Islamic Women Suffer, the Left Approves

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

Full story: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2041/full

..."Now they say it is racist to intervene. They're so frightened of being called an Islamophobe, they will defend the right of men to force women to be shackled. They smugly declare that ‘we haven't got the right to impose our values on another culture' and think themselves liberal when they do it."...

[...]

...The emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in London but not for brown-skinned women in Lahore. Or, to move from the global to the local, the emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in Hampstead and Highgate but not for brown-skinned women in Bethnal Green and Bow.

Absolutely disgusting.

[Amry]

Oh yay, a thread about Muslims. We don't have a lot of that around lately.

So anyway, what is this thread about, exactly? What are we going to debate, argue and endlessly bash each other's heads about?

[Dr. Croccer]

Erm, what's actually happening? The only thing you've quoted is some guy spouting the same Right wing crap we get every month.

Unless this is gonna be another monologue, Rightarded rant against ''Islamo-Bolshevism'' again.

[Erik]

Erm, what's actually happening? The only thing you've quoted is some guy spouting the same Right wing crap we get every month.

Yep, typical circle jerk of right-wingers accusing "the left" of all sorts of things but lacking the intelligence to bring up any arguments as to how or why.

[Dr. Croccer]

Yep, typical circle jerk of right-wingers accusing "the left" of all sorts of things but lacking the intelligence to bring up any arguments as to how or why.

...apart from a link to some obscure Far Right nutjob in some obscure tabloid explaining and tirading why Lefties are so bad.

Briliant Righty logic, as usual.

[Tominokar]

...apart from a link to some obscure Far Right nutjob in some obscure tabloid explaining and tirading why Lefties are so bad.

Briliant Righty logic, as usual.

I feel sorry for the more reasoned right-wingers. I guess politics is the same as sports, now and again you just wish some people weren't on your team.

[mongrel]

...apart from a link to some obscure Far Right nutjob in some obscure tabloid explaining and tirading why Lefties are so bad.

Briliant Righty logic, as usual.

Not even a tabloid, just a porno mag for neo-cons.

[removeduser_487563287433]

I read the first paragraph.

"The teeth sucking could be heard down the line".

He then had the nerve to call her the biased broadcaster, that's when I realised it would be a waste of my time to continue.

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

Oh yay, a thread about Muslims. We don't have a lot of that around lately.

So anyway, what is this thread about, exactly? What are we going to debate, argue and endlessly bash each other's heads about?

The hypocrisy in not condemning the abuse of women just because of fear of "cultural disrespect" by some liberal sectors?

Does the long text intimidate you?

@other responses, a fairly typical reaction: "The only trusty media is the media that agrees with me, so I refuse to hear or read".

[Amry]

The hypocrisy in not condemning the abuse of women just because of fear of "cultural disrespect" by some liberal sectors?

Does the long text intimidate you?

No, your laziness to summarize and present the parameters of the debate just screams "tl:dr;". I wonder if your term papers consist of just a hyperlink with a note to the lecturer saying, "go read and summarize the contents yourself".

[Dr. Croccer]

The hypocrisy in not condemning the abuse of women just because of fear of "cultural disrespect" by some liberal sectors?

Does the long text intimidate you?

What? It's a monologue rant by some guy in some obscure tabloid trying to condemn the evil ''Islamo-Bolshevist'' conspiracy. How is this new or relevant?

[removeduser_487563287433]

The hypocrisy in not condemning the abuse of women just because of fear of "cultural disrespect" by some liberal sectors?

Does the long text intimidate you?

Who the hell is supposedly not condemning the abuse of women, Louis? Can you tell us that?

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

Who the hell is supposedly not condemning the abuse of women, Louis? Can you tell us that?

