Read all of the article by Robert Fulford in the National Post from which we quote this:

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, an angry Khartoum journalist who works for the UN in Sudan, has started a campaign against shariah law by elevating a local police matter into an international embarrassment: She’s invited the world to witness her judicial flogging, thus making her case part of the struggle between religious traditionalists and independent women … 

In Khartoum, the General Discipline Police Authority patrols the streets, charged with maintaining shariah standards of public decency. Recently it raided a restaurant and arrested 13 women, including al-Hussein, for the crime of … wearing trousers.

Since 1991, that’s been a violation of the Sudanese criminal code. More precisely, it is classified as a violation of public morality. While erratically enforced, the rule is serious enough to carry a penalty of 40 lashes. Ten of the women arrested with al-Hussein pleaded guilty and received a reduced sentence of 10 lashes. But al-Hussein and two others demanded their day in court and al-Hussein decided to provoke a scandal by distributing 500 personal invitations to her trial. She expects to be found guilty (she won’t be allowed a lawyer or a chance to speak), so she informed her guests that they’ll also be expected at her flogging.

The French government has condemned the law, and in Cairo the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has launched a campaign to defend al-Hussein and the others. ANHRI also protested a suit brought by the police against another journalist, Amal Habbani, for an article praising al-Hussein ( “A Case of-Subduing a Woman’s Body”). The police claim that the mere act of defending female pants-wearing also violates General Discipline.

When stories such as al-Hussein’s flash around the world, there’s usually a missing element: The feminist movement rarely [never – JB] becomes part of the narrative. The rise of shariah law constitutes the major global change in women’s status during this era, yet Western feminists remain pathetically silent.

Feminist journalists like to speculate about the future of activism among women today, but you can leaf through a fat sheaf of their articles without encountering a mention of Muslim women. Feminist professors, for their part, show even less interest. Trolling through the 40-page program of the European Conference on Politics and Gender, held in Belfast last winter, I found feminist scholars (from Europe, the United States and Canada) dealing with women’s political opportunities, the implications for women of new medical technology, the politics of fashion and even women’s response to climate change. What I couldn’t find was even one lecture or discussion devoted to so-called “honour killing.” Nor was there any mention of the thousands upon thousands of women routinely flogged, raped, imprisoned or stoned to death, often with the tacit or explicit agreement of Islamic governments.

A piece in the Jerusalem Post about the death of Neda Soltan, a young woman murdered in the protests this week.

THIS WHOLE situation is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan. For years before 9/11, women’s groups were circulating articles, e-mails and any kind of visible validation demonstrating the horror that women lived with under the Taliban. Stories of women professors being arrested if they left their homes, videos of women being shot in public stadiums for daring to have a job, petitions, statistics, testimonials – they all got around. Well, at least among women. Yet, despite the extreme suffering of women throughout Taliban rule, the United States did not intervene, nor did anyone else – that is, until 9/11 happened. When the Taliban attacked the United States, suddenly America woke up and unanimously said, “Hey, those Taliban! They’re really bad! We should stop them!”

I would suggest to the author that the United States government is going to be – indeed, is obliged to be – more concerned about the murder of 3000 of its own citizens than the horrific internal autocratic oppression in the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

 Could you imagine a worse life to be born into – such that many millions are born into – than that of a Muslim woman somewhere in – say – North Africa?  

 Genitally-mutilated, secluded, wrapped in a black tent, forced into marriage, illiterate, frequently beaten, liable to lose her children at any time, not permitted to go out to work, and not allowed to have medical treatment because doctors are male and may not even see her, let alone examine her. If ever a life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short – and full of pain and sorrow – it is the life of this woman. 

She can be divorced by her husband at his whim, and if she has no family to return to, can be abandoned to starvation.   

Because of her clitorectomy and infibulation, it is agony to menstruate and copulate, and childbirth for her is even more excruciating than it is for most women.

Her children can be taken from her at any time. Her boys, even when they are little, can be sold into slavery, made to fight and kill, or to walk over minefields. Her daughters too can be taken as slaves, for a life of perpetual labour and sexual exploitation; or forced into marriage well before puberty, to endure the same sort of life that she endures.

If she is raped she will be killed by her own male relatives in an ‘honor killing’; or, if condemned to be executed by the state, she will be buried in earth up to her shoulders and stoned to death. 

Of course feminists of the free world are up in arms about this, making a huge fuss about it at the United Nations, doing everything they can with passionate zeal and dedication to help their Muslim sisters – aren’t they?

Actually, no. One hardly hears a peep from them about it.  Even to notice it, they pretend, would be ‘racism’. Because, you see, they are almost all on the political left. Leftism, for its devotees, trumps all; and the left, though it brags of caring about the oppressed – indeed, that is it’s very raison d’etre – is in reality compassionless, deliberately blind and ignorant, and universally actively or passively cruel.  

Jillian Becker  December 2008

 Post 1968 feminism was the Revolt of the Unattractive.  Feminists thought to compensate themselves for failing as women by succeeding in the male-dominated worlds of business, politics and so on.  

Now along comes a woman who is beautiful, loved, happy in her marriage to a good husband, the mother of five children, a success in everything she has undertaken, and in three strides – mayor, governor, vice-presidential candidate – achieves more than almost any other woman in America ever has.

The feminists’ vicious, spiteful, small-minded rage against Sarah Palin is sheer green-eyed envy. 

 Women like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Sarah Palin owe nothing to the lefty feminist movement.

Brains, competence, courage, character, and the right understanding of political issues equip them for  leadership, for directing whole nations, for steering the ship of state.   

The Wall Street Journal contrasts Sarah Palin with Hillary Clinton: 

Many younger women didn’t learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn’t abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.

She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections – no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.

Then came the interesting part. Under the standard model, you deploy your superb IQ to maneuver upward around the oppressors. Sarah Jock, learning her self-discipline in such weird pursuits as morning moose-hunts with her dad, ran at the system. Doing something few women and no males would do, she went after the men who run Alaska’s inbred politics, the machine. And cleaned their clocks. The people elected her governor.

I asked a number of women this week to account for Sarah Palin’s sudden appeal. Here are the common threads.

The angry woman-as-victim drives them nuts. They hate victimology. As one woman said, "The point is that across the ages women have been doing pretty much what Sarah Palin has been doing: bearing children, feeding families, bringing in an income, working to improve their communities."

Another woman said, "Her story reflects a more normal reality" of active women; "the harder you work, the luckier you get." Hillary Clinton still plays the victim card. Sarah Palin gives off no victim vibes. These women mentioned her grit, determination and character.

Read the whole thing here.

 Read this story here, and just think what the life of this Iranian woman has been like since she was a little girl of 13.  Now, after 18 years in prison, she is about to be executed for a crime she did not commit, on the insistence of the actual murderer’s family.  

Needless to say, no Western feminist voices have been raised – at least not so we could hear them – in protest against the way she or any other woman is treated in the Muslim world.

Of course, wimmin are not concerned with such things as justice. They are too busy complaining that men don’t help enough with the housework , or something of that order of significance. 

 Read Heather MacDonald’s excellent article  on the desperation in ‘the women’s grievance movement’ here.