The Validity Of Feminism & Camile Pagalia

A few notes on feminism before getting to Ms. Camile Pagalia, a "feminist" college professor and author. The left's claim of a "war on women" was always the purest of horse manure, as is the left's caricature of conservative men seeking to keep women barefoot and walking between the kitchen and the bedroom. I know of no conservative who does not unreservedly support equal treatment and equal opportunity for women. If simple equality were the goal of modern feminism, than this would be a non-issue.

But modern feminism, of the women's studies variety found in virtually every university, is something else entirely. For them, all of society is founded on "patriarchy," gender roles are evil incarnate, and every act of sex is rape. (Or at least sex with a male is. If the Vagina Monologues is to be believed, an act of lebian statutory rape is redemption.) The most recent cause celebres for modern feminism, at least when not pushing the campus rape epidemic or 72 cents on the dollar canards, appear to have been manspreading and men who happen to interrupt a woman during a conversation. True subjegation of women, as in the Middle East, or true sexual harrassment of women by anyone on the left is studiously ignored.

And in many ways, modern feminism has come full circle, taking society back to the point of devaluing women and encouraging women's sexual objectification to a degree beyond that of a fourteen year old boys most rabid fantasies. Modern feminists have killed chivalry and they deny the reality of genetics, all the while seeking special considerations for women. Modern feminism has far more to do with Stalinism than enlightenment and equality.

As regards genetics, they do happen to be real. In one respect, modern feminists deny that. The seminal example is the call to open the combat arms of our military -- and in particular, the infantry and special ops -- to women. Women have no place in those units. The military is not a social justice organization. To open those units up to women is to, of necessity, lower the physical standards as a general matter, let alone the impact on unit cohesion.

In another respect, modern feminist don't merely acknowledge the genetic differnce, they define "equal rights" within the context. That is in regards to sex. In order for a woman to have a "consequence free" sex life like a male's, she needs access to birth control. Modern feminists see government paying for that birth control as a "right" they deserve. And indeed, to take it a step further, and most importantly, modern feminists invariably seek to exclude parents from any influence on their daughters when it comes sex and birth control. It is, in my view, the single most toxic impact modern feminism has had on society.

Such is my take, and it is why I happen to have great respect for Camile Pagalia, a classical feminist who is quite willing to take on "modern feminism." This from a recent interview were she comments on modern feminism as well as "post struturalism," the most recent variant of "post modernism."

In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?

After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart feminism": there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.

Briefly put, what is post-structuralism and what is your opinion of it?

Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. I spent six months writing a long attack on academic post-structuralism for the classics journal Arion in 1991, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" (reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture). Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

Read the whole interview.

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Does The Obamacare Mandate Further Religious Liberty?

As Charles Krauthammer notes in the above video, the Obama Administration is experiencing a tremendous backlash against its decision to mandate that Catholic institutions pay for health insurance covering contraception and Plan-B abortion, or in the alternative, pay fines or dissolve. Virtually the entire Catholic Church hierarchy is up in arms, as are not just liberal Catholics, but also countless people from other religions who see this as unconstitutional government overreach.  And now, the far left is itself on the attack, making the most disingenuous and intellectually dishonest arguments imaginable in support of Obama's mandate.

The ACLU came out today arguing that Catholics institutions, by refusing to fund contraception and Plan-B abortion, are trying to "impose their will on their employees."  The ACLU further argues that this mandate is not a violation of religious liberty, concluding that "religious liberty" does not give Catholic institutions the right to "impose those views on others, including ignoring civil rights laws or denying critical health care."

Let's address the first of theses arguments, that Catholics are "trying to impose their will on their employees."  In the Thinker's Guide To Fallacies:  The Art Of Mental Trickery & Manipulation, a great publication on critical thinking, this is listed as "Dirty Trick No. 1 - Accuse Your Opponent Of Doing What He Is Accusing You Of."  That is precisely what the ACLU is doing here.  The Catholic Church has since its inception two millennia ago stood for the sanctity of life and, as the issues arose, they have uniformly stood in opposition to contraception and abortion.  The U.S. government has just decided now to force the Catholic Church to change its position, pay a fine or face dissolution.  Yet the ACLU is trying to turn the argument on its head in order to put the Catholics on the defensive.  The left uses this trick all of the time.  Scurrilous bastards.

