I knew that Trouble had found me yet again when an Old Asia Hand cautioned me to not “jump off the deep end” and jeopardize my otherwise valuable credibility. Apparently, my second blog about Bhutto’s assassination had begun to ring all kinds of bells and whistles amongst my colleagues, friends, and readers. She felt, understandably, that my bringing a feminist perspective about honor murders to bear on the Bhutto murder revealed a lack of sophistication about Pakistani politics. Point well taken–but read on.

A second colleague informed me that Bhutto had not repealed the Hudud laws and had not used her time in office on behalf of women or the poor. He further insisted that Bhutto had been a wheeler-dealer and pro-Arafat and pro-Palestinian terror. If so–how awful, but what else is new? Islamists certainly did not kill her for this.

Today, my esteemed PJM colleague, Roger Kimball, views the profusion of alarmingly positive eulogies about Bhutto as an idealization, even a “Diana-ization” of a corrupt and frivolous woman. He chides Bernard Henri-Levy (he of the photogenic bared chest and actress-wife), for having written a “saccharine” piece in the Wall Street Journal in which Levy now views the murdered Bhutto as freedom’s “symbol and standard bearer.” Levy also takes world leaders to task for having “shamefully” avoided a show of “grief” and “public mourning” on her behalf.

I dunno. I think Kimball has a point–but so, too, does Levy.

Finally, someone else, who has until now happily forwarded my articles about Islamic gender apartheid, chided me for having suggested that Bhutto had been murdered because she was a woman or a feminist. (I do not think I said this). However, in a comment to someone else, (which was immediately forwarded to me), this critic wrote that “this (article) is an example of how feminists discredit themselves…(since) Bhutto’s father, who brought Pakistan into the nuclear age and wholeheartedly encouraged an Islamic revival was executed…Bhutto was not killed because she was a woman. She was killed because of her own corruption and duplicity.”

Say what?

Politicians do not always get assassinated because they are corrupt or self-serving. If they did–there would be few politicians left standing and fewer still willing to run for public office. More important: Political saints and other innocents are hardly spared the fatwa, the sword, the sniper or the suicide-killer’s exploding bomb. Does this woman really mean to suggest that Bhutto deserved to die because she was a bad…woman? Were Bhutto more to her liking, would she then mourn her death and would Kimball himself then eulogize her?

Let me suggest that these also-worthy comments betray an (unconscious) anxiety about Hillary Clinton’s race for office and perhaps a long-standing dislike of western feminists. When I criticize feminists for failing to stand up to Islamists about Islamic gender and religious apartheid–I can do no wrong. But, if I dare to venture a kind or compassionate word for a woman who is also flawed, perhaps mightily so, (just like her male counterparts) but who is also unacceptably powerful for a girl–ah, then nothing I say can be right.

Benazir Bhutto is not one of the imagined and acceptably powerless female victims of Islamism; my interpretation of how her assassination might function psychologically, symbolically, culturally is certainly useful as one of many ways to understand it and its consequences.

For the record: I did not say that Bhutto was a feminist nor did I say that she died primarily because she was a woman. However, her gender could not possibly have helped her case in the backroom caves and rat-holes that al-Qaeda or the Taliban use for offices–or indeed, in Musharraf’s well-appointed offices. More important: Bhutto’s very public assassination is a symbol which may have grave psychological consequences for the millions of women who are already living under the Islamist boots-and-turbans in their homes and countries.

As the world prepares to greet another New Year, let us not forget their plight or the plight of Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents whose ordinary, daily lives might constitute fates even worse than death.

NEWSFLASH: Emeritus Professor George Jochnowitz calls this article in the Jerusalem Post to my attention, by Herb Keinon and Michal Lando. The article further confirms that Bhutto might have served as a bridge between Israel and the Muslim World (see HERE).

In a sense, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a political and cultural version of an honor killing. Bhutto was the first woman Prime Minister of a Muslim nation and she symbolized an unacceptably Western form of female ambition and achievement. She had attended Harvard/Radcliffe and Oxford. She spoke English–perhaps more fluently than she spoke her native Sindi or Urdu. She once dressed as Western women do. Indeed, many Muslim women from wealthy families, including educators and feminists, have done so for a long time. They cannot do so now.

