"Afghanistan had never been colonized. My Afghan relatives were very proud of this fact. 'Not even the British could occupy us,' they told me, not once but many times. I was ultimately forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism, tyranny, and misogyny were entirely of their own making, and not attributable to colonialism or imperialism."--Phyllis Chesler(1)
Over and over, white nationalist Phyllis Chesler tells readers that Western imperialism is not responsible for Islam's patriarchy. Because those who attempted to colonize Afghanistan came to such ignominious ends, Chesler says that it was a lack of colonialism that made Afghanistan susceptible to a worse form of patriarchy. Obviously her stupid propaganda enriches arms and security contractors in Afghanistan and David Horowitz finds that useful for his party's campaign coffers, but MIM will now show that there is no factual basis for Chesler's theory.
Culture war not the right way to frame question
In the Middle East and Central Asia, a close examination reveals that the whole question is framed the wrong way. Listening to Liberal warmongers Chesler and Paul Berman, one would never know that Christian Georgia and Armenia(2) also had the veil for wimmin. In other words, they do not even have the right theory of culture, and culture war is the wrong way to frame the question.
Then again, Chesler at least knows that she outright surrendered the question scientifically.(3) She admits she has no overall measure of whether romance culture violence is higher in the West or Islamic patriarchy. She also consciously waffles the question of whether she has given up science entirely.
To know the truth about what Chesler is talking about we would have to look at suicide and murder rates. Stonings are only one kind of patriarchal killing, and a very rare one in Iran lately. MIM took a look at this, and we can see why Chesler dropped the topic. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the two lowest countries for homicide according to UN statistics from 2000 for 64 countries.(4) With the united $tates at 24th and infamous for romance related murders being the leading cause of murder in most years, it's going to be hard for Chesler to come up with any statistical argument that there is less patriarchal murder in the united $tates than in her most hated countries. Quite the contrary, it looks like serious analysis will end up proving the opposite-- that Amerikan decadence means more violence in patriarchy than more orderly and role-restricted patriarchy. Chesler will have to pin her cause on the Liberal freedom of individuals to kill each other.
The only Islamic country with a higher reported murder rate than the united $tates is Kyrgyzstan. The other 22 countries are non- Muslim. (By the way, in 2003, 5 out of the top 10 countries for murder were former Soviet countries,(5) but none were Muslim-- truly another great victory for the West's great "lifestyle.")
Kyrgzyzstan is worth looking into further for sex slave trafficking.
Research in Kyrgyzstan has estimated that around 4000 people were sold out of the country, with their principal destinations being China, Germany, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Of the victims of trafficking, 62% reported being forced to work without pay, while over 50% reported being physically abused or tortured by their employers.(6)
Uh, Chesler, that is the West's fault. Anti-communism created the situation where that Muslim republic left the Soviet Union and found itself in utter poverty contrary to ridiculous Western theories of economic development, including the one put forward by Harvard's leading lights and the Russian government that 18 months of free markets would vault Russia into Macy's and Bloomingdale's.
We followers of Marx uphold the labor theory of value, and we said that Western wealth comes from exploitation of colonies and neo-colonies-- so if there are no neo-colonies, there will be no fancy living standard except for small minorities. We said that is what explains the increasing global gap between rich and poor, but stupid Liberals never had a good explanation for the unevenness of economic development. The State Department encouraged the opposite fantasy, that all that was holding down the economy of the former Soviet Union was a lack of a legalized free market as opposed to the actual black market and state capitalism that existed before the dissolution of the USSR. Now we can see a huge increase in the oppression of wimmin across the ex-Soviet Union thanks in part to the West and the collapse of economic conditions.
How many of these prostitutes recently sold out of Kyrgyzstan are later killed by pimps or johns in unsafe situations? Yet warmongers like Chesler are busy talking about three stonings in Iran in 2005. Perhaps Chesler would prefer that Iran export all Iranian wimmin as sex slaves.