As to the ACLU's "religous liberty" argument, it is equally meritless. Religious liberty lies at the foundation of our nation. Indeed, it is what drove many of the first refugees to make the dangerous trip to American shores, in order that they could freely practice their religion. And the whole concept of "religious liberty" is found in the very first Amendment to our Constituion, it provides that "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. Given that sanctity of life is at the very core of the Catholic Church doctrine, and given that the new Obama policy would require either that the Catholic Church act against its core doctrine, pay a penalty, or cease its existence, that by definition impinges on the free exercise of religion.  Furthermore, as Ed Morrisey points out:

The rights in the Constitution are not granted to American citizens because the government decided to offer them beneficently at their discretion. They exist in the document as a testament to our natural rights, part of our innate humanness, and are detailed in the Constitution as a bar to government’s overreach in trampling them.

The ACLU is not alone in their arguments today. The trio of far left politicians, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, and Jeanne Shaheen, have authored piece for the Wall Street Journal that is truly outrageous. They shamelessly assert that the Obamacare mandate furthers "religious liberty" based on a full scale redefinition of that term:

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.

Wow. That paragraph is nothing but non-sequiturs. First, these women are rewriting the Constitution, making it seem as if the Catholic Church itself has no rights. First Amendment protections flow not merely to individuals, but also to institutions.  Indeed, if the Westboro Baptist Church has First Amendment Rights, then clearly so too does the Catholic Church.

Boxer asserts that the new mandate furthers "religious freedom." Yet to make this argument, Boxer redefines religious freedom to mean solely the right of an individual to ignore the doctrine of a religion. That is a unique and tenditious redefinition if there ever was one - which is another tried and true leftie trick of argument by fallacy.

And of course, no person in the U.S., including Catholic women, are being kept by the Catholic Church from accessing contraception or abortion as elective procedures. That has never been true and, indeed, it misstates the whole issue at hand. To claim that the Obama mandate furthers actual religious freedom is as about a shameless lie as I can imagine.

Boxer, further argues:

Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.

As a threshold matter, the "rule" which Obama would impose differs fundamentally from all prior rules. None of the prior rules require Church affiliated institutions to act contrary to the core value of the Church. Further, I wait to see any case law - and I do mean any - showing that receipt of government funds and tax benefits constitutes a voluntary waiver of Constitutional rights. And lastly, Boxer ignores contrary "history" that some rules of general applicability, such as discrimination laws, cannot legally be applied in whole to religious institutions. Indeed, that was the subject of the recent Supreme Court Case, where the Court ruled unanimously for the Lutheran Church as regards the ministerial exception to employment laws.

And lastly, Boxer makes a series of pragmatic arguments that nationalizing the funding of contraception and plan-B is a panacea for American healthcare, that virtually all women use contraception at some point, and that, in the absence of funding some women working for Catholic institutions might not be able to afford the out of pocket costs.  As Bookworm points out, Boxer is conflating arguments:

This is the big lie at the heart of the Obama administration's attack on traditional religious institutions. These harpies constantly conflate the availability of birth control with funding for birth control. They are not the same. Women in America can get birth control. The government can fund organizations -- indeed, it already does with the monies that go to Planned Parenthood -- that provide all these birth control options. Forcing religious organizations to pay for birth control, sterilization and abortifacients, however, both exceeds the government's power and contravenes the limitations the Bill of Rights imposes on government. This is not about whether women should have birth control; it's about with the government can force churches to pay for it.

I would add that I find Obama's decision to nationalize funding for contraception and abortion to border on the obscene. For one, this is yet another advance down the secular road, where the radical feminists want the act of sex to be wholly devoid of any moral, ethical or physical consequences. Moreover, it further the feminist left argument that abortions should be unconditionally available. This law essentially institutes radical feminist goals as the public policy of our country. Two, why should I or any other American have to fund elective costs that are rightfully at issue between consenting adults? Three, why are woman entitled to this special treatment and not men for specifically male issues? What about the dreaded EDS you hear about in ads every day for Viagra? Again the answer is because this is part of the radical secular agenda being pushed by the feminists.

