The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that Joyce Carol Oates set off a firestorm on Twitter Friday “with a pair of tweets about sexual violence in Egypt.” One asked: “Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic–Egypt–natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?” Even for a revered leftist icon like Joyce Carol Oates, the resulting uproar was swift and predictable.
Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic–Egypt–natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 5, 2013
Trying to imagine a society (not prison) where 99.3% of men report being sexually harassed & (male) rape is epidemic….
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 5, 2013
Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review fumed: “Don’t miss @JoyceCarolOates coming out publicly as a serious bigot. Check out her tweets today, they’re awesomely gross!” Salon’s Prachi Gupta smeared Oates as “Islamophobic.” Feminists and Islamic supremacists alike lined up to condemn Oates as a racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot.
Welcome to my world, Joyce. Wait until she broaches subjects such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage, etc. Wait until she dares to subject that Islam has something to do with those, too, as it obviously does. Something tells me she enjoys the blacklist.
The sharp, piercing shrieks against the truth speak volumes and expose the left for the monsters they are.
And they give a hint as to why Western feminists are so often not only silent, but in many cases even justify the Islamic oppression of women. Women in Muslim countries face institutionalized discrimination and denial of their basic rights on a daily basis as a result of Islamic law – and Western feminists generally remain silent about this systematic and violent oppression of women in Islam.
What are they being silent about? The fact that there are over 70 million battered women in Pakistan, according to government statistics. 70 million. Over 90 percent of Pakistani women have been beaten by their husbands. And even though we constantly hear that honor killing has nothing to do with Islam, Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide, Muslim clerics justify such killings, and many Muslim countries give lighter penalties for honor killings than for other murders. Many victims of honor killing are themselves victims of rape, thereby bringing dishonor on their families.
Then there’s child marriage: Well over 50 percent of Afghan girls under age 16 are married, because Muhammad married Aisha when she was 6 and consummated the marriage when she was 9. In Iran a man can legally marry a 9-year-old girl – again, because of Muhammad’s example. Over 90 percent of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually – for offenses like cooking an unsatisfactory meal, or for failing to give birth to a male child.
All this oppression is a direct consequence of Islamic law – Shariah. This is the same comprehensive program for society that Islamic terrorists, acting in the name of the Islamic doctrine of jihad, are seeking to impose upon the world. They want a world in which women are covered from head to toe in unhealthy, unattractive coverings that symbolize their subjugation and secondary status. They seek a world where women are subject to all kinds of brutalization, diminishment and harassment – and even wanton murder – and can do nothing in their own defense, or even to claim their essential dignity as human beings.
Yet Joyce Carol Oates is the exception. Feminists routinely excuse, ignore and deny the systematic and institutionalized Islamic oppression of women. Their silence is all the more remarkable and self-indicting when they devote their time to protesting matters that are far less life-threatening, spending large amounts of time objecting to the use of male pronouns as generic as oppressive to women, and insisting that words such as “spokesman” be changed to “spokesperson.”
Is that really more important than honor killing and genital mutilation?
But where they are silent, I will not be. To say that feminism was one of the worst things to happen to women is being easy. Their ignoring of the plight of Muslim women and now the ganging-up on Joyce Carol Oates show just how bad it really has been. At the same time as feminists have hastened our societal decay and the destruction of respect for women, they’re also aiding and abetting the most oppressive, anti-woman force in the world today: Islamic law.
That is the worst betrayal of all.
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