I am suggesting that, as a member of the Ummah (or larger Muslim collectivity), Islamist fanatics decided that Bhutto was unacceptably and publicly too-Western, and they sentenced her to death for this sin.

Pakistan is known for its many bloody honor murders and other atrocities.

In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Daring to seek a divorce.

In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. His male relatives honored him for doing so. (A team of American doctors subsequently fitted Zahida with glass eyes and prostheses for her ears and nose).

In 2002, a tribal council in the Punjab, in Pakistan, sentenced eighteen year-old Mukhtaran Bibi to be gang-raped as a punishment for something her twelve year-old brother had allegedly done: Walking with a girl from a higher-status tribe. (Actually, he had been sexually abused by Mastoi men who sought to cover up their crime in this way). Mukhtaran Bibi’s father was forced to witness her gang-rape, after which she was driven naked through the streets. Amazingly, the gang-rapists were eventually arrested and convicted. Mukhtaran Bibi was given round-the-clock government protection. The rapists have vowed to kill her anyway.

Did Benazir Bhutto think that her membership in a historic dynasty would protect her from the war against women that jihadists are currently waging? Did she think that the government could actually protect her from such woman-haters who would vote al-Qaeda into power if they had the chance? (The fact that she was a political threat both to Musharraf and to the Taliban and that she might have functioned as a bridge to America and potentially to Israel did not endear her to those who killed her. The fact that she had planned to recognize Israel and had already asked for Mossad protection, could indeed have been the final nail in her coffin. SEE HERE.)

Bhutto was one of the “moderate” Muslims for whom the West yearns. Muslim fanatics murdered her in cold blood and they did so in an exquisitely planned and choreographed way. Their willingness to die in order to kill, terrorize, and impose their ideology upon others is precisely what keeps other “moderate” Muslims silent.

How far are the representatives of freedom, modernity, and human rights willing to go to end such terrorism? If we are not ready to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to free humanity from the plague of fundamentalist Islam, then we must be prepared to convert, veil, submit–or die.

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE:

Quicksand and Quagmires

Rosanne Klass, an old Asia hand, so to speak, reminds me how much central Asia resembles a far-out Eastern version of our own long-ago Wild West. The feuds never quit, the violence never stops, only more violence and larger bribes can ever dominate smaller violence and smaller bribes–and then only for awhile.

Thus, I am linking here to a sophisticated article written by Sol Sanders about Pakistan. I agree: Men here routinely assassinate male leaders. I still think that Bhutto’s assassination spells trouble for other women who may wish to divorce abusive husbands or to attend college.

To read Sol’s piece, click here…

Yesterday, I wrote about societies choosing to jail anti-Islamist dissidents and innocent Muslim civilians who are being threatened with honor murder or with other atrocities. I asked how big the jail would have to be and whether societies could actually afford to protect the innocent from the fanatically murderous. Clearly, we can not afford to sacrifice them to a political death-cult either.

Today, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination forces me to re-frame the question. When will societies finally start jailing the assassins en masse? And those who teach and fund them to blow their opponents up, to “speak” with the sword not the pen?

Today, Benazir Bhutto’s death also forces me to remind us all that the world chose not to stop suicide killers when their targets were mainly Jews and Israelis. That method has proliferated globally. A suicide killer has now assassinated a westernized Muslim woman leader–one who, wearing a headscarf, bravely returned to Pakistan with a vision of democracy.

I have no illusions about Benazir’s feminism or moral innocence. She was far from perfect–who is?–but on her head and in her blood I must say: It is time for the West to offer asylum to those innocent Pakistani civilians who wish to flee (and make sure they are who they say they are), and then fence all Pakistan in, run a wall up to the sky, include Waziristan and the tribal lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Just wall them in and wait for them to turn on each other; they surely will.

Muslim-on-Muslim violence is the largest untold story in the politically correct West.

