Islam is an appalling religion. By far the worst of the big ones.

It is savagely cruel in both theory and practice.

Now that the fanatical Taliban sect is taking complete power over Afghanistan, advancing daily as the US military withdraws from the country, Afghan women will be slaves, downtrodden, exploited, abused, killed at the whim of men or by Islamic law, which prescribes agonizing methods of execution. They can be easily divorced and abandoned. Their children can be taken from them. They will be denied education and medical treatment. (They may not be treated by male doctors, and will not be allowed to train as doctors.) They may not go to work outside their homes, so if they are divorced or widowed and have no male relations to earn money to keep them, they are sentenced to death by starvation.

Afghan women who have been working with the American army will be put to death.

Consider this story of one brave strong American woman trying to save one Afghan woman.

Phyllis Chesler tells her story at the excellent site of Steven Emerson, The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

I have been on email with this one women in Kabul both day and night.

“After international forces leave Afghanistan,” she wrote, “my life will be in danger so I once more kindly request you to save my life. Their withdrawing will be life threatening for all those women and girls who worked with international organizations and were social activists. I am one of those girls.”

Few single Afghan women will leave with smugglers on their own. And for good reason. Smugglers will probably rape, rob, and abandon a woman. Life in refugee camps is similarly dangerous. The only safe way an Afghan woman can leave at this point—and with her family’s blessing—would be on a military transport with someone waiting to receive her, and a process in place so that she can live and work while she applies for political asylum. This is the only route which does not require the almost impossible-to-obtain special or America-related visa. If one has not worked for an American NGO or the American military directly, one cannot apply for a visa. I’m told that if an Afghan woman wants to apply for a “special” visa, she must travel to a third country and remain there for a year.

There are thousands of Afghan women who have hosted Afghan radio and television programs (as my woman in Kabul has), and who have written for Afghan newspapers. There are physicians, nurses, teachers, police officers, politicians, scientists, athletes, etc. What will become of them under Taliban rule?

Perhaps America and the West stayed “in country” too long. In 20 years, we neither found bin Laden hiding in an Afghan cave nor were we able to extinguish or moderate Taliban warlord values. They are quintessential Islamists who live to fight, kill, and die “for Allah”. 

But, at the same time, the presence of Western military boots on the ground allowed countless Afghan civilians, especially women, to succeed educationally and professionally. They enjoyed a taste of what Western post-Enlightenment civilization has to offer. We are now abandoning them to the Middle Ages. 

What else can we do? We cannot afford to airlift half the Afghan population and settle them in the West.

The moment the last Western military boot leaves Afghanistan, the remaining shelters for battered women and schools for girls will be torched, one by one, as will the women who dared to run these enterprises.

And yes, the Taliban will shelter and train anti-Western terrorists from all over the world.

Does all this mean that the US should keep a military presence in the country forever?

If not that, is there anything Americans should do, at least for the women?

Is there anything Americans could do for them?

London has a Muslim mayor. Its murder rate has outstripped that of New York. It has become one of Europe’s main centers of festering ant-Semitism, encouraged by the Labour Party.

An American describes London as she finds it now.

Phyllis Chesler writes at Front Page:

Now, all London only dares whisper about the Arab and Muslim takeover of their city. Nearly every single luxury hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia as is the historic department store Harrods. (Dodi Al-Fayed’s father, an Egyptian, bought it long ago when he envisioned his son marrying Princess Diana, the mother of the future King of England).

The best townhouses on Park Lane, in Hyde Park, Belgravia, Mayfair, and Knightsbridge now belong to Arab Embassies, oil-rich sheiks, and the occasional Russian oligarch. I know several exceptionally gallant, truth-telling thinkers and writers in London who are now blacklisted, censored, their powers curtailed. They dared tell the truth about how biased against America and Israel the British media and professoriate are–and how irrationally they favor both Islam and Islamism.

However, as one life-long Londoner pointed out to me: “Harrods, which is also owned by Arabs, (al-Fayed sold it to Qatar), loses business nine months of the year and only survives because Arabs come on shopping expeditions in the summer to escape the desert heat.” London’s Fortum and Mason’s, the most luxurious store in the world, now has its first stand-alone satellite store in Dubai.

