out of their dark histories to the exact extent that they have become Western-style liberal democracies, and no further. The same is true for the "Tiger" economies: the condition of women might have been ameliorated only because it has been thought expedient to subject theocratic pressures to the rule of law, but it doesn't matter why the law is there, as long as it is there. The rule of law does not guarantee justice, but there is no justice without it. It has been one of the sour amusements provided by our feminist movement in its modern phase to watch its proponents trying to blink this fact.
What James means by the "rule of law" here is the rule of public as opposed to private law. Public law is objective: it is written down in advance so that astute men and women can know beforehand what is legal and what is illegal, and guide their conduct accordingly. Public law is also supreme: no individual is strong enough to successfully oppose its application with his own force or the threat of force: the State will simply reinforce its agents to whatever level needed to prevail.
By contrast, private law -- the rule of the clan or gang or militia -- is subjective. Nobody knows in advance what will be allowed or opposed, because the clan or gang or militia leader will decide on the spot what he will punish. Furthermore, that leader's writ only runs as far as his fighters range, and he must consider the strength of the person to whom he proposes to apply force: the weak are helpless in his grasp, but the strong may very well be too strong to safely offend.
Because women are not artificially detached from the rest of society, no matter what the Wahhabists might want, a society in which it is acceptable to apply private law to women is one in which the prevalance of public law is at risk. If one's mother or wife or daughter or lover or friend may be beaten or slain for an alleged violation of some ill-defined code of conduct, and the law will do nothing to avenge this crime, then one is at the potential mercy of anyone who can credibly threaten such violence.
And so much depends upon public law. Not just the obvious emotional comfort of knowing that one is not to be unpredictably beaten or slain, but also the stability of life needed to start or invest in businesses.
I am aware of at least one case in which the Pakistani police -- and their elite capital city unit at that -- arrested, gang-raped, beat and falsely imprisoned a lady who ran a boarding house and two of her guests, simply because she hadn't wanted to rent a room to a police officer. Aside from this incident properly earning Pakistan and its police the contempt of all civilized and decent human beings, there is an economic issue here: if one is unsafe from the most hideous treatment simply for engaging in a room rental transaction, then how safe is any form of economic activity in a place like Pakistan? What would the Pakistani police do, or not do, if real money were at stake?
Considerations like this, in reality, influence international corporations in their investment decisions. Either they must spend extra money to bribe the local authorities to prevent things like this from happening, or they must accept random attacks as part of the nature of business in these countries. Millions of independent decisions made in part for these reasons are part of the reasons why the Third World is poor.
At one point our feminists, getting frustrated as the pace slowed down in the home stretch to utopia, started telling us that other cultures (cultures practising clitoridectomy, for example) were more "authentic" in the respect of female sexual identity. A woman in Somalia, we were told, at least knows she is a woman.
Indeed she does! Barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen -- and subject to horrific maiming to confirm her sexual identity. What else could she be than the Muslim version of a "woman." Truly an enviable state!
At one point, my friend Germaine Greer could be heard propounding this view, but she has a good heart, and perhaps found reason to dial back on her fervour after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has actually suffered a clitoridectomy in Somalia, pointed out that the practice, far from being a sign of authenticity, was a mechanism of repression. How Germaine Greer could ever, even momentarily, have thought anything different is a matter for study in a field that needs to be explored: the way Western intellectuals lose sight of elementary liberalism in the heat-haze of their own rhetoric.
I think it's because feminists are desperately trying to avoid the obvious confrontation between feminism and most of the rest of the Left. The Left is anti-Western, but it is only in the West, and in Westernizing countries, that women enjoy anything like full equality with men either under the law or in practice. This equality is not perfect, but it is clearly far better than the fate of women in non-Western lands. Thus, rational feminism must be pro-Western and anti-Third World: and this is precisely why feminism is irrational on the issue of the treatment of women in the Third World, because choosing the rational course would mean parting company with the pro-Third World Left.
In a free society, radical dissatisfaction is usually a condition of mind before it is a response to circumstances, so it has to go somewhere. As atomisation continues in the liberal democracies, the number of candidates for an irresponsible semi-intelligentsia continues to increase. They come from either wing, but are always more vociferous on the Left, because capitalism provides the more blatant source of provocation. One can hardly blame them for that. What is striking is their capacity, once they run out of injustices in liberal democracy that they can blame on capitalism, to look for injustices in the rest of the world that they can blame on liberal democracy.