If it works with Pakistan–let’s consider continuing the wall country by country. In the end, it may actually cost less to jail the assassins than to jail their innocent prey.

To Taslima Nasreen I say: If you value your life, return to Scandinavia while you have the chance.

Benazir: Rest in Peace. May your death be a turning point, may it inspire your long-suffering people and their leaders to finally say NO! to death cult suicide killers; NO! to Islamism; NO! to despotism.

In an attempt to protect high-profile Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents who have had fatwas issued against them: Taslima Nasreen or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, the “good” people have been forced to jail them, not their attackers. Today, Nasreen says she is a “virtual prisoner” in Delhi where, for her own safety, the Indian government has stashed her after a mob of fanatic Islamists tried to kill her. When Hirsi Ali was similarly threatened, the Dutch government was forced to essentially “jail” Hirsi Ali for her own good.

Where will this end? With all the “moderate” and dissident Muslims and ex-Muslims in jail? How big will this jail be? How much will it cost? Can the world’s governments afford this? How many people will have to be jailed before the West really understands that a new kind of war has been declared against us–one that we may have to fight in ways other than by jailing innocent civilians.

Hint: There are no civilians in this new kind of War.

What is the price of dissent? How much will governments be willing and able to pay to protect women from their own families who intend to honor-murder them? Or who control them in terrifying ways? Today, a Saudi women and her advocates are appealing to the Saudi King to save her from her own brothers who forced her to divorce her husband and the father of her children because the husband was deeemed tribally unworthy. The woman is now distraught and threatening suicide.

The British government has just announced a new program that will both better protect and prosecute honor killings in the West. The approach will follow an anti-Mafia model in that the British police now understand that the equivalent of a federal witness protection program, will be required for both intended victims and for witnesses who might be willing to testify on their behalf. (I have been talking about this kind of model for quite awhile and am glad to see such signs of potential progress in Britain).

Last night I saw Marjane Satrapi’s film “Persepolis” which is based upon her popular adult graphic novel aka a book-length comic strip of the same name. Although the film was a bit too long–it was nevertheless a highly creative, charming, feisty, and original presentation of the most sombre political history.

Her heroine, “Marjane,” is a child when Khomeini comes to power and she is a very young adult when she leaves Teheran first for Vienna and then for Paris. Marjane is a feminist warrior. (But so is her grandmother!) Both are portrayed as daring and sophisticated. The jailing, torture, and agonizing deaths of the regime’s political opponents, both male and female, is rendered in a soulful and heartbreaking way–as is the regime’s diabolical persecution of women.

On the other hand, the West, in which women are not punished for how they dress or because they dance or even sleep with men, is still not a welcoming place for a young Muslim immigrant entirely on her own. Indeed, the young Marjane ends up homeless on the streets of Vienna where she nearly dies. The difficulty of integrating into a Western-style life without any family protection or connections, sends Marjane back home to Teheran where at least she has family. Grim Iranian political reality ultimately returns her to the West.

When Westerners fight about Muslim immigration and about alleged “racism” towards Muslims, they are often talking about two distinct populations. Those who argue for an open door policy are thinking about Muslim and ex-Muslim immigrants in flight from Islamist persecution who deserve asylum in the West. Those who argue against open immigration are thinking about their Islamist persecutors and about those Muslim immigrants who mean to practice Islamic gender and religious Apartheid in the West.

Go see “Persepolis.” Read the book. Think long and hard about a pre-emptive strike against a civilian population that has already been so persecuted by its leaders. But, think even harder about whether we want such leaders and those who share their ideology to impose their evil will upon the West and upon Judaeo-Christian culture.

Hebrew University has just awarded a research prize to a graduate student’s essay in which she claims that Israeli soldiers are “racists for not raping Arab women.”(See HERE.)

This is no joke–anyway, who could make this up? The graduate student is a woman named Tal Nitzan. Her anthropological essay has been published by the Hebrew University’s “Shaine Center.”

