Wednesday, November 16, 2005

A DEAFENING SILENCE

...from international feminists has greeted this astonishing news:


Female candidates have triumphed in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections, with one bidding to become the new parliament's speaker.

After a delay in counting of more than a month, official results show women secured seats ahead of male candidates in a quarter of the 34 provinces, while in one a woman was outright winner.

Before September's parliamentary vote, the first for 30 years, there had been widespread predictions that, due to the conservatism of Afghan society, women would only gain seats through a quota system which automatically reserved 25 per cent of seats for them under the country's new constitution. But women won seats in their own right and will take up 68 of the 249 in the lower house when it convenes later this month.

Remnants of the Taliban responded to the results by detonating two suicide bombs in Kabul, killing a German peacekeeper and three Afghans. British troops opened fire to repel a threat to their camp in the capital.

Betsy Newmark, blogging at Michelle Malkin has this to say:

Think of the amazing courage of these women. They are risking their lives and the lives of their families in order to try to build a stronger, more moral country. I don't think that I would have that brand of courage. I think of the feminists who fought for women's suffrage in our past. They often made a similar sort of argument that women would clean up politics because they would bring a new morality to the election booth. Well, that certainly hasn't happened here. Maybe, this new women's caucus in the Afghan parliament will be able to band together against the warlords and remnants of the Taliban.

I would think that women rights advocates throughout the world would be trumpeting the courage and achievements of these women. But, instead, there is a very speaking silence from leading feminists. I guess they're afraid that any praise for what women have achieved in Afghanistan would remind people of the President who made those achievements possible. Is that what being committed to women's rights around the globe really comes down to?

I spoke at length about the intellectual an moral bankruptcy of today's feminist movement in several previous posts (here and here), and this is what one commentor pointed out in the comments to the first linked post:

Feminism was utterly successful, much like the March of Dimes when polio was for the most part eliminated. But the March of Dimes still exists, and I am not sure why. The same holds true for feminism. If I remember correctly, one of Senator Kennedy's objections to John Roberts' nomination to the supreme court was that Roberts was not sufficiently against the barriers that young women face being admitted to college. My understanding is that more women are in college than men, by margin of about 53% to 47%, so WTF?. I am glad that my daughter will have more opportunities than girls did in the past, but I don't really think that "the Man is keeping her Down" anymore.

The problem is that today's feminists have a vested interest in maintaining the vicitmhood of women; because how can they be the champions of oppressed women ...if they aren't being oppressed anymore??

And since the feminsts have committed to the idea that those evil oppressors of women are (courtesy of Marxist and Leftist theories in general): Bush, Republicans, Capitalism, and America (not necessarily in that order). If you ain't on that list, you get a pass.

Feminists today can't be bothered with the women of Afghanistan and their incredible courage in standing up and risking their lives for freedom-- they are too busy fighting the delusions that are part of a carefully contructed alternate reality.

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