Kos Kid: Women Have It Great Under Islam!

Excuses, excuses. Barbaric illiberal tyrannies are supplied with endless apologism because their hearts are in the right place (i.e., they are at war, hot or cold, with America).

And America of course is castigated for every flaw, real or imagined.

But don't question their patriotism. This particular chappie seems to think women have it better in Pakistan than in Pawtucket, but do not question his passionate love affair with the United States.

Before 9/11/01, the media relegated stories about women in Islamic societies to page B27, below the fold. Ever since 9/12/01, those same stories have screamed from the front pages in 100-point type.

Really? Um, I don't notice the MSM making an issue of the plight of Islamic women. I notice the alternative conservative media making such noises, but that is not in fact "the media," except in the demented imaginations of leftist fantasists.

The shift in discourse coincided with the launch of Bush's global "War on Terror," when various hawks began using the plight of women in Islam to illustrate the supposed perfidy of our "enemies," and to justify a series of military "interventions" -- invasions -- by Western powers.

"Enemies" like "Al Qaeda" and "the Taliban," he means.

In the United States, there's now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame.

As to the first part: Of course, because it's true.

As to the second: No, it isn't Islam that's wholly to blame; it's also partly due to medieval tribal/cultural customs. However, Islam's aggressively anti-modernist stance certainly abets the persistence of prehistoric notions of female inferiority.

Most of the rest of the world has a much more enlightened, liberal view of female inferiority, to wit, we all still believe in it but we're nice enough not to say so.

But it is the elephant in the room, of course.

But there's scant empirical evidence to support the claim -- mostly, we're treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies, most will reply that "everyone knows it."

And the rest live in such feminist utopias as Pakistan, Indonesia, Libya, and Iran.

Oh, and the Sudan, where at least they're considerate enough to just rape the Christian and black women to death.

But I've seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women's ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women's status in Saudi Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but there's little support for the notion that women living in "traditional" Islamic cultures enjoy a lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a few examples.

Self-Fisking.

...Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands. Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a whole.

This just in, thousands of clit-less Mormon women being raped by their husband's family members in "honor rapings" inflicted for the crime of walking at night without a chaperone. Oh, and PS, then they get whipped and jailed for the crime of being gang-raped, the dirty whores.

Look at the way she was dressed -- I swear to God, I could see part of her eyebrow, Officer.

Gee, I sure fucking wished I could belong to the Reality Based Community.

posted by Ace at 05:10 PM

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