Striking, but hardly irrational. Capitalism and liberalism are linked: freedom to enjoy one's property is, after all, merely a subclass of the general freedom to pursue one's own happiness. Those cultures which abridge the freedom of property are likely to also abridge other freedoms as well: if they didn't start by doing so, they will simply because it is easier to abridge someone's other freedoms if one also can abridge her freedom to enjoy her own property. And vice versa.
James talks about the importance of the "right to responsibility," meaning that it is not doing a group a favor to treat that group as somehow less responsible for its actions than we treat members of our own group. He then says:
The other crucial requirement, surely, is for the pampered intelligentsia of the West to give up finally and forever on any notion that the Third World - for all its deprivations and perhaps because of them - is some kind of Eden in which countervailing values against the excesses of the West may be found. What may be found is more often a heap of dead bodies. Most of those get blamed on the West, too, but when half of the population of Rwanda sets out to murder the other half, with no recourse to Western technology except the metal to make machetes, the explanation starts looking thin. And always it is mandatory for the women to be raped as well as being chopped up, the only question in the minds of the men being about what order in which to do these things. No doubt the same sort of dialogue was going on somewhere in the mind of Fred West, but at least he found it advisable to hide the corpses.
Which is the often-unremarked elephant in the room of the intellectuals who claim to admire the Third World. The countries which they admire routinely produce heaps of corpses of their own citizens. And Western feminists do not often enough take official notice of the strong tendency for these murders to be especially brutal when the victims are female, nor of the literally murderous misogyny implicit in such a tendency.
But there are men all over the world who really do want to kill women on a point of honour. What kind of honour is that? When are these dreadful men, and all who encourage and "understand" them, to be condemned as the homicidal maniacs they are? It could be said that there is not much point in condemning what we can't change, but in our own countries, where it could be changed if the will existed, condemnation would surely be a useful first step, and it might help some of the countries of origin to at least see the point.
It could be pointed out that it is already illegal to beat, rape or murder women in general in Western countries. This is true, but it is also true that Western law enforcement authorities often avoid responding to such crimes among "ethnic" communities (especially Muslims, but also Hindus and Sikhs to some extent) unless they have no choice (as in the case of murder); and that criminal justice systems sometimes accept "cultural" defenses, instead of either ignoring them or treating them as contempt of court.
We need to do more: we should be pro-active, acknowledge the existence of these misogynistic cultural complexes and start working at breaking them up through aggressive law enforcement and also extra-legal programs such as shelters and self-defense classes (nothing says "humiliated" like "beaten up by your intended female victim"). And, in particular, we need to start treating families and mosques as criminal conspiracies when they aid and abet honor killers. It's already within our law: we just aren't enforcing it.
We need to begin enforcing Civilization on the barbarians, rather than just taking it for granted that they will abuse "their" women, and that we must accept this as "authentic" to their culture.
From "A Veil of Silence," by Clive James in Standpoint (http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2042/full)
Clive James first details the extreme misogynistic cruelty of Third World cultures in general and Muslim ones in particular. He gives shocking examples of violent crimes being effectively excused not only in Jordan and Pakistan but also in Britain, and points out:
By this time the words "community" and "culture" are starting to sound like what they are: weasel words for institutionalised sadism, which the naïve onlooker is likely to suspect might have something to do with the religion, whether it be Hindu, Sikh or Islamic.
Indeed. And what's more, a denial of the legally-enunciated rights of the individual victims in favor of the vague alleged rights of a "culture" which receives those rights primarily as a gift for being non-Western.
He pours deserved scorn on the notion that shari'a somehow protects women by demanding witnesses to an "honor crime" before the woman involved can be killed:
The requirement that the culprits should be killed goes unexamined. No doubt, if it were examined, the community would be placed in danger and the culture begin to fray. But surely, if moderate Islam is to hold its own against its extremist wings, then fraying, in that one respect at least, is exactly what the culture needs to do. There are more than a billion Muslims who are not engaged in jihad against the West, and not likely to be. We should try to remember just how few people are trying to kill us, even when they feel sorely provoked. But if the non-fanatical majority can't find a voice to condemn the few among their fellows who see nothing wrong with killing their own women for imaginary crimes, then they either condone that attitude or are afraid of those who hold it: either way, not a very encouraging start towards the more liberal Muslim future that we have been promised.
