Feminism & Jihad

Mark Steyn comments on the practical consequences of Feminist epistemology.

In their peculiarly reductive definition of “women’s issues,” older Western feminists sound squaresville and younger ones sound kooky. Just before the 2004 U.S. elections, Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”

The question is not whether Cameron’s lost all rights to her body, but whether she’s lost her mind. After presenting the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under Islamic legal codes around the world — and, given that more countries live under Sharia than did 50 years ago, that means more women have “lost the right to their bodies”. Under the Taliban, women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces. Following the country’s liberation by right-wing patriarchs like Bush and Blair, there are now, as Linda Frum noted here the other week, more females in electoral politics in Afghanistan than in Canada.

In other words, isn’t the war on terror the real “women’s issue”? As Ahmad al-Baqer, an MP from one of the more progressive Muslim nations (Kuwait), breezily put it, nixing a proposal to give broads the right to vote, “God said in the holy Koran that men are better than women. Why can’t we settle for that?”

The whole thing: The war on terror is the real women’s issue