Nitzan writes that the “lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.” Since Israel fears the Palestinians demographically, IDF soldiers have been trained not to rape the women in order to avoid creating new Palestinians and little intifaders. (Has Nitzan never heard about Palestinian honor killings in which pregnant-out-of-wedlock or adulterous women are murdered by their families who love them too much?) Nitzan alleges that the “lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences–just as organized military rape would have done.”

Thus, Israeli racism, which “de-humanizes” Palestinian women, suppresses Jewish male lust–which proves that Israeli soldiers are racist oppressors. As the only army that does not, apparently, rape, Nitzan fails to grapple with other reasons for this, including the possibility that Israeli soldiers are acting in an ethical and civilized manner.

According to Israeli Professor Steven Plaut who called this to my attention: ” So essentially Nitzan is saying that the proof that Israeli soldiers are brutal oppressive stormtroopers is the fact that they do NOT mistreat and sexually abuse Palestinian women, not even the Palestinian terrorist women apprehended after trying to murder Jews.”

Plaut bitterly wonders whether if Nitzan “herself were to be raped by Hamas terrorists, I guess this would pretty much prove that they are egalitarian and progressive seekers of peace and justice.”

He suggests that people let the heads of Hebrew University know what they think about awarding a prize to such an essay. He provides the following contact information.

Hebrew University:

President of the University Menachem Magidor
Primary Email address: hupres@cc.huji.ac.il
Second Email address (extra): menachem@math.huji.ac.il
Fax. 02-5811023

Rector of the University: Professor Chaim Rabinowitch
Primary Email address: rabin@agri.huji.ac.il
Second Email address (extra): rector@savion.huji.ac.il

Hebrew University “Friends of” Offices:
http://www.huji.ac.il/huji/eng/friends_e.htm

“The Saudis are Coming, the Saudis are Coming”–and this time they mean to tax and silence us via lawsuit not via military action. Paul Revere’s pre-Revolutionary alarm about “The British are Coming” might still apply since British Law is now actively aiding and abetting the Saudi Crusade against Freedom of Speech in the West.

Where are all the First Ammendment fanatics when we need them? Actually–they are all here. (See below for the incredible line-up of organizations that submitted an Amicus Curiae brief).

First, for our hero. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote a book “Funding Evil. How Terrorism Is Financed–and How to Stop It.” One of the funders whom she named is Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz–who sued Ehrenfeld in London because, although Ehrenfeld does not live, work, or publish in England, 23 people based in the UK bought her book on the Internet.

This means that if anyone writes a book in America or in Europe which tells the truth about Islamic terrorism, that both author and publisher can be sued in London for “libel” where libel laws favor the accuser. However, if an author is not a multi-millionnaire and cannot afford to defend herself or to risk being ordered to pay for both her own and for the plaintiff’s barrister–she is royally screwed. She might as well give up telling the truth about Islam and publishers might restrict their titles to gardening and the occult. (See a short film about Ehrenfeld’s struggle with Libel Tourism produced by Rob Pfaltzgraff. HERE: http://www.thelibeltourist.com/cgi-local/content.cgi )

The brave and determined Ehrenfeld, whom no philanthropist, corporation, government entity or defense fund supported, chose not to defend herself in London. It was too expensive, and also too dangerous, given how often the London courts find for plaintiffs in such matters. Thus, Bin Mahfouz won in London but only by default; however, the interest continues to accrue. Ehrenfeld instead sued for a declaratory judgement in New York State. She and her lawyer, Daniel J. Kornstein, wanted the Court to determine that the London-based default judgement against her is un-enforceable in New York–just in case Mahfouz decided to come after her here to enforce the London judgement.

Every major publisher and bookseller, including Amazon. Com, signed onto Ehrenfeld’s lawsuit in an Amicus Brief. The signatories include Advance Publications, The American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Association of American Publishers, The Author’s Guild, The European Publisher’s Council, Forbes, Gannett Co., The Newspaper Association of America, The Online News Association, The Radio-Television News Directors Association, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The World Press Freedom Committee.

