A Challenge to Feminists

Here. Some female soldiers fighting ISIS in the Middle East are challenging feminists to join them. Feminists won’t, of course. They haven’t even wanted to have a protest march against ISIS. They haven’t even wanted to have a march in solidarity with the young victims in Rotherham and other towns in England. One of the commenters at the link (Dragblacker) basically had it right when he (or she, but most likely he) said:

Fighting ISIS is Islamophobic, because the real reason for their actions is outrage at racist US/Western foreign policy of bombing them (“What if your family was bombed??”), and they’re anyway just a front for Israel to take out Assad because Zionism.

This actually cleverly combines two different leftist views of ISIS:

1. ISIS is another agent fighting against racist Westerners, and so feminists need to side with them. Accordingly, there will be no demonstrations against ISIS, much less actual fighting against them.

2. ISIS is a creation of the Zionists, because no one else in the Middle East could be that evil. But that means there is no need to demonstrate against them because there already are demonstrations against Israel.

Of course, these two are in conflict since the first sees them as on the feminists’s side, while the second sees them as on their opponents’ side, but as suggested, neither perspective demands that feminists demonstrate against ISIS, and naturally the idea of fighting against them is completely beyond the pale.

And here is another challenge to feminists, this time from an Iranian leftist, who insists that the “cultural sensitivity” of Western feminists who insist upon covering their heads when in Muslim countries doesn’t help feminists in those countries at all. Exactly.

Both of these links support my view that leftists outside of the West do not share the Islamophilia of Western leftists. I shouldn’t have to say this, but the raison d’etre for feminism isn’t fighting racism or Zionism or supporting cultural conservatives in the Third World “oppressed” by the West, it is helping women oppressed by patriarchy. And patriarchy isn’t confined to the West.

Comments

[Charles N.Steele]

Regarding what motivates Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood, Daesh, Al Qaeda, etc., I'm halfway through Sayyid Qtub's "Milestones." Qtub is the primary inspiration/theoretician for the most violent factions of the Muslim Brotherhood (e.g. AQ, ISIS) and his "Milestones" one of his most important works. It's *NOT* motivated by colonialism or western intervention or bombing or anything -- it's a work of Islamic theology, and very little of what the West does matters for his argument. He argues that Muslims have a duty to impose Muslim rule on the entire world, and that this is what the Koran ultimately is about. He even discusses the cases of foreign countries that leave the Muslim word entirely alone, asking just to be left to their own ways, and says this cannot be accepted.

The book (which I find well-written and interesting) is a book of Islamic theology. It's not about outrage over Western policy. The Islamists themselves entirely reject the feminist "defenses" of Islamism. I'm afraid our Western girls really have gone crazy.

[John Pepple]

Yes, this is exactly right. I saw this after the Shah left Iran, and to my surprise, learned that lots of leftists were murdered by the Muslims. It seemed incredible since both groups had worked hard to overthrow the Shah. Why murder your own allies? But that's what they did, and it showed to me quite early on that Muslims were allied with neither the free world nor the socialist world. They had their own dreams of world domination, dreams which leftists in the West still refuse to acknowledge.