A limousine driver tells me that he routinely picks up exceedingly short fur coats that cost $65,000.00 for Arab women and that “once, a Saudi Prince left 3 million pounds in the boot (trunk) of my car. He completely forgot about it.”

A professor from Oxford comes down to visit me. She tells me about the “Asian (Pakistani) grooming gangs” in Oxford and about how 378 very young Caucasian infidel girls were pimped out by these gangs in Oxford alone.

“Finally, after many years, the pimps were arrested and sentenced and the failure of the police to stop them was excoriated in open court. The English Defense League mounted a brave, civil rights protest right in front of the police station. The police cordoned them off, surrounded them with barking dogs and a line of police officers who let no one near enough to hear what they had to say. And then they loosed the Anti-Fascist League against them who came rushing down the street, hollering “Nazi, fascist scum.”

As Orwell understood, not all speech is equal.

The streets are filled with women in heavy hijab, in Niqab, (face masks), and in black, burqa-like body bags. As I have written many times before: I have no quarrel with head coverings but suggest that the West must draw the line at face masks and sensory deprivation isolation chambers which burqas truly are. These “covered” women are flying the flag of Jihad, of a barbaric version of patriarchy – which is now increasingly ensconced within Britain’s gates.

The West’s dependence on Big Oil together with its own blind commitment to cultural sensitivity, an allegedly anti-racist tolerance for the barbarian “other,” and fearfulness about the consequences of speaking out, have together brought this about.

Some say that just as England once colonized the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, Central Asia, and the Far East that now, the favor is being returned; the Islamic world is giving the colonizing Mother Country a taste of its own well deserved medicine.

The British took great gifts to the backward Third World as they spread their empire. To all their colonies, individual freedom (for all, after Wilberforce), tolerance, a free press, an impartial judiciary, roads and railways. To some who lacked it, literacy.

The Muslims now colonizing Britain – many of them NOT from former British colonies – have no equal gifts to bring. Instead they offer the subjugation of women, intolerance, honor killings, female genital mutilation, suppression of free speech, indoctrination of their primitive and cruel ideology, the horrors of Sharia law wherever and whenever they can, and hatred of the people and culture of their host country.

Tragically, this means that infidel women are sexual prey; that their rape, sexual harassment, and sexual slavery is being done quite openly, publicly – just as it is done in the Muslim world.

It means that the luxury hotels all offer a “halal” option; that certain British government offices are run as Sharia enterprises.

All British government offices have Muslims in positions of authority. For – you know – “diversity and inclusion”.

The British nationalists and the Islamists agree on one thing and one thing only: That the Jews are the greatest oppressors and conspirators in the world; that “Palestine” is the most oppressed (non-) country in the whole wide world; and that this must be screamed out loud in the mosques, on the streets, in the media, and in the universities. …

Recently, I wrote about a British documentary made possible by the hard work of a Turkish-born nun, Sister Hatune Dogan. She opened every door for the British filmmakers, gentled the sex slaves whom she and her networks had rescued from ISIS and translated their words for the filmmaker.

Despite all promises to the contrary, Sister Hatune and her foundation were completely dropped from the film. When I finally got the producer on the phone, she admitted to me that “the film could not afford to be associated with such a racist Islamophobe, that it would ruin their chances for recognition and prizes” – and when I questioned her further, she quickly began yelling, then screaming after which she hung up on me in breathtaking fashion.

Yes, there is some “fight back”. Britain has the power to return Muslim girls whose families have kidnapped them to Pakistan for forced marriages – that’s if they can find them. Just as I was leaving, I read that a couple were arrested at Heathrow Airport for having taken their eight year old girl back to Somalia to have her genitals mutilated; doing so is against the law.

Will Britain, will all Europe, fight to remain Western countries? Or, hoisted on their own petard of political correctness, will they simply become vassal states of Islam?

To be or not to be – that is the question.

The Islamic Republic of Great Britain looms ahead. For the most part, the living generations are too feeble and cowardly to do anything to stop it.

*

In preparation for the transformation of the United Kingdom into the Islamic Republic of Great Britain, the Conservative government is turning it into a thorough-going police state.

