Ponder this reason given by Brandeis University faculty for opposing the appearance of Hirsi Ali at their school:
These faculty members said that “the selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus.” And they also could not “accept Ms. Hirsi Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.”
Ponder that. Ms. Ali wanted to speak of how women are being abused, subjugated, and even killed by Islamist fanatics. Yet the faculty protesters of Brandeis didn't want that problem to compete with their privileged world of micro-aggressions and dog whistle hostility.
Really, what's forced female circumcision when you have to fight to get college funding for yet another run of Vagina Monologues?
What's keeping women uneducated and separate and out of sight of men when you've got another Slutwalk event to organize?
I mean, how could actual triggers being pulled to kidnap and kill girls compete with petitions to expand trigger warnings for ever-expanding issues?
As for whether the West is superior to Islamist societies? The ability to judge this is disputed by faculty who probably sprinkle their conversations with smirking comments about "rednecks" who cling to God and guns, own 5 dogs, let their kids go barefoot, and fix their cars by the side of the road?
UPDATE: About that backwardness that feminists don't want to address:
An interesting trend in Arab media is the growing number of articles, letters-to-the-editor and online comments that points out some obvious (but unpopular) truths about the Arab world. ...
In the past reference, especially by Israelis or Westerners, to cultural differences to explain Arab problems was immediately jumped on by political demagogues and media pundits worldwide as a racist remark. But it was never that and now that is obvious as Arab leaders have been openly discussing the same problem. Those discussions are often ignored by the demagogues and pundits, especially in the West. More's the pity because there is a cultural crisis in the Arab world in particular and the Moslem world in general and it is very serious. The crisis is expressed by a lack of economic, educational and political performance. By whatever measure you wish to use; Nobel prizes, patents awarded, books published or translated, GDP growth, the Arabs have fallen behind the rest of the world. Part of the problem is the Arab tendency to blame outsiders, and to avoid taking responsibility. Tolerating tyranny and resistance to change doesn't help either. Those attitudes are shifting, and for most of the last decade the war in Iraq became the center of this cultural battle.
We're in bonus territory considering how so many insist that Iraq was a blunder. This is fascinating:
The shift began with the 2003 invasion, which was reported by the Arab media at the time (as it was still going on) as a great defeat for the Western "crusader" army. Until, that is, it was all too obvious that American troops had battled their way to Baghdad in three weeks and were rapidly defeating Iraqi forced defending this cultural capital of the Arab world. This triggered a debate among Arabs that got little coverage in the West. It began when some Arab journalists openly pointed out that, in the Arab media Arab reporters had not only been writing fantastical stories that had no relationship to reality, but that this sort of thing had been going on for a long time and, gosh, maybe it had something to do with the sorry state of affairs in the Arab world. That particular debate is still going on, largely unnoticed in the West. This is the real war against terrorism, because the terrorists represent the forces of repression and backwardness in the Arab world and this talk of fundamental reform strikes at the heart of popular support for Islamic terrorism.
This is why it was such a mistake to cut loose Iraq after 2011. I wanted our troops to stay in order to promote rule of law within Iraq and help win that long war--that real war--against the jihadis. Warfare has always been the holding action while the real fight attempted to support Arab Moslems who understand that cultural backwardness is the reason for the Arab Moslem world's backwardness. Absent that culture, Arabs can thrive--witness the success of Arab immigrants in America who work within our culture.
But by all means, let's focus on our micro-aggressions and dog whistle crimes rather than bolstering the forces of modernization in the Moslem world.
I obviously want you to read this blog. But if you have to limit yourself to just one site, I'd pick Strategypage as the one.