If Chesler would like to offer every Iranian and Afghan womyn a green card simultaneously (and not in dribs and drabs every week so as to create a neo-colonialist war climate through lurid newspaper stories), we are with her. That's as far as her complaining should go. Third World wimmin should have "choice" where to live. As far as we can see, none of Chesler's Western pseudo-feminist organizations are working on that: it's too radical.
For that matter, we also have to look at whether some ghastly killings do not have counterparts in the West. For if we see a pattern in romance culture killings it stands to reason that the spread of Western culture through Hollywood and mass media generally increased patriarchal violence in Islamic countries. When MIM reads the news about Amerikan teenage girls chopping up their romantic competitors into bits and burying them in the backyard, it's hard to see that Islam came up with anything particularly grueling in its patriarchy. We should rather suspect that it could be U.$. television exports at the root of global patriarchal violence problems. Chesler's long lists of individual grisly stories from the Islamic countries are demagogic war propaganda. We could construct longer ones from the united $tates.
MIM looked at the suicide question too. It's not very convincing. Maybe the World Health Organization botched it, but it reports a total of 20 female suicides in Iran in 1991.(7) In 2005 there were stories about 220 female suicides in just one province of Iran.(8) Another Amerikan organization says that Iran has one of the highest female suicide rates in the world, but its facts are unreferenced.(9)
Regardless, after we total up romance culture murders and suicides, it's going to be ranging from difficult to perverse to argue that Islam is somehow worse for wimmin on a general factual basis. The only remaining argument will be the one Chesler does make, that the form of oppression is "particular," in other words, one she does not subjectively like, one that white nationalists will oppose on a mystical fascist basis.
Equality for wimmin and where it came about
MIM is not going to allow an argument that Islam is somehow more violently patriarchal than other patriarchies. We would suspect it's true, only because Islamic countries tend to be disproportionately Third World countries needing revolution against semi-feudalism. However, looking at the facts does not bear out our suspicion because Western imperialism is so decadent that it has gone so far backward that it passes the Islamic countries for romance culture barbarism in some ways.
There is no comparative factual basis for Chesler's attack. What we can do instead is look at wimmin's equality in terms of access to education, careers and property. When we do that, we can see that wimmin benefitted only when the world's Cheslers failed.
Many of the first Muslims including wimmin Muslims to fight for equality for wimmin gained their experience in Russia including Russia-identified Georgia. Kicked out of the Reagan administration for being too anti-Soviet, Richard Pipes put it this way regarding the May 1st 1917 All-Russian Moslem Congress:
"Resolutions proclaiming equal rights for women were passed. This was an event of great historic significance. Russian Moslems were the first in the world to free women from the restrictions to which they had been traditionally subjected in Islamic societies."(10)
MIM is not aware if that is actually true in Islam's centuries- long history, but we see no contradiction of that statement of Pipes for recent times. There was even an All-Russian Moslem Communist Party for a brief period of time and Muslim Communist Sultan-Galiev has received credit as the original author of MIM's third cardinal principle; although MIM is uncertain on that point, as others may have arrived at it first, including W.E.B. Du Bois. (Certainly Sultan-Galiev's interpretation was much purer than W.E.B. Du Bois's in terms of fidelity to Marxism-Leninism of that day.) The Bolsheviks did not have an easy relationship with Muslims, but there was enough interaction that some interesting social experiments occurred.
In Christian Georgia, someone appeared who Chesler derided practically every other page in her book The Death of Feminism--Stalin. Stalin got his start organizing Baku oil workers after studying in a Christian seminary in nearby Georgia.
If wimmin in the ex-Soviet Union have any reason to fear Islamic patriarchy, we can again thank the West for ramping up the arms race and destroying the Soviet economy and causing the separation of Islamic republics from Russia and the other republics--not to mention the Chechen war, which is a training ground for Islamic militants. (We can also thank Khruschev for being a traitor.)