Freedom of speech is abolished.

Blasphemy laws are re-introduced.

Breitbart reports:

People promoting “hostility” towards a religion or the transgendered online could get sentences of up to six years in jail, especially if they have a large online audience, according to new proposals.

The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has drafted changes to public order offenses, including anyone perceived as targeting online “protected characteristics”, including “race; sex; disability; age; sexual orientation; religion or belief; pregnancy and maternity; and gender reassignment”.

Whoever drafted this nonsense is retarded, insane, or Muslim. Or all three. (Muslim intermarriage in Britain produces many future citizens who are physically and/or mentally impaired.)

It is commonly known and generally accepted that the only religion actually protected by law from criticism is Islam.

All ideologies, all ideas, must be critically examined.

And as we have said before, and will say again:

Any idea that needs a special law to protect it is ipso facto a bad idea. 

Daniel Greenfield’s 10 Reasons to Abolish the UN is a must-read. Find it here.

These are the 10 reasons summed up in headings:

1. The United Nations Obstructs America’s Defense of the Free World

2. The United Nations is a Force of Global Injustice

3. The UN Obstructs the Prevention of Genocide

4. The UN Distorts Women’s Rights to Promote Violence against Women

5. The UN Cannot Prevent Nuclear Proliferation

6. The UN is an Undemocratic Perversion of Democracy

7. The United Nations is Hopelessly Corrupt

8. The UN is an Economic Drain on America

9. The United Nations Endangers American Civil Liberties

10. The UN Holds Human Rights Hostage to its Double Standards

The booklet is short, but every accusation is fully proved.

In his Conclusion, Greenfield writes:

The UN is a vast global employment agency with no purpose except the perpetuation of its own power and authority. Its lofty buildings and the bustle of its vast armies of employees conceal its underlying corruption and uselessness.

American participation in the United Nations supports the deception that it is an international body capable of fair-minded governance. That deception cruelly betrays the hopes of the weak and the vulnerable and abets genocide, mass rape and terror.

The United Nations has become an organizational assault on its own founding principles. And all the while it undermines the sovereignty and rights of the free member nations who still believe that all men are created equal and that governments derive their authority from the people.

The only way to redeem those principles is to exit its corridors and walk a new path toward an alternative alliance that does more than pay lip service to freedom, democracy and human rights. Only America can be the nucleus of such an alliance. And only when the nation that gave the world freedom leaves the international order that impedes it can a global alliance of free nations truly be born.

*

In an article titled America: The Chief Subsidizer of UN Rapists and Traffickers, chiefly concerned with what happens to whistle-blowers on the UN role in crimes of rape and the trafficking of sex slaves, Phyllis Chesler expresses her disgust with that appalling institution:

The Wilsonian-influenced ideals of the UN are not realistic or realizable.

We agree emphatically. And whenever unrealistic ideals are set, nastiness ensues. (Vide Christianity.)

The UN is predicated on the myth — nay, the lie — that UN diplomats and civil servants are morally upright, fair, decent, rational — and, not the vicious tyrants, bullies, thugs, liars, egomaniacs, cowards, and grifters that they truly are. Nor does the UN have a transparent system in place that would hold their mightily flawed personnel accountable for the crimes they commit. …

Who keeps it going, this Tower of Iniquity, this World Headquarters of Evil? More than any other country, the United States of America!   

If it is clear that the United Nations allows its peacekeeping troops to commit major human rights atrocities, why would we allow such an institution to render decisions that are meant to affect the entire world? Why would we abide by such decisions? More important: Why should the United States fund an international criminal operation? The United States pays the lion’s share of the Secretariat costs at the United Nations. Don’t worry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has assured stressed American taxpayers that the two-year headquarters budget (2010-11) will only amount to a meager $4.92 billion.

According to the UN peacekeeping website, the budget for the fiscal year 1 July 2011-30 June 2012 is approximately seven billion dollars. The United States is responsible for 27 percent of this cost, or about two billion. This is far more than what Japan (1 billion), the UK (591 million), China (285 million), Spain (230 million), or Korea (164 million) pays for peacekeepers. Interestingly, under President Barack Obama’s administration, the United States overpaid its share of the UN peacekeeping budget. In fact, our overpayment of 287 million dollars is more than what most of the world’s supporters — including China — pay for “peacekeeping.”