So, in sum, there is good and bad in all of this. That portion of the Obamacare mandate requiring all Americans to fund the costs of birth control and abortions is likely to get through (though I wonder if individuals of deeply religious beliefs could not make the same argument as the Catholic Church, using the Courts rulings in the area conscientious objector status as a springboard for a colorable argument). The good news is that Obama has grossly overreached on this issue, as Krauthammer points out in the above video.  I actually find it comforting that Obama and the far left are drawing a line in the sand on this issue. I hope they keep it up through November, because this issue is easily one that could cost Obama reelection and cost the left Congressional seats.

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Wednesday Links

From the Blogprof: Illinois is refusing to issue state tax refunds. They aren't even bothering to issue IOU's. Sounds like a 1983 action in the making to me.

At Maggie's Farm, a cost benefit number crunch convinces the author to stay in Texas and out of NYC.

If this isn't a Tea Party issue, it ought to be - from Tom Blumer: GAO is unable to complete an accounting of our government's finances for the 14th year running.

From Thomas Sowell: "There are ways the government can juggle money around to make everything look OK, but it is only a matter of time before that money runs out and the ultimate reality hits, that there is no free lunch." Amen.

JammieWearingFool "loves a good Democrat food fight over racial politics."

Hey - it turns out Gitmo never was a recruiting tool for jihadis. If that surprises you, then it is certain that you haven't made the slightest effort to educate yourself on jihadism since 9-11.

Gay Patriot takes note that it is de rigueur for the politically correct gay activist to use obscenities to slur conservatives. And in getting their message out, they are supported by a media that enjoys their little jokes.

With a hat-tip to Instapundit, here is something I didn't know. During the Falklands War, PM Margaret Thatcher was ready to nuke Agrentina. The Argentinians were armed with state of the art weaponry sold to them by France. Thatcher told French PM Mitterand that she would employ nukes against Argentina unless Mitterand gave her the codes to make the French missiles blind:

Mitterrand - who once described Mrs Thatcher as "the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe" - went on: "One cannot win against the insular syndrome of an unbridled Englishwoman. Provoke a nuclear war for a few islands inhabited by three sheep as hairy as they are freezing! But it's a good job I gave way. Otherwise, I assure you, the Lady's metallic finger would have hit the button."

And from Sister Toldjah, modern-day feminism in a nutshell:

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Playing Politics With . . . .

The RNC's Nancy Pelosi spy ad is back up. See what you think.



It was taken off of Youtube yesterday though it has since been reposted. Finally having seen it, I think it's clever and dead on point. It is in no way inherently controversial or risque.

The left is going into full feigned outrage over the ad, claiming it is code for some sort of anti-feminist rant because the music and some of the scenery comes from the 1964 James Bond flick, Goldfinger. The female villian of that movie was Pussy Galore. Apparently, CBS's recent explicit reference to Dick Cheney as "a dick" is okay, but anything that can be remotely twisted by the left as a risque reference to one of their own, why that's just unacceptable, isin't it?

But in truth, there is no explicit reference whatsoever in this ad to Nancy Pelosi being "Pussy Galore." There is nothing but reference after reference to Pelosi smearing the CIA for her own partisan purpose - all of which logically fits neatly within a James Bond motif. And indeed, "Pussy Galore," as a name, is no more risque than, say, "Vagina Monologues." I have yet to hear the left claim how demeaning that title was. And lastly, as far as the feminism complaints go, after watching today's "feminists" go after Sarah Palin with knives drawn in an effort to utterly destroy her, color me cynical for not crediting these partisan hypocrites with even a patina of credibility. They can go pound sand as far as I am concerned.

Hot Air panned the ad, but that is because they thought it was too easilly criticized by the left as injecting gender into the Pelosi-CIA flap. I disagree. The last thing we need to do at this point is censor ourselves over something this benign because the left will go into full feigned outrage mode. Let them go into that mode and meet them head on, exposing their rhetorical devices and their bias. We will win more, I think, than we will lose at this point, as America is coming to see just how hypocritical the One's rhetoric has been.

At any rate, all in all, a great ad I think. What say you?