Question: have you even read the article? It is an answer to the flood of critics from "Does God Hate Women?", a book which deals with the abuse of women in the Islamic world. Here is an example for you (among many):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Ophelia Benson did not quite get the four-on-one treatment when she appeared on Radio 3's cultural talk show Nightwaves to discuss a "controversial" book she has co-authored with Jeremy Stangroom. They gave her a mere two opponents, and the presenter tried to be fair. Still, when one adversary stopped disparaging her, the other started, as the BBC flashed warning signs to listeners to ignore her.

If they missed the point, the press banged it home. The Independent denounced Benson and Stangroom "as inflammatory in the extreme"; authors who produce "torrents of invective" and "show no desire to go beyond name-calling and distortion." The Guardian accused them of "crudeness and lack of insight". It was "staggered anyone wanted to publish" them, and concluded that only a base desire to make money could explain the release of a "profoundly intellectually dishonest", "hysterical" and "bizarre" work. My own newspaper, the Observer, was slightly more temperate, but not so the casual reader would notice. Benson and Stangroom were not original thinkers but had "trawled through newspaper articles". They "splutter with righteous anger", their style "clunky", "hammering" and "repetitive", their arguments "flimsy" and "deadening".

Readers who imagine that Benson and Stangroom were on the receiving end of the fullest stomach-load of bile literary London has brought up this year because they were making the case for white supremacy or the return of the death penalty do not understand the dark turn Western thought took between the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Benson and Stangroom's book is Does God Hate Women?, which the predecessors of today's critics would have hailed as a feminist classic.

"So does God hate women?" it asks.

Well, what can one say. Religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of 10-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship — despite rhetoric about justice and compassion — a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug. They worship a God who thinks little girls should be married to grown men. They worship a God who looks on in approval when a grown man rapes a child because he is "married" to her. They worship a God who thinks a woman should receive 80 lashes with a whip because her hair wasn't completely covered. They worship a God who is pleased when three brothers hack their sisters to death with axes because one of them married without their father's permission.

Don't expect me to explain every bit of the article just because you're being lazy here. Read the article for yourself and take your own conclusions rather than making me silly questions.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Question: have you even read the article?

You've clearly not bothered to even read my posts. Now, answer my question.

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

You've clearly not bothered to even read my posts. Now, answer my question.

Don't try to derail this discussion into yourself. If you refuse to read the subject, then why debate at all? Why make silly questions such as the one above?

No, your laziness to summarize and present the parameters of the debate just screams "tl:dr;". I wonder if your term papers consist of just a hyperlink with a note to the lecturer saying, "go read and summarize the contents yourself".

Clearly, if you cannot read an article because it appears long, then I know who's the one being lazy here.

[mongrel]

The hypocrisy in not condemning the abuse of women just because of fear of "cultural disrespect" by some liberal sectors?

Does the long text intimidate you?

@other responses, a fairly typical reaction: "The only trusty media is the media that agrees with me, so I refuse to hear or read".

I'd go with Dr Croccer, the piece is incoherent and shoots all over the place. We are whisked from Nigeria to Afghanistan, through to East London in a blink of an eye, how are all these jumbled rants supposed to hang together? It's not meant to, as Islamophobes never check sources. As Amry says;

No, your laziness to summarize and present the parameters of the debate just screams "tl:dr;". I wonder if your term papers consist of just a hyperlink with a note to the lecturer saying, "go read and summarize the contents yourself".

Do as the man says, give us something to debate.

Erm, what's actually happening? The only thing you've quoted is some guy spouting the same Right wing crap we get every month.

Unless this is gonna be another monologue, Rightarded rant against ''Islamo-Bolshevism'' again.

Only response to make thus far.

Even the title sucks. As Afghanistan is poised to pass laws that will genuinely cause suffering to Afghan women, the US and UK sat and watched. Is the left to blame for this? I don't think so. It was the destruction of the Marxist state in Afghanistan that brought the nation to it's current wretched state.

