Posted on 02/09/2006 4:56:00 PM PST by LibWhacker
In her new book, "The Death of Feminism" (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95), feminist pioneer Phyllis Chesler describes her disastrous 1961 marriage to her college boyfriend, a Muslim from Afghanistan.
When they returned to his homeland, she says, she was segregated from men, given inedible food and placed under virtual house arrest.
By the time her father-in-law allowed her to return to the U.S., she was pregnant, had hepatitis and weighed 90 pounds.
It's a dramatic story, and one that figures prominently in the rest of the book, an extensive but mostly anecdotal argument that Islam, as it is currently practiced, harshly oppresses women.
It's also perhaps the least inflammatory part of a book in which Chesler, 65, the author of the 1972 best seller "Women and Madness," criticizes her fellow feminists, who have largely refrained from condemning Muslim practices, as "cowardly herd animals."
She also condemns veiling and female genital mutilation and makes statistically unsupported claims about high rates of domestic violence in Muslim countries.
"The barbaric nature of Islamic woman-hatred is impossible to overstate," Chesler writes.
Chesler's fellow feminists at Ms. magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation did not return phone calls seeking comment about the book, but Egyptian-born anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi, author of "Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance," said Chesler's arguments are "arrogant" and "factually wrong."
El Guindi said that studies, including a survey in which 28 percent of American women reported being physically abused by a partner, show that domestic violence is a worldwide phenomenon that cannot be blamed on Arab or Muslim culture.
Muslim women "need the support of the world," El Guindi said. "This kind of stereotypical attack doesn't really take us anywhere."
The following is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Chesler.
• You say in your book that Muslim women need to be "deprogrammed" in order to obtain freedom. Are you saying they don't know what's best for themselves?
• Chesler: Women, to survive, will do anything. They're human beings, like men. ... When I was working on my second book, "Women, Money and Power," in the early 1970s, I would ask women, do you feel discriminated against on the job? And, pretty much, they would say "not at all." And when I would say, "Well, do you know that your male colleague in the next cubbyhole is earning almost twice what you're earning or your male boss is earning six times what you're earning?", the response was, "Well, you know, they have families to support."
So, women in America, before their consciousness was raised and before it was safe for them to recognize discrimination, failed to do so. So, likewise, women in the Arab and Muslim world - it's not safe for them, most of them, to demand their rights and to protest their limitations.
• There's still a difference between being educated and deprogrammed. Deprogrammed sounds like you're coming out of a cult.
• Chesler: You're right. But to the extent that Islam has not evolved as a theology and given that it's been hijacked by the most reactionary of fundamentalists with little resistance from the moderate Muslims so far, it is a closed system.
They only get one opinion, and they get pretty much molded to obey authority and not depart from what is the conformist or authority opinion. So it's like a cult.
• In your book you say that there's an epidemic of men sexually abusing boys in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, and you imply that domestic violence is higher in Muslim and Arab countries than it is in other places. Do you have statistics to support that?
• Chesler: It's not possible to have the kind of statistics that we have in the West. ... In a culture where some of my interviewees described how, if they argued against wife-beating, they would be beaten twice as hard, I doubt that it would be easy to do a study, to come in with a tape recorder and a pen and a pad of paper and say, "OK, we'd like to find out how many of you are (having sex with) your male children. Uh, any hands?"
• What do you want American feminists to do for Muslim women?
• Chesler: I wouldn't say just American feminists. I would say the American government, and I would like the American government to start building into every peace treaty and every trade treaty a series of clauses having to do with women's rights in that country.
If you want this amount of money, then you don't practice female genital mutilation. If you want this kind of hydroelectric power dam, if you want American aid and human resources, then we want the girls to go to school.
So George Bush frees 50 million people, just a few of which are probably women, and the Feminists still fight him at every turn.
But the Rapist-in-Chief gets offers for hummers from them.
Depraved.
Her conclusions are sort of right, and her methods are questionable, at best. I give her a D.
According to the Sharia laws I have seen, women are treated differently than men in court. For instance:
Men get more money in any inheritance matter.
Men are allowed to divorce women by just saying it three times. Women are not.
Children are exempted from punishment. But in sharia girls are no longer children at 9 and boys at age 15. So girls get punished with adult punishments younger. If two 10 year old children get caught stealing, the boy will go free. The girl may lose her fingers.
Many crimes are punished by the payment of "blood money". But a woman is not worth as much as a man. You don't have to pay as much for killing her.
Woman's testimony in court does not count in many cases. Only that of a muslim man. (Neither does an infidel, by the way)
The list goes on and on. We've all read it. Just ask any woman trying to get custody of her kids from her husband in an Islamic court.
TROLL !!!! How obvious!! Go back to your Muslim buthcher site. Member since....well....today!
Children exempted from punishment? I don't know about that...I saw horrible photos of a 10 year old boy getting his right arm crushed under the wheels of a car...this was done by those savages in Iran recently, it was a link within the replies to a FR posting...he was accused of stealing!
Don't believe such photos. Believe the Muslim troll. All those videos of women being stoned to death could be faked. All those zip wad Muslim men you remember cheating their way through college were just reacting in institutional American racism......>Sarcasm off.
The worthless cur was shown the door.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but fanatical women obviously exist everywhere and this so called devil-inspired religion was born of the region region that created the other 2 great monotheistic religions: Judaism and later, Christianity and if you look closely enough, you might see that the similarities in all 3 greatly outweigh the differences. core message: basic human decency.
and this is coming from a Muslim girl who went to a Catholic school, studied hard, and eventually became Capt. Cheerleading Team and Valedictorian and Iguess what helped me alot was that my family always taught me respect and an open mind; values that I hope my kids will inherit from me.
I think the focus should be on this issue - how muzzie / islam-o-fascists treat women. Lack of rights, etc.
That is what the world needs to be educated on.
Where is the UN outcry for human rights?
Where is the US outcry for human rights?
The focus needs to be on how out-dated / fossilized / barbaric their culture actually is.
Forget about the cartoons.
Talk civil / women rights.
I'm sure NAG / NOW / ACLU will just jump on the bandwagon in support of this.
Once we tell them that GWB/Cheney/Halliburton are involved.
Serious, time to ask Sen. Crintoon a question about this matter.
Now we have Troll#2 who has been a member two whole days. Pax has a great story. All lies of course.
Let's see how long he lasts.
The left won't get on this issue because they might have to admit that Bush may have been right.
Islam is a product of that region because it is a plagiarism of Christianity and Judaism, the two dominant religions in Mohammed's area, along with a sprinkling of his tribe's pagan beliefs (involving the meteorite at Mecca, etc).
The core message of Islam, alas, does not seem to be basic human dignity, but adherence to its founder's very narrow and twisted version of those two religions.
You have been formed by a lot of non-Islamic influences and a non-Islamic interpretation of Islam. Good luck to you in the future, because other Muslims do not agree with you, and historically, the more radical element in Islam always overruns and exterminates the more temperate element. For a blood-curdling experience, go back 1500 years and follow the history of Islam from start to the present in some honest non-Muslim book.
Not only that but the Rapist in Chief enslaved how many people with his Kosovo adventure.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but fanatical women obviously exist everywhere and this so called devil-inspired religion was born of the region region that created the other 2 great monotheistic religions: Judaism and later, Christianity and if you look closely enough, you might see that the similarities in all 3 greatly outweigh the differences. core message: basic human decency.
Just where within Christianity is the core message basic human decency? The message is that all humans are sinners, that we're incapable of doing the right or decent thing without Jesus.
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