Why is the United States funding rapists, criminals, pimps, brothels, and sex traffickers? Why are we funding orgies? Why are we funding the most heinous betrayal of the world’s most vulnerable civilians in war zones? Why are we overpaying for UN peacekeeping?

Why is the US paying anything at all to sustain the rotten institution?

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED.

We have become sadly used to reading about Muslim men killing their daughters, sisters and wives to restore or preserve the “honor” of their family.

We have posted stories of Muslim girls being buried alive by their fathers, brothers, uncles, tribal elders. (See our posts, In the name of Allah the Merciful, February 4, 2010; Imagine, February 6, 2010; The atrocity that is Islam, September 10, 2010.)* In some cases, their mothers and sisters plead vainly for their lives.

Now we hear of  two Muslim mothers helping each other kill their daughters because they married men of their own choice in defiance of family disapproval and the convention of their “culture”.

Phyllis Chesler writes at Front Page:

Two Muslim mothers, both widows, both living in Uttar Pradesh in India, helped each other murder their grown daughters, Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, for having committed the crime of marrying Hindu men.

They held their daughters down and slowly strangled them to death. The poor dead darlings actually believed they were entitled to marry non-Muslim men and for “love,” and that ultimately their mothers and Muslim community would accept them back. This is typical of many honor killing victims. While these two young women knew enough to contact the police for help — and the police actually got their mothers to sign an agreement that they would not “harm” their children — it was only a deceptive piece of paper. But the daughters’ longing for reconciliation and naive hopefulness was their undoing. Their mothers agreed not to hurt them and sweet-talked them into returning; once the girls were home, they became prey for the kill.

But life without a family network is unthinkable for someone whose identity is not individual but rather located in a collectivity. Progress and “modernity” may be coming to India, but slowly, very slowly.

Neither mother, Khatun or Subrato, has expressed the slightest remorse. Both feel justified because their daughters brought shame to their families. According to the police, Khatun said: “We killed them because they brought shame to our community. How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse.”

This is cold-hearted, barbaric, almost unbelievable. But such Muslim-on-Muslim crimes and woman-on-woman crimes are typical in many parts of the world. …

We expect women, mothers especially, to be able to defy social custom for the sake of saving their children. The reality is just the opposite. The slightest transgression, especially by women, will upset huge networks and topple all social stability. No one will marry someone from a “shamed” family; that family will be forever ostracized, impoverished, and may also die out genetically. Mothers, fathers, relatives are loyal to their tribal social customs rather than to any one individual, even if that individual is their own child. The system itself demands and allows for such barbarism—but the sacrifice of the individual is seen as in the service of the greater tribal and caste based social structure or “civilization.”

She is right to put the word civilization in quotation marks in that context. She is also right to point out that,  as a feature of Islamic custom, woman-on-woman cruelty goes on in “many parts of the world”, which is to say that Muslim “culture” often has its baleful effect even in countries where Muslims are a minority. “Honor killings” are carried out by Muslims in Western Europe and the United States. Religion is often the ingredient that keeps a culture primitive and cruel. In the case of Khartun and Sobrato, they objected fiercely to the husbands because they were Hindus.

India is a democracy, and rapidly becoming an economic power in the world. The British brought ideas of individual freedom and justice to the sub-continent and put an end to its cultural tradition of “suttee” – the burning alive of a wife on her husband’s funeral pyre. And the process of “modernization” is continuing – meaning that it is continuing to develop into a Western-type law and order state. But democracy and law take time to eradicate ancient traditions and change cultures.

In India .. mothers-in-law routinely assist their sons in burning their daughters-in-law to death. This is known as a “dowry killing” because it is done so that a new bride can bring another dowry into the impoverished and/or greedy family. There is actually a special wing in a prison in New Delhi for such mothers-in-law. … Both women and men steal children in India and sell them to be adopted abroad or, more frequently, to be groomed into sexual slavery either at home or abroad.