The West is uncritically accepting the monstrous assumption that it constitutes justice to murder women for the "crime" of surviving a rape or of simply daring to enjoy the life of a free adult human being, instead of committing suicide or remaining obedient to her male relatives even once she reaches the age of majority. We would not accept such a code of conduct for our own mothers, wives, daughters, or female friends -- still less (if female) for ourselves. Why do we consider it reasonable to allow such a code to be imposed upon Muslim women?
There is a possible reason, but it is one unflattering to modern Western feminism. It is that, by virtue of their Muslim origin, these women are less than Western women -- they do not deserve the same human rights as do those born of Christian or Jewish families. But this theory requires religious bigotry of the vilest order, disguising itself as religious tolerance.
What is worse, by tolerating the oppression of Muslim women, we are maintaining the integrity of the very cultural system which produces the jihadists. Furthermore, if we imagine that this denigration of female status will remain confined to Muslim women, we delude ourselves: already there have been many examples in Europe of whole neighborhoods becoming unsafe to any women who act on the assumption that they have normal Western civil rights. A rape gang or lynch mob does not generally ask for one's identity card before attacking.
James then discusses the importance of the rule of law:
We had also better believe that where men alone decide what women's rights are, the results are rarely good. Western liberal democracy, or a reasonable imitation of Western liberal democracy when it comes to the rule of law, is still the only kind of society we know about where women are not at the mercy of systematic injustice - that is, of justice conceived of and maintained as a weapon of terror. Where women are concerned, countries like Japan have climbed out of their dark histories to the exact extent that they have become Western-style liberal democracies, and no further. The same is true for the "Tiger" economies: the condition of women might have been ameliorated only because it has been thought expedient to subject theocratic pressures to the rule of law, but it doesn't matter why the law is there, as long as it is there. The rule of law does not guarantee justice, but there is no justice without it. It has been one of the sour amusements provided by our feminist movement in its modern phase to watch its proponents trying to blink this fact.
What James means by the "rule of law" here is the rule of public as opposed to private law. Public law is objective: it is written down in advance so that astute men and women can know beforehand what is legal and what is illegal, and guide their conduct accordingly. Public law is also supreme: no individual is strong enough to successfully oppose its application with his own force or the threat of force: the State will simply reinforce its agents to whatever level needed to prevail.
By contrast, private law -- the rule of the clan or gang or militia -- is subjective. Nobody knows in advance what will be allowed or opposed, because the clan or gang or militia leader will decide on the spot what he will punish. Furthermore, that leader's writ only runs as far as his fighters range, and he must consider the strength of the person to whom he proposes to apply force: the weak are helpless in his grasp, but the strong may very well be too strong to safely offend.
Because women are not artificially detached from the rest of society, no matter what the Wahhabists might want, a society in which it is acceptable to apply private law to women is one in which the prevalance of public law is at risk. If one's mother or wife or daughter or lover or friend may be beaten or slain for an alleged violation of some ill-defined code of conduct, and the law will do nothing to avenge this crime, then one is at the potential mercy of anyone who can credibly threaten such violence.
And so much depends upon public law. Not just the obvious emotional comfort of knowing that one is not to be unpredictably beaten or slain, but also the stability of life needed to start or invest in businesses.
I am aware of at least one case in which the Pakistani police -- and their elite capital city unit at that -- arrested, gang-raped, beat and falsely imprisoned a lady who ran a boarding house and two of her guests, simply because she hadn't wanted to rent a room to a police officer. Aside from this incident properly earning Pakistan and its police the contempt of all civilized and decent human beings, there is an economic issue here: if one is unsafe from the most hideous treatment simply for engaging in a room rental transaction, then how safe is any form of economic activity in a place like Pakistan? What would the Pakistani police do, or not do, if real money were at stake?
Considerations like this, in reality, influence international corporations in their investment decisions. Either they must spend extra money to bribe the local authorities to prevent things like this from happening, or they must accept random attacks as part of the nature of business in these countries. Millions of independent decisions made in part for these reasons are part of the reasons why the Third World is poor.
At one point our feminists, getting frustrated as the pace slowed down in the home stretch to utopia, started telling us that other cultures (cultures practising clitoridectomy, for example) were more "authentic" in the respect of female sexual identity. A woman in Somalia, we were told, at least knows she is a woman.
Indeed she does! Barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen -- and subject to horrific maiming to confirm her sexual identity. What else could she be than the Muslim version of a "woman." Truly an enviable state!
