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Home Front: Culture Wars
A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam
2008-02-20
By David Horowitz and Robert Spencer

This week, seven hundred feminists signed an Open Letter complaining that “columnists and opinion writers from The Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world.”
What about Rantburg! We've been slighted!
We recognize this Open Letter as a delayed response to the Freedom Center’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which protested the silence of feminists over the “Oppression of Women in Islam” on campuses all over the country last fall, organized sit-ins at a dozen Women’s Studies Departments to protest the absence of courses and department-sponsored events confronting the issue, and made this a matter of national discussion and debate. This is why the signers of the Open Letter complain that “‘Women’s rights are human rights’ was not a slogan dreamed up by David Horowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers,” two of our speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. (We never claimed it was.)

The signers of this Letter claim that, “contrary to the accusations of pundits,” they support Muslim feminists in “their struggle against female genital mutilation, ‘honor’ murder, forced marriage, child marriage, compulsory Islamic dress codes, the criminalization of sex outside marriage, brutal punishments like lashing and stoning, family laws that favor men and that place adult women under the legal power of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and laws that discount legal testimony made by women.”

Well, we welcome these avowals of support for the rights of Muslim women. However, forgive us for doubting their sincerity. As one of us pointed out in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin during Islamo-Fascism Week:

“One of our concerns … is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. Our researchers looked at more than 600 Women’s Studies programs on fifteen American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. But they were unable to locate a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.”

What was true last October is still true today. As recently as December 10, a Muslim teenager was strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab without a protest from the American feminist movement. And that is only one of many crimes committed in the name of Islam against Muslim women over which the feminist movement continues to be silent.
Posted by:ed

#4  "600 WomenÂ’s Studies programs on fifteen American campuses"

They must mean 600 courses? It is indeed frightening. Indicates the further decline of American higher education. Multiculturalism and PC has run rampant thanks to the tyranny of the leftists.
Posted by: JohnQC   2008-02-20 23:16  

#3  "600 WomenÂ’s Studies programs on fifteen American campuses"

That just f**king frightening!
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut   2008-02-20 18:54  

#2  We burned our bras in the 60s. Jane Fonda used the C-bomb on national TV just last week. What do you want from us?
Posted by: JohnQC   2008-02-20 17:52  

#1  Ah, yes. The "strongly worded letter"...
Now, leave us alone as we are busy trying to stem the Obama tide...
Posted by: tu3031   2008-02-20 10:34  

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