Caroline Glick, in her post today, points out the similarities between the feminists in Israel and the feminists in America. Both are less for the rights of women (especially the women forced to live under Islam) than they are for the extreme Leftist agenda in each country. The following is from her post:
Every few months, we are presented with media reports about Jewish women rescued from their Muslim husbands in the Palestinian Authority or within Israel....
The fact is that both misogyny and Jew-hatred are facts of life throughout the Muslim world. This state of affairs renders marriage to Muslim men a particularly dangerous prospect for Jewish women.
But the feminists throughout the Jewish world are silent on this issue. And this isn't surprising. The egregious mistreatment of Jewish women by their Arab husbands involves two issues that the Left - which encompasses most feminist groups - is intent on ignoring: Islamic misogyny and Islamic Jew hatred. Just as the Left ignores, underplays, trivializes or justifies the fact that hatred of Jews is the most universal sentiment in the Muslim world today, so it systematically ignores, underplays or trivializes the endemic brutalization of women and girls throughout the Islamic world.
Take a purportedly feminist discussion of the impact of the Arab revolt on the position of women in the Arab world from ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour on Sunday. In a segment that lasted roughly 15 minutes, Amanpour said essentially nothing about the appalling lives of women and girls under Islamic law.
When Newsweek editor Tina Brown mentioned "the barbaric custom of child brides," in Yemen, Amanpour didn't ask her to elaborate. In accordance with that Yemeni custom, little girls are routinely married off to grown men.
When Iraqi women's rights activist Zainab Salbi noted that the key issue for women in the Muslim world is changing the family law that governs their societies, Amanpour didn't ask her what she meant.
What she meant was that under Islamic family law, women and girls are considered the property of their male relatives. And their "owners" can legally beat them and rape them and genitally mutilate them and force them into marriages they object to. If the women and girls are "disobedient," their male relatives can expect little or no punishment for murdering them.
Rather than discuss the real, truly life-threatening dangers faced by women and girls throughout the Islamic world, Amanpour presented her viewers with a superficial and false depiction of recent events in which a few well-dressed, perfectly coiffed, pretty young women in Egypt and two Western dressed women in Libya are supposedly transforming the position of women in their societies one tweet at a time.
It was a complete lie. But it wasn't shocking. It would have been shocking if Amanpour had provided her viewers with any relevant facts about the subject she was purportedly discussing.