At one point, my friend Germaine Greer could be heard propounding this view, but she has a good heart, and perhaps found reason to dial back on her fervour after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has actually suffered a clitoridectomy in Somalia, pointed out that the practice, far from being a sign of authenticity, was a mechanism of repression. How Germaine Greer could ever, even momentarily, have thought anything different is a matter for study in a field that needs to be explored: the way Western intellectuals lose sight of elementary liberalism in the heat-haze of their own rhetoric.
I think it's because feminists are desperately trying to avoid the obvious confrontation between feminism and most of the rest of the Left. The Left is anti-Western, but it is only in the West, and in Westernizing countries, that women enjoy anything like full equality with men either under the law or in practice. This equality is not perfect, but it is clearly far better than the fate of women in non-Western lands. Thus, rational feminism must be pro-Western and anti-Third World: and this is precisely why feminism is irrational on the issue of the treatment of women in the Third World, because choosing the rational course would mean parting company with the pro-Third World Left.
In a free society, radical dissatisfaction is usually a condition of mind before it is a response to circumstances, so it has to go somewhere. As atomisation continues in the liberal democracies, the number of candidates for an irresponsible semi-intelligentsia continues to increase. They come from either wing, but are always more vociferous on the Left, because capitalism provides the more blatant source of provocation. One can hardly blame them for that. What is striking is their capacity, once they run out of injustices in liberal democracy that they can blame on capitalism, to look for injustices in the rest of the world that they can blame on liberal democracy.
Striking, but hardly irrational. Capitalism and liberalism are linked: freedom to enjoy one's property is, after all, merely a subclass of the general freedom to pursue one's own happiness. Those cultures which abridge the freedom of property are likely to also abridge other freedoms as well: if they didn't start by doing so, they will simply because it is easier to abridge someone's other freedoms if one also can abridge her freedom to enjoy her own property. And vice versa.
James talks about the importance of the "right to responsibility," meaning that it is not doing a group a favor to treat that group as somehow less responsible for its actions than we treat members of our own group. He then says:
The other crucial requirement, surely, is for the pampered intelligentsia of the West to give up finally and forever on any notion that the Third World - for all its deprivations and perhaps because of them - is some kind of Eden in which countervailing values against the excesses of the West may be found. What may be found is more often a heap of dead bodies. Most of those get blamed on the West, too, but when half of the population of Rwanda sets out to murder the other half, with no recourse to Western technology except the metal to make machetes, the explanation starts looking thin. And always it is mandatory for the women to be raped as well as being chopped up, the only question in the minds of the men being about what order in which to do these things. No doubt the same sort of dialogue was going on somewhere in the mind of Fred West, but at least he found it advisable to hide the corpses.
Which is the often-unremarked elephant in the room of the intellectuals who claim to admire the Third World. The countries which they admire routinely produce heaps of corpses of their own citizens. And Western feminists do not often enough take official notice of the strong tendency for these murders to be especially brutal when the victims are female, nor of the literally murderous misogyny implicit in such a tendency.
But there are men all over the world who really do want to kill women on a point of honour. What kind of honour is that? When are these dreadful men, and all who encourage and "understand" them, to be condemned as the homicidal maniacs they are? It could be said that there is not much point in condemning what we can't change, but in our own countries, where it could be changed if the will existed, condemnation would surely be a useful first step, and it might help some of the countries of origin to at least see the point.
It could be pointed out that it is already illegal to beat, rape or murder women in general in Western countries. This is true, but it is also true that Western law enforcement authorities often avoid responding to such crimes among "ethnic" communities (especially Muslims, but also Hindus and Sikhs to some extent) unless they have no choice (as in the case of murder); and that criminal justice systems sometimes accept "cultural" defenses, instead of either ignoring them or treating them as contempt of court.
We need to do more: we should be pro-active, acknowledge the existence of these misogynistic cultural complexes and start working at breaking them up through aggressive law enforcement and also extra-legal programs such as shelters and self-defense classes (nothing says "humiliated" like "beaten up by your intended female victim"). And, in particular, we need to start treating families and mosques as criminal conspiracies when they aid and abet honor killers. It's already within our law: we just aren't enforcing it.
We need to begin enforcing Civilization on the barbarians, rather than just taking it for granted that they will abuse "their" women, and that we must accept this as "authentic" to their culture.