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Sally Quinn Spins Palin & Ignores the Obamaphant In The Room

Sally Quinn’s column in the Washington Post today, "Palin's Preganancy Problem," is hypocrisy of the left gone mad. Ms. Quinn is in full scale righteous “anger.” She is “shocked.” She is “insulted.” McCain has chosen a failed mother who needs to be attending to her children. She reminds us that we on the right are supposed to by misogynists. And, she tells us, Gov. Palin is too inexperienced for vice president, studiously ignoring the Obamaphant in the middle of her office.

I said in the post below, Palendimonium, that the left just won’t be able to stop themselves from sliming Gov. Palin and attempting to claim she is too inexperienced for the job of Vice President. Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn’s steps into the left wing breach today with an effort to do just that. And it is an outrageous effort indeed.

You can find Ms. Quinn’s column here. Quinn’s most outrageous arguments surround Gov. Palin as a mother. First, pointing to Gov. Palin’s teenage daughter’s out of wedlock pregnancy, Quinn asserts that this “must certainly raise the question among the evangelical base about whether Sarah Palin has been enough of a hands-on mother.”

It would be hard to imagine a more insulting or fatuous argument. What teenager does not rebel and try to distinguish themselves as a person? And in doing so, what teenager does not make mistakes? How many children are born in this country to parents whose wedding dates are less than nine months from the birth date, let alone how many are born out of wedlock? Quinn just painted the parents of all of these people as intinsically failed people in order to slime Gov. Palin. That ought to play well amongst the fly over crowd.

Two, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of those on the right who espouse morals and try to live by them. We see human failings all the time – in ourselves and all around us. That does not mean that a person who fails is a failed person, as Quinn would paint Gov. Palin. The evangelical Rev. Dobson's response to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy could have been written in response directly to Sally Quinn:

. . . ”Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord. I’ve been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I’m sure the Palins have.

“The media are already trying to spin this as evidence Gov. Palin is a ‘hypocrite,’ but all it really means is that she and her family are human. They are in my prayers and those of millions of Americans.”

Second, Quinn takes a century of feminist efforts to end misogyny and have women treated as the equals of men and she tosses it out the window. She explicitly argues that Palin, as the mother of five, has no business being the V.P. She should be at home taking care of these children as her primary responsibility.

Not only do we have a woman with five children, including an infant with special needs, but a woman whose 17-year-old child will need her even more in the coming months. Not to mention the grandchild. This would inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil. . . . [W]omen also will have to decide if they will vote against their conscience by voting to put the mother of young children in a job outside the home that will demand so much of her time and energy. . . . [H]er family situation [is a] valid and vital considerations here.

If there is any intellectually honest feminist out there, they should be spewing their coffee across the keyboard while they read that one. And one wonders about how Ms. Quinn feels about women in other high powered jobs. How does she feel about Michelle Obama holding down a job with two young children? What about fathers of young children? How about Bill Clinton in the White House while his daughter was a teenager? So according to Ms. Quinn, we should vote against Republicans to save motherhood and to demand that mothers stay in the home. Could this get any more hypocritical?

Quinn spends much of the rest of her piece trying to de-legitimize Gov. Palin by labeling her, in essence, an affirmative action pick. This is aimed at the general electorate and, more narrowly, at the Hillary voters. Quinn makes her argument while ignoring Gov. Palin’s accomplishments, her success in office, her background, and the affinity McCain has for a “kindered spirit.” I addressed this argument at length in a post below, Palendemonium. Suffice it to say, Gov. Palin’s plumbing may be a plus, but McCain’s justifications for choosing her neither start nor end at Gov. Palin’s gonads. One finds no hint of that in Quinn’s piece.

And lastly, there is the inexperience argument. The fact that, as mayor and governor, she has more executive experience than the combined Democratic ticket is studiously ignored – as is the fact that Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience is the equal of the Obamaphant in the room. Instead, we get:

How can McCain call Barack Obama unqualified, inexperienced, not ready from Day One, not able to be commander in chief, and then put someone like Palin in a position that is a heartbeat away from the pesidency?

All one needs to do is turn that argument on its head to see how dangerous it is for Democrats. How can Obama be President if he has less qualifications and relevant experience than even the Repulican’s VP pick? That is the real question.