Oh and check out the article. Standpoint magazine is the organ of the Social Affairs Unit, a think tank that bothers the media and the government with neo-liberal and neo-conservative trash. It includes pro-Iraq war liberals, such as Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, with neoconservatives. Michael Gove and Gertrude Himmelfarb who spawn two US neocons, Irving and William Kristol. These are the people who helped to persuade two gullible populations to support a pointless war in Iraq.

Enough said really, this is another propaganda rag.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Hang on, I'm asking who is defending the abuse of women - precisely what the thread is about. Why can't you answer? Do you not know? Are you crying?

[Marie Louise von Preussen]

Hang on, I'm asking who is defending the abuse of women - precisely what the thread is about. Why can't you answer? Do you not know? Are you crying?

When pressed, the characteristic response to accusations of indifference is for hypocritical Westerners to protest that of course they do not support the imprisonment of rape victims. True, but they do not oppose it either. Their bad faith is evidenced by their palming of the moral-equivalence card from the bottom of the deck. I first saw it being waved in triumph in 1993 when Germaine Greer declared that attempts to outlaw female circumcision were "an attack on cultural identity". In her mind, there was no difference between religious traditionalists forcing an eight-year-old to submit to the removal of her clitoris and labia, and an American teenager voluntarily trying out body piercing. "If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?" asked the author of The Female Eunuch as she excused clitoral castration. At the time, I thought that Greer was a crass contrarian who would say anything to grab attention. I should have taken her more seriously. In the intervening years, her casuistry became the dominant mode of argument. Not everywhere: you can still find principled feminist comment from Katha Pollitt of the Nation or Joan Smith of the Independent on Sunday. Laurie Penny, one of the new generation of feminists, tells me to look to the internet where I will find campaigns to stop the Home Office deporting women asylum-seekers to misogynist tyrannies. Nevertheless and as before, even when I have made all the caveats, the stubborn fact remains that the treatment of Benson and Stangroom by the liberal mainstream was hardly an aberration.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali published Infidel, her account of escape from forced marriage and genital mutilation to Europe, her defence of the liberal values they once believed in appalled "liberal" Europeans. Although Ali needed bodyguards to protect her from Islamist assassins, Timothy Garton Ash sneered that she was an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" while Ian Buruma denounced her as an absolutist. Maryam Namazie, a Marxist Iranian exile who set up the "One Law for all Campaign" to oppose the Archbishop and the Lord Chief Justice, tells me that she experiences every variety of Western duplicity. When she argues in favour of the demonstrators in Tehran, the hard Left tell her she is serving the interests of US imperialism — "It's now reactionary to have a revolution," she sighs. When she last appeared on the BBC, to argue that the burka was a straightjacket designed to mark off a woman as a man's private property, the presenter told her she was an "extremist". With dreary inevitability, Does God Hate Women's critics say that Benson and Stangroom's atheist liberalism is as fundamentalist as the religion of the hardliners they condemn.

If you had ever bothered to read the thing instead of repeating nonsense, you would get your answers quickly. Last time I reply to these frivolous things.

[removeduser_487563287433]

If you had ever bothered to read the thing instead of repeating nonsense, you would get your answers quickly. Last time I reply to these frivolous things.

So the thrust of the article is "oh no! opinions!". I might point out that the tone with which he describes some poor BBC production assistant as a "biased broadcaster" makes him unreliable to judge others.

[Mithie]

Puppies starve to death, the Right Approves

..."Now they say it is bad for the economy to intervene. They're so frightened of being called a socialist, they will defend the right of men to throw pets they can no longer afford to feed out onto the streets. They smugly declare that ‘we haven't got the money to spent on pork bills like animal housing" and think themselves fiscally responsible when they do it."...

[...]

...The well provision of pets is necessary and essential for poodles for white-skinned upper class aristocrats in London but not for the puppies of brown-skinned women living in poverty in Sheffield. Or, to move from the global to the local, well care is necessary and essential for poodles belonging to white-skinned women in Hampstead and Highgate but not for puppies belonging to brown-skinned women in impoverished Bethnal Green and Bow.