That is a digression though, because today Azerbaijan where Stalin organized the oil workers is an Islamic republic. On the whole, Azerbaijan looks up to Turkey, which has a better economy and more visas to Europe. Had White Studies expert Chesler and her supposed nemesis Robin Morgan looked around a bit, they would have realized that "demon" Stalin came to power and the West was stymied. Simultaneously, the veil came to an end in both Christian and Muslim territories of the Soviet Union. What a coincidence, huh gender bureaucrats? The "demon" came to power and the veil, stoning and honor killings culture collapsed.
Though Turkey is better off than Azerbaijan, it is Turkey where we have "Yol" conditions for wimmin, which Chesler thinks of as more Liberal than those in Afghanistan. Conditions for wimmin as wimmin in Azerbaijan (not wimmin as consumers) are even better than in Turkey. Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan have no death penalty at all according to Amnesty International, never mind stoning. In relatively impoverished but Muslim Azerbaijan, we do not hear about the veil, honor killings or stonings. Those are only in places where the West succeeded in stopping communism, especially that evil "demon" Stalin.
In somewhat more difficult conditions regarding Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, MIM did a Google search and found to this day still no evidence of stoning. The Google search for the phrases "stoning in Iran" and "stoning in Nigeria" turn up web pages, notso for the Muslim republics of the ex-USSR--thanks to Stalin.
The blame for patriarchal inequality goes on the Western imperialists
1. It was the West that created the Taliban. Chesler says the Taliban is worse than what she encountered in Afghanistan in 1961, but if so what should we conclude? The reason for that is that the CIA aided the mullahs against the social-fascist Soviet Union. (As a result Democrat Jimmy Carter instituted draft registration and provided major impetus to the formation of our party.) Afghanistan was militarised by two imperialist powers. Even Osama Bin Laden indirectly admitted being a creation of the West by recommending Blum's book Rogue State, which details how it happened. None of this is to mention the hundreds of millions in U.$. aid to the Taliban before 9/11.
This is the most famous way that Western imperialism is responsible for Islamic patriarchy, but there are other much more important ways.
2. One way the West is to blame is something the West already knows at least partially. Number three in aiding the Taliban after the United $tates and Pakistan was Saudi Arabia. Yet who was it that installed the government there and made it rich? Was it the Soviet Union importing oil? Was it China or India? No, it was the West again.
Were the socialists who wanted new Western spending on alternative energy production from solar and wind power to blame or the stupid capitalists who already had big businesses set up to pump oil? The question answers itself: capitalism is to blame again. By capitalism's calculations, the war in Iraq is "worth it" instead of being a huge drain of resources that could have gone into very exotic forms of energy production, given how expensive the Iraq War has turned out.
It was neo-colonialism that put in all the regimes in the richest oil states. A former intelligence agent from the united $tates has already explained his role in installing the u.$. puppet regimes of the Arab peninsula. Claiming the united $tates is not to blame for Saudi backwardness is white nationalist coverup.
When secular revolutionary forces threatened all Arab states in the late 1960s, I$rael played the role it originally came into existence for. U.$. client state Jordan crushed the revolution in 1970 in "Black September." U.$. lackey Saddam Hussein pulled out 12,000 troops that could have helped revolutionary Palestinian fedayeen. Instead, I$rael and the United $tates intervened on Jordan's side. Jordanian lackeys wiped out the fedayeen in Black September.
Subsequently, the degree of Marxism in the Palestinian struggle decreased. I$rael then aided the rise of Hamas, an Islamic group, as even the New York Times never tires of pointing out. Aid to Muslims in both Palestine and Algeria seemed at the time to the imperialists a good choice relative to Marxism(11)--and why not? Imperialism as an economic system has no way of discerning beyond what is profitable at the moment. Phyllis Chesler's faith in capitalism is misplaced even in her crusade against Islam.
3. Britain's greatest colony was India. India had for thousands of years in its own scriptures the elements of modern day Western Liberalism suitable to please Chesler. Yet today, India is locked in communal hatreds. What elements of Hinduism and Indian history came to the fore and which ones receded? That had everything to do with English colonialism.
