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A western feminist stepped down from her Ivory Tower and moved to a Muslim country with her Muslim husband and received the kind of education she never would have received in any left-leaning western university.
Phyllis Chesler, a professor of “women’s studies,†witnessed Muslim barbarity firsthand. She married a Muslim she’d met at an American school, then moved to his country. She writes:
When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,†my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.
…
Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.†Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.
Naysayers will claim Chesler’s account is an isolated story or merely one woman’s account, but it is not. Though some Muslim countries may not be as brutal and backward, there is no such thing as “women’s rights” in Islam or even “individual rights.” This is why people say that Islam is incompatible with western societies. The suppression of individual rights is an integral part of living under Sharia, and it is not racist or bigotry to say so.
My problem isn’t with “radical†Islam. I have a problem with the entire religion, especially the desire of its followers to live under religious law and to have that law imposed on westerners. In western countries. Every time I blog about my issues with Islam, somebody somewhere calls me a religious bigot. Whatever. Sticks and stones, you know?
My first question to Chesler and women like her is why she married a Muslim in the first place? (And don’t give me that love stuff.) Based on the fact that she’s a women’s studies professor and probably majored in women’s studies in college, she, like so many feminist elites in the West, held a romanticized and false notion that followers of Allah were no different from secularists like herself. But she knows the truth now. After having lived in Afghanistan, she says (emphasis added):
Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs†are absolutely, not relatively, evil.
My best guess is that Chesler, who is Jewish, is not an observant Jew, which is why she married a non-Jew. As a Christian, I am forbidden to marry an unbeliever. An unbeliever is anyone who does not profess Christ. (This doesn’t mean that someone who became a Christian after marriage should divorce an unbelieving spouse. The admonition is against Christians intentionally marrying non-Christians.)
My second question to Chesler is why in god’s name she even thought about moving to a backward Muslim country, let alone actually doing it? The most likely explanation is that she, like so many liberal westerners, bought the insipid multicultural all-cultures-are-equally-valid line. Strangely enough, these same people tend to hold Islam and other religions in higher esteem than they do Christianity, a religion that played and continues to play a huge role in the fact that even Christianity’s harshest critics can denigrate the faith without worrying about having their heads chopped off!
After witnessing Islamic brutality, Chesler is telling the world what she knows. But she has to put up with people who don’t know what the hell heck they’re talking about:
Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe†for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West
Islamophobe. What a stupid word. If that label describes anyone who thinks the West is far superior to the Middle East and that an Islamic state is a less than ideal place to live, Islamo-lovers can call me whatever they like. The irony is totally lost on them. Only in a western country, particularly the U.S., do individuals even have the freedom to broadcast their bloody opinions about us Islamophobes in the first place! Dolts.
You know, it’s really easy to sit in the comfort and luxury of the U.S. and fantasize about some Third World country, full of barbarity, and blame that barbarity on “imperialism.” I believe the word is code for hostility and envy toward white “Christian” men. I strongly suspect this is the case among feminist bloggers, who shall remain nameless and unlinked. They seem not to care about actual brutality toward women by Muslims, only perceived brutality perpetrated by white men.
Let’s do an experiment. Go to the top feminist political blogs and search for criticism of Muslims’ treatment of their wives specifically and women in general, and Islam. Now do a search for disparaging references to the “patriarchy,” which also is code for “white men,” and for Christianity. Additionally, search for criticism of rape where the rapist is someone other than a white man. Let me know what you find.
Chesler of the Open Eyes has a word of warning for western liberal snots and their cohorts:
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
Western so-called anarchists antiracists [I misread the word, but that's OK. So-called tolerant "antiracists" are spoiled brats, too!] and multiculturalists are nothing more than brats, spoiled on the fat hog of American wealth and freedom, which provides them with plenty of leisure to fantasize that barbaric Third World countries and uncivilized religious zealots are somehow morally equal or even superior to the society that gives them the forum and safety to criticize American wealth and freedom.
They lean back in cushioned comfort bad-mouthing the hog while biting into it. May they suffer gut-wrenching indigestion.
Update: Commenter Jeff Turner writes:
For six years of my life I was a devout Muslim who followed the “path†(sirat) of the Salif-as-Salih (those who follow their righteous predecessors) or Wahabibism (a name we didnt particularly like), and I can tell you that everything that this woman has written is true. I’ve seen Muslim men beat their wives, marry other women without their first wife knowing and then one day springs it on his first wife that she is now a co-wife. I remember watching a jihadist tape which was used as a recruiting tool to get the Muslim men to fight jihad in Bosnia via Afghanistan. Islamic life focuses on death and returning to Allah. I have never been so miserable as when I was a Muslim; I could not stop thinking about death. It is a very repressive and oppresive lifestyle in which you are not in control your actions or your thoughts; you’re always living in fear that Allah will punish you not only for your bad actions but your bad thoughts.
Commenter Margaret shares insight on why Chesler traveled to a Muslim country (edited for spelling):
La Shawn, you asked why a feminazi would marry a muslim and go live in Afghanistan.
The answer is because of Chesler’s age. She is in her early 70’s. She went to college in the late 50’s early 60’s married and went to Afghanistan in 1961.
She, like most of the early feminazis such as Betty Freidan was a marxist from a communist background.
In the fifties when Chesler was growing up, Islam was unknown in this country. Most of the Mediterranean islamic countries such as Algeria, Egypt etc were officially very secular at the time. This secularism was because the communists had been very helpful in ridding those countries of their European colonial rulers.
African nationalists also depended on communist help in ending colonial European rule.
So most leftists in America and Europe thought of muslims as fellow fighters against evil colonial white men.
It was really a different time. There was no such thing as women’s studies. The only people who were into women’s rights were the communists. But they weren’t really for women’s rights of course.The communists became pro women’s rights back in the thirties when the labor movement and MALE working class rejected communism. so the communists decided to focus on women, minorities and regional conflicts, (Spanish Basques, Irish catholics etc)
A marxist rebel beatnik young woman of the 1950’s, ignorant of the muslim treatment of women would be very likely to reject all the boring bourgeois boys in her college and marry a stranger from afar country simply because he was not a drab American.
Barack Obama’s Mother is the same age as Chesler. She did the same thing, not once but twice. I am older than you who were exposed to women’s studies at an early age. I am younger that Chesler but knowing the marxist, anti american beatnik New York milieu from which she came I can understand why she chose to marry an Afghan, as far from middle America as possible.
Ten years later, women like Chesler joined the weather underground and bombed the ROTC building on their college campuses, married Black Panthers and rioted for their causes.
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- In Defense of Virgil Goode
- If I Were The Pope…
- A Religious and Unconventional War
- Third World PC BS
- Gunpoint Conversions and Martyrdom
- Let the Ethnic/Religious Profiling Begin!
