Feminist sisters doing it only for themselves

Vocal feminists continue to fume about trivial or imagined offences, says Rita Panahi.

ISLAM and women’s rights are a problematic mix at the best of times, let alone in the current climate of fear and savagery, with fundamentalists causing mayhem in several corners of the world.

Rape, enslavement, murder and wholesale subjugation of women in the name of Islam is taking place in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

And yet empowered Western women refuse to take a stand against the brutal misogyny seen in Islamic countries, as well as abhorrent practices tolerated much closer to home in the name of cultural diversity.

Vocal feminists continue to fume about trivial or imagined offences, such as sexist air conditioning, gendered toys, prime ministerial winks and menstruation stigmas, and all but ignore the predicament of truly oppressed women.

For reasons I’ll never understand, the mistreatment of the most disempowered women in the world doesn’t seem to inspire much concern from privileged progressives.

While women in Iraq and Syria are subjected to the most sadistic treatment imaginable, we have “the sisterhood” agitating about mindless nonsense.

You can be sure that if the evil perpetrated by Islamic State, al-Qaeda or Boko Haram was being done in the name of another religion or belief system, progressives, including feminists, would be clambering to denounce it.

There would be rallies in the streets, boycotts and well-orchestrated campaigns.

But the loud and proud haters in the modern feminist movement would rather don T-shirts emblazoned with F--- Tony Abbott instead of F--- IS. The latter would be unthinkable.

The bizarre alliance between progressives and Islamists is one unholy hot mess.

It’s a phenomenon that is evident in many Western nations, including the US, Australia and much of Europe.

Maajid Nawaz — co-founder of global think tank Quilliam and founder of Khudi, a Pakistan-based pro-democratic movement — believes Europe’s Left fears “that challenging Islamist extremism can only aid Europe’s far-Right” and thus has turned a blind eye to unspeakable atrocities.

The anti-extremist campaigner has opined about how the unhappy marriage between Islamic fundamentalism and the “regressive Left” has empowered “theocratic fascism”.

Nawaz wrote: “It is my fellow Muslims who suffer most from this patronising, self-pity-inspiring mollycoddling. British Muslims are being spoonfed regressive-Left sedatives, encouraging a perpetual state of victimhood in order to score their petty ideological points against ‘the West’.”

We see the same trend in Australia, where the fear of “Islamophobia” is whipped up to the point where some believe Muslims need to be chaperoned on public transport. The “I’ll ride with you” hashtag, which started with a lie, will go down as one of the dumbest and most disingenuous campaigns of the decade.

What is far more horrifying than the faux fear of Islamophobia is the reality that one in four British Muslims feel sympathy for the terrorists behind the Charlie Hebdo attack, according to polling by ComRes for the BBC.

Again and again, we see ugly, intolerant attitudes that would normally be condemned be tolerated due to cultural sensitivities.

Another reputable poll conducted in 2009 showed British Muslims had zero tolerance for homosexuality.

Not one of the 500 Muslims polled in the Gallup Coexist Index believed homosexual acts were morally acceptable.

Is it any wonder not much is said about IS throwing gay men from buildings and stoning those who survive the fall?

A gay couple denied a wedding cake in Colorado received more sympathy and coverage than the gay men slaughtered in the name of Islam in the Middle East.

And despite all the column inches devoted to rape culture by feminists, little was said when a real case of rape culture was uncovered last year in the West in the English city of Rotherham.

The systematic abuse of more than 1400 children was not properly investigated because authorities were fearful of appearing racist, because the complaints were against mainly Pakistani men. Here was a genuine example of rape culture that took place on a massive scale, yet the sisterhood hardly gave the scandal a second thought.

The cowardice of the modern feminist movement is matched by other so-called “progressives”, who prefer to aim at conservatives instead of radicals of a religion that is as intolerant as it is merciless.

There’s hardly a week goes by when we don’t learn about some new horror perpetrated against women by Islamist groups and regimes.

This month, IS murdered 19 female hostages who refused to submit to sexual slavery, and details emerged of a catalogue listing the prices and ages of children and women for sale. Girls aged between one and nine command the highest prices, followed by adolescent girls. Women older than 40 cost as little as $60.

The latest reports emerging from Yazidi slave girls who have escaped IS paint a horrifying picture, where rape and enslavement is not only used as a weapon of war and a recruitment tool but promoted by the group as a means of worshipping God.

Meanwhile, our grievance feminists indulge in outrage orgies over insignificant claptrap and ignore real misogyny in its cruellest and most barbaric forms, whether it’s the plight of Yazidi girls in Iraq or the increasing numbers of Muslim girls in the West subjected to female genital mutilation.

The silence of the sisterhood is a betrayal of every girl and woman persecuted in the name of Islam.