Posted on 12/09/2001 6:05:51 AM PST by IronJack
At least one Afghan heroine was not impressed with Hillary Clinton's recent offer to guide liberated Afghan women into Western feminist consciousness. Not content with masterminding the most successful marriage in presidential history and cornering the market in cattle futures and Arkansas real estate, Ms. Clinton is drawing on her street-scuffed background (Wellsley, the Rose Law Firm, the Executive Mansion) to advise Afghan women on gender issues. In a column for Time.com, Sen. Clinton (D - N.Y.) offered her insightful analysis on gender politics in war-torn Afghanistan, and a roadmap to social parity for that country's deprived female population.
Gen. Suhaila Siddiq is a physician, a hospital administrator, and the only female military leader in Afghanistan. She is adored by a generation of muted Afghan women as a true heroine, and now heads a 400-unit women's hospital in Kabul. She rejected Ms. Clinton's guidance as superficial and ineffective, as well as hypocritical. "She cannot defend her own rights against her husband," Gen. Siddiq told a London paper. "How can she defend the rights of my country?"
Aside from the obvious political mileage Sen. Clinton hoped to exploit from championing women's rights in a country about which she knows nothing, this tepid PR move demonstrates one of the basic flaws in liberal reasoning, and validates the rejection of their patronizing sympathy.
Foremost is the notion that Ivy League temporizing is the same as getting dirt under your manicure. While Hillary was holding teas for her Sarah Lawrence sob sisters and organizing protests against the Vietnam war, Suhaila Siddiq was leading a battalion of nurses on one of the ugliest battlefields in history. She probably couldn't pass the final in Noam Chomsky's Comparative Linguistics class, and she doesn't know what fork to use on the escargot. She's completely ignorant of derivative social theory or Marxist/Hegelian dialecticism, and she's never at the right cocktail parties.
But she's saved countless lives, knitting together not only the bones of maimed majahadeen but the hopes of a generation of disenfranchised Afghan girls in the process.
Hillary's experience is confined to the ivory towers of Park Avenue and pretentious academia. Gen. Siddiq has spent time in the trenches. The drawing room of spoiled privilege is no match for the trauma room of harsh reality. Life isn't a game to be played out in parlor conversations and unread Poli Sci theses. For the women of Afghanistan, "feminism" means not getting beaten when they step foot out their front door. It means sending little girls to school right beside their brothers. It means providing job opportunities for women whose husbands have been killed or who have cavalierly abandoned their families with the sanction of the male-dominated Taliban.
I would imagine it's hard to care about finding your G-spot when you're cowering in an alley to avoid being raped. And grrrrrrl power to Afghan women means learning to control an AK-47.
Contrast that razor-edge survivalism with the soulless non-issues of the American "feminist:" potty parity at public facilities; a non-existent "glass ceiling" that keeps female middle managers from taking the girls out to Chippendale's on the company expense account; The Vagina Monologues. This is the face of Western feminist thought today - trivial, wasted, hoping to make up in shrillness what it lacks in substance.
Halfway around the world, wounded soldiers and mine-mangled children have no use for talking genitalia or martini lunches. They are more concerned with finding enough penicillin than with finding the right Merlot. Their heroes are the women who roll up their sleeves and succor the ailing, who shun the sterile salon for the grit and stench of battle, and in so doing, show that women have steel in their spines, not treacle.
The feminist movement has spent its energy. It is a relic, a threadbare shell that maintains a tenuous relevance only by torturing every social disparity into a gender issue. It sustains itself through Marxist class warfare, substituting biology for economics. But when held to a truer light, it shows its transparency, its sheer, embarrassing paltriness. And its "heroines," including the self-appointed and patronizing "smartest woman in the world" look pretty feeble next to Afghanistan's version of Rosie the Riveter, Clara Barton, and George Patton, all in one feisty and defiant package.
Hillary and her polished feminist cronies are "sistahs" to Gen. Siddiq like crème brouille is sistah to oatmeal. She needs these sisters like Cinderella needed hers. The mock sororite reeks of political opportunism, lace curtain largesse, and typical Clintonesque spin It is Hillary's meager attempt to co-opt some redemption from the Republican prosecution of this war and share in spoils she hasn't earned.
It is also an attempt to resurrect the moribund feminist army and restore its political clout with Hillary as its general. But the army of harpies is defeated, bled to death under its self-inflicted wounds. When it rallied to defend Ms. Clinton's wayward husband, when it ignored Juanita Broaddrick and the broadsides loosed on Linda Tripp, when it lent its shriek to the clamor against Katherine Harris, its duplicity showed like a bloodstain on a wedding dress.
The true "feminist," (who would probably eschew that label), thrives on principle, a principle she's never sacrificed for political expediency or public gain. She's quietly, diligently labored to translate ideals into action. The world can see the results. All we have to show for Hillary's feminism is Anita Hill and a shelf full of dusty college papers.
From observing the petulance of the Demoncratic congress in their attempt to keel haul Ashcroft, I'm sure they are all upset that this has been a one man war, President Bush's in the minds of the public. They deseperately want to be in on the glory while avoiding the action and pout at the lack of opportunity.
They are a disgusting bunch, and their brattish behaviour is going to be their undoing.
Come on DWSUWF. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel about Hildebeast.
She rejected Ms. Clinton's guidance as superficial and ineffective, as well as hypocritical. "She cannot defend her own rights against her husband," Gen. Siddiq told a London paper. "How can she defend the rights of my country?"
Perhaps Hillary! can start by defending the rights of more local women. Women from this country. Women such as Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Eileen Wellstone, Sandra Allen James, the many unnamed college women that her husband terrorized in the 70's, and the many more women who are too scared to reveal the situations that Hillary!'s husband put them through.
I also hope this gets published in the mainstream.
IJ: I think it's probably a little too strident for mainstream tastes. But it might see daylight at some of the other conservative sites.
You might be right but you ought to let the editors decide that. This is very good and I'm not saying that just because Hitlery is evil incarnate.
No. This is a Free Republic original. It's never been posted anywhere before this. I can assure you of that.
That's a good way to put it. But then, Hillary has always excelled at standing on the shoulders of others.
Must suck to live life as a sound byte.
I think that's the unspoken barb Gen. Siddiq directed toward Hillary. "Who are you to advise us, when you can't even rein in that panting pup you call a husband? And when you're confronted with the evidence against him, since his fate is your own, you defend him at his victims' expense." Women needs heros who are true to principles, not political self-service. And Hillary has no principle in her body, save that of pure, unbridled ambition.
Oh ye of little faith...
If you don't believe me, check for yourself.
It's like those images of Elvis that sometimes turn up in things like wood grain patterns...
Most excellent style of prose: Truth and satire; homily, fury and funnies. Thanks for the bump, darling.
Great paragraph. Says it all. Wish I'd written it!
Thank you. Truth, Satire, Homily, Fury, and Funnies are my lawyers.
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