Sapped of its wealth, India became a much less attractive place than it would have been without colonial rule. That is relevant because India has had more influence on more Muslims than any other country.
England left behind a poor country in a mess. Pakistan broke away and it did not exist before British colonialism. It was Pakistan's intelligence agency that did the most for the Taliban in its heyday. From Pakistan's perspective, Islam as an organizing principle makes perfect sense only because India "didn't work." Perhaps if England had not been in the way, India would have been Sovietized anyway.
Even after England departed, it left a legacy and schemes instigating a disastrous border war of India with China the history of which is in a book by Neville Maxwell. The war was based on previous colonial land-grabbing and fear of communism. It's little wonder that India's influence on Muslims declined, since India was saddled with the usually disastrous British geopolitics. This was another factor in how Afghanistan became more militantly Islamic since 1961.
Imperialism was ruinous for both India and Pakistan. To this day, we see communal hatreds of the poor wrack the region. Where the West was kicked out completely and exploitation ended in neighboring China, the economy improved to surpass India's and the position of wimmin became more advanced than in industrialized Japan.
4. That brings us to the next most populous region of Muslim influence--Indonesia. Chinese communism was so popular in Indonesia that President Sukarno allied himself with the pro-Maoist party of Indonesia, the PKI--the largest communist party in the world not in power. That was before the CIA organized Muslims to massacre 500,000 people.(12)
What a surprise, Islam became more influential afterwards as Indonesia's most modern element perished. After the military dictatorship responsible for the massacre of communists, progressive nationalists, people of East Timor and various other random people ended, a Muslim party came to power through a bourgeois democratic process.
Liberal warmonger of the "Dissent" social-democratic sort
and comrade-in-arms of Phyllis Chesler, Paul Berman fully
admitted the recent history:
Reagan aided the mujahadeen in their war against the Soviet occupation,and the Bush the Elder continued the aid, and even Bill Clinton continued the aid. . . . American policy in Afghanistan during those many years does offer one more example of America's willingness to support the world's far-flung Muslims in their struggles. . . and we might as well claim the credit, given that we have had to endure the consequences.(13)Applying the gender aristocracy thesis of MIM
Phyllis Chesler went to Afghanistan in 1961, already a man in the global hierarchy. The proof is her zoology-based complaint against Islam that wearing a bikini and being stopped from doing so was a "routine crime" of Islam.(14)
Chesler would tell the world that her biology is what resulted in discrimination. As such, Chesler sees patriarchy as something entirely biological. For MIM, biology is only one component of gender, and mostly because biology is wrapped up with age and development that makes children vulnerable.
So to think about an adult female wearing a bikini in Afghanistan, there are two contrasting views. MIM admits that Chesler faced biology-based discrimination. As such, Chesler's argument belongs in the same category as animal rights.
What MIM will not admit is that the repression of Chesler's bikini was gender hierarchy. Quite the contrary, it is men who like bikinis. It is fully adult and privileged people who enjoy bikinis. Ditto lipstick, miniskirts, pornography, prostitution and yes, even adultery, which is a pleasure of adults.
Chesler was comfortable lying down in a bikini where other Afghan people saw her, because she was socially-speaking a man in her home country. Likewise, as MIM pointed out about Brandi Chastain's disrobing in her moment of victory in an international soccer game, it is only gender privileged people who are comfortable disrobing in public. Most countries in the world--not just Afghanistan-- are not ready to export their females for naked viewing by the world. Only recently for example, did Japanese females start travelling abroad by themselves in large numbers--and that's not naked!
In countries like the united $tates where females actually own more assets than males, have more college degrees than males, live longer than males, find themselves above 90% of the world's females and generally face no starvation conditions, it becomes common for adult females to adopt the social condition of men. In contrast, in Belarus, they are trying to form a gender aristocracy by not allowing foreign models into the country or letting wimmin out of the country, because they recognize that ex-Soviet females are being sexploited in other republics that allow wimmin out of the country.