On December 20, 2007,Judge Carmen Ciparik, writing for a unanimous Court, determined that “there is no personal jurisdiction yet over Mahfouz in New York State.”The court’s decision may be read HERE http://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2007/2007_09961.htm Lawyers assure me that the ruling is along technical, jurisdictional grounds and responds narrowly to the question put to it by the Second Circuit of whether New York State has jurisdiction over Mahfouz.

We do not know how the New York Courts would rule if Mahfouz actually came here and tried to enforce his London judgement. Also, the Federal Appeals Court, Second Circuit, did not ask the New York State Court of Appeals to “opine upon the propriety of English libel law or its differences from United States and particularly New York State counterparts.” Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld said: “This is a sad day for all Americans. Failing to protect my rights for freedom of speech under the Constitution’s First Ammendment laws, the New York Court of Appeals opened the door to those wishing to curtail the U.S. press and media willingness and ability to freely investigate and report on matters important to our survival as a free nation.”

Dr. Ehrenfeld’s lawyer, Daniel Kornstein of Manhattan, said: “The chill continues. That’s the danger and the risk and the problem that we tried to stress. It creates a sword of Damocles that inhibits authors and publishers, and readers can’t read about it.”

Ehrenfeld, (Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, the David Project) yesterday, Mark Steyn today; which author will be sued tommorrow?

Paradoxically, the same internet which allows for more freedom of speech is now also responsible for chilling that very speech. We have got to put our money where our principles are. The West will have to start funding authors like Ehrenfeld just as if she were a prize fighter or football player–or a national resource. Until or unless this happens, ever fewer authors and publishers will be willing to take the enormous risk of speaking truth to power.

Dr. Ehrenfeld may be contacted at www.acdemocracy.org , through Audrey Mullen at audrey@advocayink.com Tel: 703-548-1160, or through her website: ehrenfeld@acdemocracy.org

Last night I finally saw the film based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. I loved it–yes, even if it captures a pre-Taliban country more mythical than real. Nevertheless, the musical soundtrack, the recitation of classical poetry, the innocent kite-flying competitions in Kabul, (not to mention Homayoun Ershadi who strongly resembles Marcello Mastroianni), all comprise utterly charming scenes and characters carefully chosen and calibrated to help us distinguish between sophisticated and westernized Afghans who are non-violent, (I know many), and the barbarians amongst them.

I think that the film is also brave. First, it depicts a tall, thin, slightly effeminate, incredibly brutal pederast (”Assef”) who, although he is an Afghan through and through, reminds one of none other than Osama bin Laden. Both figures walk languidly; both teach “harsh” lessons. The film also shows us how the Taliban publicly stone a sobbing woman in a pink burqa to death and how they kidnap or purchase Afghan orphans, mainly girls, but sometimes also boys, as “dancing” sex-objects.

True, as shown, wealthy and western-educated Afghans did have private, gender-integrated dancing parties in the 1970s in Kabul–but the nature of Afghan society is better represented in both the novel and the film in how they depict Afghan marriage and family customs in America. Even those immigrants who live in San Francisco guard their women, expect would-be suitors to ask a father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. (The film has a wonderful Afghan Wedding scene every bit the equal of any Bollywood Indian Wedding.) And, Afghan immigrants continue to live with or geographically near to their parents and to center their adult social lives together with them.

Not a bad idea at all.

Ah, but now I come to the hard part. Daily, I receive news of Islamic gender and religious apartheid, both in the Islamic East and as it has steadily penetrated the West. I write about this at length in my latest book The Death of Feminism.

But, the same continent (North America) and culture (the West) which is so proud of its multi-cultural sensitivity and tolerance–and whose people have embraced books such as The Kite Runner and Reading Lolita in Tehran, are all more eager to embrace the immigrant “Other,” (which is commendably open-hearted), and reluctant to take into account the cultural “baggage” that most immigrants bring with them into their new lives.

Although fewer immigrants arrive in the West from Iran or Saudi Arabia, these two countries have exported their versions of Islam to Muslims in very effective ways. For example, in the last month:

IRAN
A top Muslim cleric, Hojatolislam Gholam Reza Hassani said that Muslim women who do not wear the hijab “should die.” He went further: “These women and their husbands and their fathers must die.”