The exploitation of children as prostitutes is common in India, and not only as prostitutes. We have written about a child whipped with razor-blades by her beggar-father to arouse pity and solicit alms (see our post, Condemned to dream and bleed, December 23, 2010).

Governments may make laws, and courts may rule, against such practices. Perpetrators may even be punished. But in its struggle with custom, law can take ages to succeed.

The truth, however offensive to liberal opinion, is that most of the world’s cultures are barbarically cruel. And the cruelty is often inseparable from religion. Life for millions of human beings in our time is still essentially tribal, which is to say collective, and haunted by superstition. A vale of tears. Thousands of well-meaning young Peace Corps enthusiasts going to “help” in Africa can change nothing. Whole American armies mis-used to build schools and clinics in Afghanistan can change nothing. Technology alone – the life-improving products of the First World – may, in time, effect a real transformation.

Only the First World, the Western Pan-European culture, its values and system, is worthy as a whole of respect; and if the respectable is to be searched for the best that humankind has achieved, it is the Anglo-Saxon that deserves the laurel wreath. Yes, the birthplace of it, Britain, is in steep decline; and yes, it is  flawed with religion and threatened presently by socialist collectivism in America, the multi-ethnic land of its supreme success. But it is the highest peak of civilization, the Shining City on the Hill.

* See also this story from Pakistan (hat tip George).

How bleak and sad life is for the religious, especially for Muslims, and most miserably for their women and children.

Osama bin Laden was a rich man. Phyllis Chesler tells how he kept his wives and children in want, hunger, discomfort, and deliberate joylessness.

While he still lived in Saudi Arabia, before he had to flee to Sudan and thereafter to Afghanistan, [Osama bin Laden] condemned his wives and children to lives of physical, medical, and psychological hardship. …

He insisted on an increasingly spartan existence as a matter of ideology …

Here is what Omar bin Laden has written about his life with his father Osama:

“There were absurd rules regarding our conduct. ..  We were told that we must not become excited at any situation. We should be serious about everything. We were not allowed to tell jokes. We were ordered not to express joy over anything. He did say that he would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh. If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eyeteeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment had revealed.”

According to Omar, his father … “caned” him and his brothers “for the slightest infraction.” Osama… deprived his sons of their much needed asthma medication … He force marched them without water for hours and in the desert. In addition, he allowed his sons to be brutalized by sadistic teachers. He refused to give his sons “pocket money” for “school snacks.” He told them, Omar writes:

“‘No. You need to suffer. Hunger pangs will not hurt you.’ … Our father appeared to relish seeing us suffer, reminding us that it was good for us to know what it felt like to be hungry or thirsty, to do without while others had plenty. Why? He said that we would end up being the stronger. Those with plenty would grow up weak men, unable to defend themselves.” …

Omar and his brothers all learned that they would have to endure paternal cruelty and humiliation and that their tender and sympathetic mothers would not and could not intercede on their behalf. Osama bin Laden’s wives, especially Najwa, Omar’s mother, are portrayed as … submissive, uncomplaining, very religious, quite passive. Najwa gave up her desire to decorate her home, which was, essentially, her prison. … She never uttered a single complaint—not even when she was deprived of most conveniences and normal amenities. Omar writes:

“Although we lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the hottest and most humid cities in a country that is known for its hot climate, my father would not allow my mother to turn on the air-conditioning that the contractor had built into the apartment building. Neither would he allow her to use the refrigerator that was standing in the kitchen. My father announced, ‘Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernization.’”

Yet “he himself had fast cars, fast planes … weaponry too.”

Although he has every reason to hate his father, Omar bin Laden is complaining that the cruel old man did not receive justice.

What would be justice for a man who has killed thousands of people? He has only two eyes to give for thousands of eyes, only one mouthful of teeth for thousands of teeth. He cannot be made to choose between death by fire or leaping from a height, or to choke in smoke, or to crash to the ground in a plane, thousands of times over.

Besides, justice has no place in war. War happens when law and all civil norms have broken down. Osama bin Laden made war on the United States, so American warriors hunted him down and shot him dead. He deserved worse.