When Brandi Chastain takes off her clothes in public, no one from her culture thinks, "oh, that poor girl is starving and now faces sexploitation." There is no knife of pain that enters the heart in Western culture regarding that, just some moderate complaints from a portion of Western society. In fact, there are about as many complaints about males wearing skimpy bathing suits--mostly as a matter of taste, not a searing condition of oppression.
How different the situation in Kyrgyzstan is. When 4000 wimmin have been exported as sex slaves recently, how can we expect the people of that Islamic republic to think lightly of even the slightest exposure of their wimmin? Western Liberals are attacked with a passion, as if Liberals were delivering a burning knife right to the heart.
Liberal pseudo-feminism works fine for people who are men in the gender hierarchy. Their zoological complaint about females not being allowed to become men is true. There is such discrimination and they don't like it. While we recognize the complaint of the gender aristocracy, MIM does not work for the gender aristocracy and animal rights is also on the backburner.
Liberal pseudo-feminism is absolutely backwards for the truly gender oppressed of the world. CNN ran an expose of how Italian gay men pay for sex with Romanian boys, brought to market by fathers bankrupted with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The Liberal response is that "sex is fun" and it should be permitted. If we do not permit the sex, then we are being anti-gay according to Western Liberalism.
For MIM, this is another problem with the zoological approach to feminism. The Romanian boys sexploited by imperialist country adults and the Abu Ghraib boys raped by U.$. soldiers are extremely sharply gender oppressed. A biology-based approach--the zoological approach--is not going to cover that, but it is going to cover the "crime" of repressing Chesler's bikini-wearing. That's why MIM has the "gender aristocracy" thesis. There can be no compromise with the zoological approach.
MIM does not have to defend Islam to see why Muslims of Third World countries hate Western Liberalism, including pseudo- feminism. Just as trade Liberalism makes sense to the rich countries, so too does sexual Liberalism make sense to men. Defenders of Islam are going to boil down pseudo-feminism to "sluts." The kernel of truth there is that Islam finds itself disproportionately located in poor countries where the condition of womyn is under constant threat of sexploitation, including by Western tourists at Western hotels. The outlook of the "slut" in such a situation really is degradation. Any ideology defending the "slut" is suitable to sex slave traffickers, pornographers and pimps. At the same time, even Islamic people know that sex slave traffickers, pornographers and pimps do not generally pose any threat to adult males--men. Western females are not threatened enough by sex slave traffickers, pornographers or pimps to give up their zoological quest to be free of discrimination. The interaction of Western females with pornographers and pimps involves much higher pay than the interaction Third World wimmin are familiar with. In the case of the imperialist country female, the "slut" outlook is normal fun free of degradation or containing moderate or debateable degradation.
The troglodytes of pseudo-feminism are stuck in a zoological view of the "slut" question. They want for females to have the right to be men, but they do not understand that without the prerequisite social conditions, the animal rights position clears the way for sexploitation. For people already highly privileged it is a kind of discrimination to deprive them of their leisure, but for people with low gender privilege, the "slut" outlook is a justification for oppression.
In the Third World, there is also a zoological position. Most Muslims cannot imagine the pseudo-feminist at all, because most Muslims come from different social conditions. Yet patriarchy is not a biological condition mostly. If historically one could become king only by having 1000 experiences of selling one's body for sex, then society would not know to consider prostitution as degradation. Quite the contrary, there would be legends about the wisdom of prostitution in class society. There is nothing about zoology that is ever going to tell people that prostitution is inherently degrading. Unconscious of this, the Third World Muslim cannot imagine that adult Western society is almost entirely men. Hence there is the big global gender disconnect.
We have to distinguish the ordinary Third World view of "sluts" from misogyny. The ideologue of sexual pleasure is a man's advocate. Truly gender oppressed people are rightly threatened by bikinis, miniskirts, adultery, pornography and prostitution. Western Liberalism works fine for Western females, because they are men, but the Third World is right to oppose it.