The use of the word “women” has just been banned from Iranian state TV. They have begun using the word “family” instead. In recent weeks, Iran’s Center for the Participation of Women changed its name to the Centre for Family Matters.

Two Kurdish women’s rights activists, Ronak Safazadeh and Hana Abdi, were just arrested in Teheran and charged as “terrorists.” These two feminists were collecting “a million signatures for equality” but have, instead, been charged with a car bomb.

PAKISTAN
Seventy one percent of the men polled in Pakistan “justify beating women.” The survey documents that 80% of Pakistani women are the “victims of domestic violence.” The report claims that “Women in Pakistan face death by shooting, burning, or killing with axes” in shame and honor murders.

Also, a former Muslim in Pakistan who converted to Christianity has been receiving “death threats from his Muslim siblings” and is now in hiding together with his wife, their four daughters and son.

IRAQ
Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women in the southern city of Basra because their dress “violated Islamic teachings.” Maj General Jalil Khalaf said: “The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior.”

SAUDI ARABIA
The parents of a nineteen year-old Saudi girl chained her by the feet in order to prevent her from meeting her fiancée whom her family would not accept.

Saudi women are not allowed to drive or change the color of their clothing or shake a man’s hand (which some mullahs view as “adultery of the hand.”) She cannot marry without permission, retain custody of her children after a divorce, or “annoy” her husband. She is also forbidden to “speak in public.” A popular Saudi television preacher has stated that “a girl who is not beaten from an early age grows up to be a rebellious woman, difficult to control” and that “a woman who leaves her home without a veil is like a woman who goes out naked.”

Those who emigrate into the West from these countries take these attitudes and customs along with them. So far, the West has been slow in noting or in trying to prevent what for us are crimes. On the other hand, the West has also offered refuge to and published the work of Islamic dissidents; appointed and elected pro-woman and anti-violence Muslims to public office; offered police protection and shelter to those in flight from Islamist violence in the West. Thus, also in the last month:

BRITAIN
The daughter of an imam who herself has converted to Christianity, is under serious police protection after receiving death threats from her family. She has, so far, had to move 45 times since she converted 15 years ago. She did so after she ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage.

Waris Dirie, who herself underwent female genital mutilation in her native Somalia has, together with Corinna Milborn, published a new book in Britain. They estimate that 500,000 girls and women have been genitally mutilated in Europe–even though it is illegal to do so. Dirie considers the “difficulties of bringing such cases to court, the culture of silence that keeps affected women quiet, and the muddled association of circumcision with Islam.”

NORWAY
Norwegian author, Tor Erling Staff has published a book in which he calls for “reduced sentences for honor murders.” In his view, such Muslim men who kill are “betrayed by Norwegian society. They come from places where equality is an unknown concept. Where the thought of equality is a humiliation. Suddenly they land here, in the middle of equality paradise. It is clear there is stress…”

HOLLAND
Dutch Minister of Integration, Ella Vogellar, admitted that the emancipation of immigrant women is expected to lead to more cases of honor related violence. A special task force has received about 470 such cases this year. Men are also the victims, either because they are homosexuals or because they try to help their sisters.

Not everyone is keeping their heads firmly down. In Amsterdam, Ehsan Jami, the founder of the Committee for Former Muslims is about to release a film about The Life of Mohammed. He says: “I show how violent and tyrannical Mohammed was. This man murdered three Jewish tribes, killed people who left the faith, and married a 6 year-old girl with whom he had sex when she was 9.” Jami remains under heavy police protection and has offered EUR 50,000 to “anyone who can refute these facts.”

Too many people in the West are misguided and believe that telling the truth about Islam is “Islamophobic” or simply dangerous. May we all begin to have the courage of Ehsan Jami (or Khaled Hosseini) because we are going to need it.

Aqsa Parvez, the tragic sixteen year old slain by her father in an honor killing in Canada, was buried secretly and privately. Her teenage friends arrived hours too late at the Islamic Center where they had been told her funeral would take place. The kind of family and culture capable of honor murder (she and her family are all Pakistani immigrants) is also quite capable of denying her Canadian friends the opportunity of paying their last respects.