Considering what is done to prisoners in Iran, what American captives have had to endure at the hands of the mullahs, and how women generally are treated under Islamic law, one might say that Sarah Shourd is extraordinarily fortunate to have been let out of prison and allowed to leave that fearful country. Her half a million dollars ransom was almost certainly paid by the US State Department with tax-payers’ money, though that’s unlikely ever to be admitted for the sensible reason that if a state is known to be willing to pay for the release of its kidnapped citizens, more will be kidnapped. So rumors that the Sultan of Oman paid it out of the goodness of his generous heart have been allowed to float.

How did she come to be in Iranian hands? She and two men friends decided to go for a nice long walk somewhere abroad, for recreation, exercise and amusement. Did they look at maps and pictures of various likely resorts for walking vacations? Did they consider Scotland, Canada, New Zealand? Whether they did or not, what they chose was Iraq: a country that has barely if at all emerged from a long war, where every day people are being shot down and blown up. One of the most dangerous places on  earth. And the route they chose was along the border with Iran, another of the most dangerous countries on earth, at least for Americans. They could have picked only one region more dangerous – the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Were they excited by the idea of putting themselves at risk? Were they “playing chicken”? Did they imagine, fear, or get a frisson at the idea, that they might be taken hostage? And did they not understand that if they were, they’d be putting their families and their country over a barrel? Or are they – as many  say they are for loss of a better explanation, and the Iranian authorities insist they are – spies? Shourd denies it, but so she must, whether it’s true or not.

We don’t think the three hikers are spies. We think they’re more likely to be reckless fools. And yet – how did they get to where they were captured? What documents did they need to get into Iraq? Can anyone do it? Are crowds of tourists landing there daily now? Do coaches take parties of Americans sightseeing or bird-watching? How did they get from wherever it was they entered Iraq to the Iranian frontier? On foot? Unchallenged and unmolested? The more one thinks about it, the stranger the whole affair seems, and the more questions present themselves.

Where do Sarah Shourd’s political sympathies lie? Had she ever protested against the Iraq war? Was she trying to prove something?

Does she by character belong in that class of  “privileged, young, white” women from America, Europe and Israel (Jewish and Arab) who are going to the West Bank to protect the Palestinians from Israeli soldiers by interposing themselves between the “murderous” Jews and their hapless victims – and, Phyllis Chesler writes at FrontPage, are being kidnapped, raped, and (in the case of the Arab girls only, presumably) forced into marriage by the subjects of their selfless compassion?

According to one recent and very disturbing report, foreign (American and European) and Israeli Jewish and Arab left-feminists are being routinely harassed, raped, and even forced into marriage by the very Palestinians whom they have come to “rescue.” More shocking is the alleged pressure brought to bear on those activists who wish to press charges about being raped or abducted into marriage; their own movement presumably pressures them not to do so because the alleged Israeli “occupation” of Palestine is far more important than the violent “occupation” of any woman’s body.

The type of girl we’re talking about has been sacrificing herself for noble causes to the annoyance and inconvenience of others, and her own ultimate remorse, since the nineteenth century.

Joseph Conrad wrote about her sort in a story called The Informer:

She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions – the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social classes to which she belonged herself. …She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. … For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures.

Reckless adventurism and a self-righteous refusal to believe that people can intend to do evil – especially if those people have been selected as objects of pity – are not criminal but they are not blameless. Willful ingenuousness amounts to a vice. A grown-up should know better.

Jillian Becker    September 24, 2010

“The human race,” quoth an anonymous wit, “is divided into adults and women.”

If we accept the division for the sake of argument, we would observe that many females belong in the adult column, but almost all feminists, along with all leftists, belong in the other. (Homosexuals are well distributed into both, the division having nothing to do with sexual preferences or who’s macho or who’s effeminate.)

Generally, but most significantly in the realm of public affairs, adults think, women feel.

One of the few exceptions among feminists is brave, intelligent, principled Phyllis Chesler.

Recently, on August 25, she gave an address at a Yale University conference on global anti-semitism.

Her speech, titled The History and Psychological Roots of Anti-Semitism Among Feminists, Their Gradual Palestinianization and Stalinization, is well worth reading in full. Here are a few passages from it:

I could not have predicted the rapid and extreme Stalinization and Palestinianization that would take place among academics and activists in general. I could never have imagined that the western intelligentsia, the “good” people, including feminists, would make so tragic an alliance with Islamic barbarism and misogyny.