Allowing pornography, prostitution and sex slave trafficking is not liberation for wimmin. Even abortion "choice" is a jaundiced outlook in the eyes of Third World wimmin. Again it appears as the Western female attending to her fun. She seems to have no obligations of motherhood. That in turn means an ideology that is still threatening to gender oppressed people. Third World wimmin are looking to be free from sterilization abuse by Western population control planners and for their children to survive. Paul Berman pointed out that recent Islamic ideologue Sayyid Qutb said that womyn oriented toward flirtation, pleasure and even material production is ungodly, because she is not taking advantage of her natural gift for motherhood.(15) MIM believes this view would have no popularity if it were not for the fact that most of the world does not enjoy a high level of gender privilege. Ultimately, Qutb's point rests on a zoological proposition just as Chesler's position does. Because zoological aspects of life appear permanent, they stand in place of a real reason for supporting God. In actual fact, Qutb's argument is materialist, just more crudely materialist than ours.
Even the act of allowing wimmin out of a country can be seen as oppressive, since that is what allows sex slave trafficking to occur. That is something that the comfortable Western Liberal of any biology just does not understand. Authoritarian repression may be necessary to advance the conditions of wimmin.
Conclusion
In territories ranging from Turkey to Turkmenistan, particular forms of Islamic patriarchy only exist because their competitors were sapped by the West. Though Phyllis Chesler and Robin Morgan supposedly attack each other from opposite sides in NOW, neither was thinking of wimmin in the Mideast and Central Asia when they bad-mouthed Stalin.
Whenever there were forces that arose in Islamic countries to implement secular change, the West made sure they failed. Saddam Hussein being the most secular ruler in the Mideast, naturally he was on the hitlist first in the 21st century.
Islam derives its strength as a nationalist response to Western exploitation. There could hardly be a better ally of Islamic patriarchy than Phyllis Chesler--patriot of the largest oil- consuming nation, fan of the Amerikan lifestyle, anti-communist and Zionist enemy of secular revolution in the Arab world.
Notes:
1. Phyllis Chesler, The Death of Feminism: What's Next
in the Struggle for Women's Freedom (NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), p. 81.
2. Paintings of Armenians in the veil:
http://www.imagesofeyes.com/armenia.htm
3. "Western intellectuals and Islamic apologists tend to conflate Muslim
honor murders with all forms of domestic violence. . . . There are important
cultural and psychological differences between a Muslim honor murder and
wife-murder in the West." Phyllis Chesler, The Death of Feminism: What's Next
in the Struggle for Women's Freedom (NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), p. 158.
MIM would respond that if there are important psychological differences, they must be of the kind that ameliorate patriarchy under Islam. Instead of speaking of patriarchy as a whole by country or religion, Chesler breaks it down into arbitrary categories. She should have said patriarchy is "six of one, half dozen of another," but instead she left herself open to the attack that Islamic patriarchy is actually less violent overall than Western patriarchy. Honor killings may be the price of admission to a less violent society for wimmin, relative to the united $tates.
4.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_percap&int=-1
5.
http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html
6. Fact Sheet, World
Health Organization (10/02)
http://www.euro.who.int/mediacentre/FactSheets/20021003_1.
7.
http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/en/322.pdf
8.
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1494
9. "International Women's Day in Iran"
http://storiesinamerica.blogspot.com/2006/03/international-
womens-day-in-iran.html
10. Richard Pipes, The Formation of the
Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.
77.
11. Again, MIM says nothing Phyllis Chesler comrade-in-arms Paul Berman
goes out of his way to admit. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003), p. 105.
12. William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed
Books, 1986), pp. 217-221. This point also admitted by Berman,
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003), p. 53.
13. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003), pp. 16-7.
14. Phyllis Chesler, The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for
Women's Freedom (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 83.
15. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003), p. 88.