Quinn’s piece is a disgraceful attempt to smear Gov. Palin. Quinn is making an ill disguised reach across the aisle to evangelicals to telling them that they should just follow their misogynist instincts. And it is an explicit warning to Hillary backers not to vote for McCain-Palin. While Gov. Palin may share their plumbing, she is obviously not of their cut. The snobbery and identity politics emanating from Ms. Quinn’s keyboard is palpable.

As I wrote in Palindemonium, the left will just be unable to stop themselves from smearing Gov. Palin because of what she represents – a woman who does not accept victim status and who has made it on her own. That is so antithetical to the left’s belief system and their identity politics that Gov. Palin’s mere presence on the ticket has opened up the gates that held back the sewer water. Ms. Quinn's piece just happens to be one of the first bits of excreta that has floated out. But if America starts to like this most amazing woman, Gov. Palin, and finds her competent, their revulsion at the tactics employed by people such as Ms. Quinn will be reflected in November - and hopefully in the bottom line of Ms. Quinn's MSM employers.

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Links From The Anglosphere

Today is links from our allies in the Anglosphere, all below the fold:
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Art: Conversation in a Park, Thomas Gainsborough, 1740

From North of the Border

Kateland at The Last Amazon blogs on the "second Inquisition." Palestinians are making use of Spanish courts to charge Israelis with war crimes. International law, just like the UN Human Rights commission, is subject to gross distortion.

The Covenant Zone sees China and Canada as going in opposite trajectories, the former towards greater freedom, the latter towards greater repression.

Halls of Macademia posts inarticulate commentary placed on his site from the left. Until recently, I was predisposed to ignore such folks, but I think we do so at our peril at this point.

The recent spate of Human Rights Commission cases in fact seems to be causing a lot of introspection on freedom of speech north of the border. Blazing Cat Fur has several good posts on this topic, including this one on articles addressing the topic by Nigel Hannaford and Ezra Levant in the Calgary Herald. But, as Five Feet of Fury notes, the Muslims who wish to silence speech in Canada and, for that matter, the HRC are determined to prevail. This really is grotesque.

Ezra Levant posts on his confrontation with his HRC accuser, radical Pakistani Imam Syed Soharwardy, on a radio show this week. He asked of Soharwardy when he was going to repay the half million taxpayers dollars wasted on the HRC inquisition of Mr. Levant.

From Down Under

Dr. John Ray posts at a Western Heart on how Kevin Rudd is using politicized science – evidence that is sounding ever more shrill as hard evidence of the falacy of anthropogenic global warming – to justify his massive assault on Australia’s economy.

Col. Robert Neville recounts the conversation of Derek & Clive as they contemplate Islam and anonymous commentor on the good Colonel’s blog. Interesting, the comment sounds very a lot like those from the loony left memorialized in the link to Halls of Macademia above.

KG is doing a bit of howling at Crusader Rabbit over a publicly funded meeting of NZ "bovines" and Islamics, apparently so the NZ ladies can brush up on their dhimmitude.

MK notes that, if you are travelling on the high seas, you had better go armed. Muslim piracy did not end with the Barbary pirates.

Aurora ponders the naked aggression of Russia and sees dangers for America’s allies if Obama is elected President and the world is left without any policeman.

From Across The Pond

Standards matter more than money. From an Englishman’s Castle: "The literacy and numeracy of new employees have tumbled over the past decade despite Labour’s £28 billion increase in education spending, according to research by a leading employers’ organisation."

Heh. At Biased BBC, the foxes are calling for a poultry protection act.

From Bishop Hill, the BBC – a snake pit of socialism, multiculturalism and post modernism – has now made its global warming bias official: "The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]."

Brits At Their Best notes that Brits retain their affinity for measuring distance in miles, not metric.

Burning Our Money spells out, . . . well, how Labour is burning through Britain’s money.

From the Centre for Social Cohesion, this is an interesting artifice. Radical Muslims in the UK want Sharia law recognized for Muslims and, in fact, are running Sharia law courts, though not recognized by the UK. So what the radicals have done now, to give their Islamic marriage a patina of fairness between the sexes, is to launch a new Muslim marriage contract that is, on its face, more fair to women. If that is their goal, why not simply rely on the law of marriage in the UK? Clearly they intend to use this to try and blunt the criticism of those reactionary, non-BBC watching BNP types who do not want to see a parallel legal system recognized in the UK.