I became a feminist leader in 1968-1969. I remain one. Most of the other feminists of my generation are no longer engaged in the historical moment. …

For the last decade, Jewish and non-Jewish feminists have marched in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rallies, signed newspaper ads and petitions to divest from and boycott Israel—yes, even gay and lesbian feminists who would be tortured to death in Muslim countries, did so. These professed “humanitarians”—who carry on about the recent Turkish assassination flotilla—do not take as strong a stand against stoning or forced face-veiling. Some feminists think [face-veiling is] “liberating” or even the ultimate feminist choice. Most feminists do not take a stand against forced marriage, child marriage, first cousin marriage, polygamy, and honor-related violence, included honor killing. They fear that doing so might be seen as “racist” or as culturally insensitive. …

In October of 2004, a small group of San Francisco-based feminist activists … traveled to Duke University … to support the Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference that was taking place there. …

They did not have a balanced or particularly feminist agenda. Although many activists were lesbians or pro-gay, they had not come to protest the Palestinian persecution and torture of suspected homosexuals in Gaza or on the West Bank nor did they seem to know that Israel has granted political asylum to Palestinian homosexuals, including those who have literally been tortured and nearly killed by other Palestinians. Instead, these American feminists wore keffiyas, political buttons and tee-shirts that read “We are all Palestinians.”

The American and European Left and feminist and gay movements have made a marriage in Hell with Islamist terrorists. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over their devotion to communist dictators who murdered one hundred million of their own people in the service of a Great Idea, have now fatefully joined the world Jihadic chorus in calling for the end to “racist” Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid and “Nazi” state. …

She notices the immaturity of these leftists and feminists:

These westerners share an extraordinary psychological rage which requires a scapegoat and cleaning messianic promises, a refusal to look within, an overwhelming need for group approval, an inability or refusal to think as independent individuals, an adolescent in-your-face rebelliousness towards certain authorities—coupled with an adolescent, slavish adoration of other authorities, a desire for cathartic violence, for the ecstasy of mob action …

And their often stunning stupidity:

In 2007, a Jewish Israeli feminist researcher at Hebrew University, doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, blamed Israeli soldiers because they refused to rape Arab and Palestinian women; she claimed this constituted “racism” against Palestinians.

Earlier this year, 2010, a team of researchers led by a female Harvard social scientist blamed Israel in the pages of The Lancet, a British medical journal, for an increase in Palestinian wife-battering in Gaza and on the West Bank. The researchers did not even consider the role that radical Islamification might play in the oppression of women or the fact that Gaza is ruled by terrorist gangsters and this might cause an escalation of violence towards women. Honor killings (and a relevant, recent study actually existed) were not included in their measures of violence against Palestinian women. Why? Because that cannot be blamed on Israel or on the West. …

In the summer of 2010, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and former spokesman for the PLO, …

– who, it is said, arranged for Obama’s fees at Harvard to be paid presumably by some rich Arab or Arabs –

… a man who also happens to be a friend and former dinner companion of President Obama, signed an appeal for money to send yet another aid ship to Gaza named “The Audacity of Hope,” the title of Obama’s second autobiographical book. He publicly challenged the President, saying that “if the name [of the boat] is a problem for the administration, it can simply insist that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment.” …

We’re perfectly sure he won’t be embarrassed. Though he might pretend to be.

Such feminists, leftists, and gay liberationists have not thought through what their lives might be like under Islamic rule. In fact, they still deny that there’s a “problem” with Islam and insist that the main problem is with American and Israeli colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. …

They should try converting to Islam to test their theory.

We like her whole speech, except the end of it where she says:

I have not come here today to bash feminists [as such]. I am one. As I’ve said, I don’t understand what happened to the best minds of my Second Wave generation. However, our feminist work is certainly not worthless and was not done in vain.

We say it was almost entirely done in vain. Worse, it was done to the detriment of generations of children. We regret that Phyllis Chesler still wants to describe herself as a feminist. To us she is a thinking adult. She is an asset to the cause of individual freedom, the cause that feminism is hysterically against.

