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.
I'm glad you liked it. The contrast seemed so blatant it bore exploration.
You found a lawyer named Truth?
Her maiden name was "Fake."
I will go over the dissection tomorrow!
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