The Winds of Jihad has the story of the British welfare system at work. Counting Cats has his fur up and is hissing loudly.

David Thompson bravely goes where few will willingly tread – into the indecipherable prose of the academic bull-shit artist. He appears to have found a few literary Picassos.

The Heresy Corner weighs whether Obama is the anti-Christ.

Hibernia Girl casts a jaundiced eye at some more of the many benefits of EU law – such as preventing enactment of common sense laws to tackle welfare fraud. The EU really is the penultimate socialist nightmare.

Heh. The House of Dumb notes that the left has ferreted out an insidious plot by right wingers.

Mediocracy diagnoses the root causes of the difference in popularity between Gordon the Leper and Tony the Annointed.

One of the most hypocritical aspects of modern feminism is the utter failure to support Muslim women. Mick Hartley notes at least one feminist who justifies that by projecting onto veiled Muslim women the belief that they are making a conscious choice to go veiled so as "a way to register protest against the sexual objectification of women and express solidarity against Western colonialism." There is some post modern thought at its finest.

When I read this story at Pub Philosopher, all I could think was that I did not realize a Clockwork Orange was a documentary.

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Tammy Bruce On The Feminist Warpath

One of the most scandalous aspects of the modern feminist movement in America is their utter partisan bent. Events such as the plight of the young saudi victim of gang rape now sentenced to prison and flogging or even the more general treatment of women in most of the Middle East elicits not a word of reproach while the same organization rails against President Bush and the war in Iraq. And all this has Tammy Bruce, former leader in the National Organization for Women, hunting scalps:

British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, an unimposing woman of 54, was found guilty of "inciting religious hatred" and sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation by a court in Sudan’s Khartoum after allowing her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”

In the meantime, Islamist fundamentalists have called for her execution, and her safety is in constant jeopardy. Demonstrations have increased, with crowds carrying machetes, shouting in part: “Execute her! Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

. . . Apparently, naming a cuddly bear Muhammad insults the prophet, while mass-murdering homicide bombers named Muhammad don’t.

During the past 14 years at least, certainly since Usama bin Laden declared ‘war’ on Western civilization in 1993, we’ve all been exposed to the literal madness of Islamic fundamentalism. We’ve seen the curtain pulled back on how craven American leftists can be as well. Yes, it took a teddy bear to highlight more clearly than ever the psychosis of the enemy, and the failure of the feminist establishment.

There has been appropriate international outrage over the treatment of Gibbons, from virtually everyone except American “feminists.” Multiple Muslim groups in the U.K. have condemned the sentence. Even the popular little boy in Mrs. Gibbons’ class who suggested the name for the bear came to her defense, explaining that he named the bear after himself.

Yet, when asked by FOX News for a comment about the situation, a National Organization for Women spokeswoman said they were "not putting out a statement or taking a position."

This is how depraved the American left has become. A little Muslim boy in Sudan shows more courage and conviction for a woman under fire than a bunch of women sitting in Washington, D.C., who preen themselves on being the premiere “advocates” for women.

It’s been apparent for years that the American feminist establishment is nothing more than a shill for the shallow leftists in the Democrat party, wrapping themselves in the feminist label for convenience. Groups like NOW and Eleanor Smeal’s Feminist Majority, also amazingly silent in the past five years about Islamic terrorism and violence against women, use women’s issues as nothing more than slogans and chants in their efforts to gain political power.

. . . Calling attention to abuse, violence and oppression is something the left claims it does, but these days they’re more than willing to throw those who need our voices under the bus. Their obsession is to make sure the leftist false construct of an evil George Bush and oppressive United States won’t be eclipsed by the truth — the truth of a world where our enemy targets women on a daily basis for terror, torture, oppression and murder as our troops risk and give their lives to banish that horror from the lives of tens of millions.

. . .There have also been a few organizations since 2003 that have done astounding authentic feminist work for women and children around the world, and in Afghanistan and Iraq specifically. The American military, without even a passing "thank you" from so-called feminist leaders Smeal or Steinem or Gandy, have liberated over 53 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a good 25 million of those being women and children. . .

Read the entire article.

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