Perhaps Aqsa’s family did not want a western-style “scene” at her funeral. Perhaps they viewed Aqsa’s westernized friends as enemies who stole their daughter from them. No doubt, as Pakistani immigrants, they are deeply invested in the subordination of women as the very sign and symbol of their religious and cultural identity–the bedrock of which consists of female obedience to male authority. Obviously, from Aqsa’s father’s point of view, he had no choice. A Muslim girl whose hair or face is uncovered is viewed as a prostitute or as an out-of-control female who, for the sake of her family’s honor, must be killed.

Thus, while I understand the wrenching, cultural conflict involved, including the rejection of a shallow secular culture which condemns women in yet another way–I must, on behalf of the martyred Aqsa and on behalf of so many other girls who have suffered her fate, still say: Enough! We will not allow such criminal barbarism to gain a foothold in the West.

Now is the time for all good multi-culturalists to reconsider their views and for everyone who judges Israel and America harshly for its alleged human rights abuses of Palestinians and terrorists, to begin to judge Islam just as harshly for its criminal subordination of Muslim girls and women.

Aqsa Parvez could have been saved. Apparently, she had twice fled her home and had moved into a shelter. However, following a classic pattern, her family wrote to her, claimed that they could not “sleep without her home,” told her that she would not have to wear the hijab, and persuaded her to return home.

In The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, I recount examples of Muslim families both in the West and in the Islamic East who trick their daughters into returning home so that they can kill them.

In Aqsa’s case, within weeks, she ran away from home a second time.

At this point, she really might have been saved–but only if the western shelter had understood that Aqsa needed the equivalent of a federal witness protection program to protect her from her family for the rest of her life. Nothing less would do since her father and brother would have murderously stalked her for the rest of her life. And, Aqsa would also have needed a warm and understanding alternative family to adopt her. Yes–adopt her. Life without a protective family is not a life most Muslim immigrants would deem worth living.

Is Canada prepared to invest in such programs? Are America or Europe?

While we may or may not be able to abolish honor killings in Muslim lands, we are absolutely responsible for the proliferation of Islamic gender Apartheid–or its abolition–in the West.

Honor murders, daughter- and wife-beating, female genital mutilation, female illiteracy, and polygamy are crimes in the West and must be prosecuted as such.

Yes, I favor cultural “sensitivity.” Therefore, I know that Islam is a political and military movement and not just a religion. Yes, I understand that Islamic religious beliefs may seemingly be at odds with modernity and women’s rights, but I also know that other great religions have managed to find a way to straddle the Great Divide between religious belief and modern, democratic public life. Islam must do no less if its followers wish to live in the West or in the modern world. The “sensitivity” must be in both directions.

According to the Toronto Star, Aqsa Parvez’s friends attended an anti-violence vigil at the Mississauga Civic Centre which was organized by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations. (In my experience, in the United States, and as one commentator has pointed out, CAIR essentially fights for civil rights for shar’ia law. ) At the CAIR event, “One speaker explained they would say a prayer to comfort those who weren’t able to attend the funeral.’Take mercy on Aqsa,’ the prayer went, ‘and on us who are left behind.’ ”

Canadians might consider creating an Aqsa Parvez Shelter for Muslim women who are being battered or threatened with honor killing.

I would go further. It is time for Western democracies to start screening potential immigrants in their home countries as to their views about women. If we did so, at the very least, we might have an opportunity to educate would-be immigrants in the ways of the West long before they actually take up residence amongst us.

The sixteen year old was “too modern” for her fundamentalist Muslim family. She craved forbidden North American freedoms which, if practiced, would shame her immigrant family. The struggle over this issue was hot and abusive. The girl was continually attacked and closely monitored. Her own sisters envied and hated her not only because she was allowed to attend school but because her choice of modern dress could harm their own young daughters’ future marriage chances.

