Lame-Brained Dames
When Jeff Jacoby wrote the column “The Islamist War Against Muslim Women” (linked to today at FrontPage Magazine), you might have thought that the baying pack of leftie Glob readers would lay off its token conservative columnist.
After all, Jacoby recounted the horror of violence and intimidation visited on Muslim women for the crime of being Muslim women. Who could argue against that?
You’re kidding, right?
Women mistreated in the West, too
IN APRIL 2007, a man broke into the apartment of a Columbia University graduate student, tied her up, and taped her mouth shut. He proceeded to rape and sodomize her for 19 hours, stopping only to slit her eyelids and burn her with hot water and bleach. According to the Department of Justice, 115,010 women were raped in the United States in 2005. Americans have even joined the war against women in Iraq: Four US soldiers gang-raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl in June 2006.
None of this is meant to excuse the horrible events relayed by Jeff Jacoby. It does, however, indicate that no single culture holds a monopoly on the “subjugation of women” or that such incidents are “unthinkable by Western standards,” as Jacoby suggests.
Yes, sweetheart, but those are crimes, not doctrine. Something of a difference.
But that letter’s nothing compared to this one:
US enabled war on Muslim women
While the argument might be made that our intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 helped the plight of women, our failure to finish the job has led to a comeback by the Taliban and an erosion of women’s rights there. Perhaps that teacher of girls would be alive today if we had done the job right.
But in Iraq, we took a country that was secular, where women had full rights, probably the freest in the Middle East, and turned it into an Islamic theocracy. All the rights women once enjoyed there - driving, going to school, walking unescorted, and wearing Western dress - have been taken away. Women can now be murdered for not wearing the hijab. Their life is now a living hell.
I’m stunned.
Never mind the crazed logic that we somehow over-fought Iraq and under-fought Afghanistan—simultaneously—who could possibly think (much less write) that Iraq under Saddam had the freest women in the Middle East? Two words, toots: rape rooms.
And if Iraq is a “living hell” of an “Islamic theocracy”, so are Canada, Britain, Holland, France, and other Western nations where so-called honor killings of women have been committed.
Not to mention the Left’s beloved Palestine.