Thursday, January 24, 2008

A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam

“One of our concerns … is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. There are probably 600 Women’s Studies programs on American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. We have had a very hard time locating a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.”
- An Annonymous Islamophobe
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Horowitz and Spencer: A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam
January 24, 2008
David Horowitz and I invite feminists to join us in protesting the oppression of Muslim women. From FrontPage:
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This week, seven hundred feminists signed an Open Letter complaining that “columnists and opinion writers from The Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world.”
We recognize this Open Letter as a delayed response to the Freedom Center’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which protested the silence of feminists over the “Oppression of Women in Islam” on campuses all over the country last fall, organized sit-ins at a dozen Women’s Studies Departments to protest the absence of courses and department-sponsored events confronting the issue, and made this a matter of national discussion and debate. This is why the signers of the Open Letter complain that “‘Women’s rights are human rights’ was not a slogan dreamed up by David Horowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers,” two of our speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. (We never claimed it was.)
The signers of this Letter claim that, “contrary to the accusations of pundits,” they support Muslim feminists in “their struggle against female genital mutilation, ‘honor’ murder, forced marriage, child marriage, compulsory Islamic dress codes, the criminalization of sex outside marriage, brutal punishments like lashing and stoning, family laws that favor men and that place adult women under the legal power of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and laws that discount legal testimony made by women.”
Well, we welcome these avowals of support for the rights of Muslim women. However, forgive us for doubting their sincerity. As one of us pointed out in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin during Islamo-Fascism Week:
“One of our concerns … is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. There are probably 600 Women’s Studies programs on American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. We have had a very hard time locating a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.”
What was true last October is still true today. As recently as December 10, a Muslim teenager was strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab without a protest from the American feminist movement. And that is only one of many crimes committed in the name of Islam against Muslim women over which the feminist movement continues to be silent.

On New Year’s Day, Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, (above) were shot dead in Irving, Texas. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, on a warrant for capital murder. The girls’ great aunt, Gail Gartrell, told reporters, “This was an honor killing.” Apparently Yaser Said murdered his daughters because they had non-Muslim boyfriends...
READ IT ALL HERE:

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I really hope the women and the organizations that signed this letter are sincere. Truly, I do. But it will take more than signatures on a letter to convince me.

I've been toiling away on dishonor killings for years. None of the human rights and women's organizations I've contacted over the years has offered me any kind of support and, with the noble exception of the International Campaign Against Honor Killings (in the UK), not even encouragement. So forgive me if this response seems to me a bit too little, a bit too late, and a bit too face saving in the context of direct confrontation.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"

4:41 PM  
Blogger Gary Baumgarten said...

Gail Gartrell will be my guest today at 5 PM NY time on News Talk Online.

To talk to Gartrell please go to www.garybaumgarten.com and click on the Join The Show link. There is no charge.

Thanks

7:36 AM  

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