We have repeatedly said that Islam is an immoral and intolerable ideology and that the way to deal with it is to argue against it constantly and thoroughly. (See for instance our post How to defeat Islam, July 20, 2009.)

The ruling political parties of Europe refuse to admit, let alone deal with, the ruinous encroachment of Islam throughout the continent. As a result, they are driving ever-growing numbers of their electors into the arms of smaller parties that preach and may soon practice force against Muslims.

Opposition to an ideology – whatever form it takes, in this case a religion formulated in the dark ages – is properly verbal. Attack should be by words on words, not by people on people. If criticism and argument are forbidden, the attack of people on people will surely happen instead.

But governments in dhimmified Eurabia do not see this. They prohibit criticism of the monstrous ideology that is replacing their traditions and darkening their future.

For example, this happened recently in Finland:

Jussi Halla-aho, a member of the Helsinki City Council, has been found guilty of defamation of religion by the Helsinki District Court. He was ordered to pay a fine of 330 euros… Prosecutor Simo Kolehmainen said Halla-aho had publicly defamed the Islamic faith in his blog writings… The prosecutor said Halla-aho’s writings insulted Muslims residing in Finland and endangered religious peace.

Throughout the Western world, the political left denies the oppression, intolerance, ignorance, cruelty, and injustice that characterize Islam. Not a word of protest do we hear from the ‘progressives’ or ‘liberals’ about Islam’s treatment of women. The physical, mental, and emotional pain that is a woman’s constant condition of existence under the oppression of Islam (as detailed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for instance – see our post immediately below), does not in the least trouble those bleeding hearts, those humanitarians who claim that their high political mission is to alleviate the lot of the poor, the downtrodden, the exploited. Well, it’s not news to us that they are hypocrites.

But – mirabile dictu – there are those among them who actually extol the way women are forced to live under Islam.

The Communist writer Naomi Wolf has done just that. Phyllis Chesler – doughty warrior on the feminist battlefield – has been arguing with her. Anyone who has read the testimony of Ayaan Hirsi Ali must surely find outrageous Wolf’s defense of the subjugation of Muslim women most visibly evinced by their total concealment in black bags –  which Wolf declares to be ‘liberating’.

Here is a part of  Chesler’s comment:

Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.

But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.

Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter…

Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:

“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”

Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England…

Well, what can I say? Here’s a few things.

Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police?

Most Muslim girls and women are impoverished and wear rags, not expensive Western clothing beneath their coverings. Only the pampered, super-controlled, often isolated, and uber-materialistic daughters of wealth, mainly in the Gulf states, but also among the ruling classes in the Islamic world, match Wolf’s portrait of well kept courtesan-wives.

Being veiled and obedient does not save a Muslim girl or woman from being incested, battered, stalked, gang-raped, or maritally raped nor does it stop her husband from taking multiple wives and girlfriends or from frequenting brothels. A fully “covered” girl-child, anywhere between the ages of 10-15, may still be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with her first cousin, perhaps with a man old enough to be her grandfather, and she is not allowed to leave him, not even if he beats her black and blue every single day…

And, by the way, the eerie effect, ultimately, of shrouded women is that they become invisible. They cease to exist. They are literally ghosts.

Wolf presents the West as anti-woman because it treats women as sex objects. Am I happy about pornography and prostitution in the West? Hell no and, unlike Wolf, I’ve fought against them – but to portray these vices as a “Western” evil, and one that the Islamic world opposes, is sheer madness.

It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves – they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent. You will find pornography magazines in every princely tent – those for boys as well as for girls. I am told that the Saudis fly in fresh planeloads of Parisian prostitutes every week. Perhaps they veil them before they conduct their all-night and all-day orgies. Or, perhaps they view them as natural, “infidel” prey.

Let me suggest that Wolf read … the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel) and Nonie Darwish (Cruel and Usual Punishment) for starters.

Then again, I suspect that Wolf is not necessarily looking for any “nuanced” truths about “female freedom” but is, rather … positioning herself within the Democratic Party. After all, what she has written in this brief article supports President Obama’s position vis a vis the Muslim world.