I am not talking about Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez who was just slaughtered by her father (may she rest in peace), but about another sixteen year old: Palestina Isa, who was honor-murdered by her father and her mother in St. Louis Missouri on November 5, 1989. Palestina (”Tina”) was murdered with primal ferocity. The forensic pathologist reported “thirteen wounds, six of them mortal. The worst one plunged into her chest wall, breaking her sternum and ribs and piercing her heart. A second gash ripped her left lung. Her liver had been slashed five times fatally.” Her breasts had been punctured seven times.

Ellen Harris wrote an important book about this one case: Guarding the Secrets: Palestinian Terrorism and a Father’s Murder of His Too-American Daughter. Palestina was clearly being physically abused at home. She attended school with visible bruises. She asked for help. She got none. The only reason her parents were prosecuted and sentenced was this: Her father, Zein Isa, was under federal surveillance. Why? Because he was a member of the Palestinian Abu Nidal terrorist group. Thus, the jury got to hear the horrendous twenty minute murder on tape and convicted her parents.

In case anyone has forgotten: At one time, the Abu Nidal group had been classified by the American government as the “most vicious terrorist group in the world.” On Christmas Eve, 1985, they were responsible for the simultaneous attacks at the El Al counters in the airports in Rome and Vienna in which 18 people died and 101 were injured. In 1986, they attacked an Israeli bus on the West Bank; they also attacked a group of Sephardic Jews as they prayed in a synagogue in Istanbul, machine-gunning 22 worshippers to death and then killing themselves.

Back then–and even more so today–Islamist terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism means that women will be savagely restricted and even more savagely punished if they stray, even a millimeter, even by accident, from the laws and customs of Islamic gender apartheid.

Back to St Louis. Zein Isa’s second wife (a first wife lived on the West Bank), was Palestina’s mother. She held her daughter down while her husband slaughtered her as if she were an animal–as if she were a woman who had provoked her own murder. Indeed, her parents never showed any remorse. Zein Isa told the police that she “deserved it, that she attacked me.”

I wrote about this case in The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (HERE and HERE). I also wrote about many other European- and North American based honor-murders.

In each instance, with a few exceptions, most western intellectuals, including liberals, leftists, and feminists, remained uneasily silent. They feared they would be viewed as “racists” or as “Islamophobes” if they criticized such Muslim customs. They said that such barbarism was mainly due to historical colonialism and imperialism; that the bikini is as exploitative as the burqua; that western moralism or intervention would only make things worse for women.

The West has not intervened in Iran–and yet as of yesterday, in addition to being stoned and publicly hung when they allege rape, Iranian women have just been forbidden to wear boots (!) and hats. (Not modest enough). The West has not intervened in Saudi Arabia–and yet a young woman who was gang-raped has also been stripped of her lawyer and sentenced to two hundred lashes. (Let’s not forget the awful case of the Saudi High School girls who were pushed back into their burning schoolhouse because, in their rush to escape, they had forgotten to put on their black sheets). The West has not intervened in Egypt–and yet, at the end of Ramadan, a mob of a thousand men indulged in an episode of “sexual wilding” in which they randomly attacked women on the street.

True, in Iraq, where the West has most definitely intervened, forty women were recently slaughtered and their bodies dumped because they refused to veil. And female police officers have just been ordered to turn over their guns to their male counterparts. But this might also be due to the Iranian and Saudi influence.

Just this morning, I was contacted by a young North American professor. When she spoke up for Muslim women, other feminists attacked her as “racist.” A kind friend slipped her The Death of Feminism. She wrote to thank me for writing it and to ask me for advice. Her quandary: She wants to assign the book to her class but fears that doing so might end her career. Here is what I wrote:

“While your career concerns are crucial, we are also talking about the end of western civilization and the mortal peril faced by Muslim women. I would suggest taking the risk–but perhaps you might talk about it to your superiors (not to your peers) and the way to present this book is in terms of the importance of tolerance and true intellectual diversity. We now have an opportunity to put our feminist ideals and analyses into vigorous practice when it comes to Muslim immigrants and to women in Muslim countries. In the name of this slaughtered Toronto sixteen year old–if for no other reason–the “good” people have got to take a stand against Islamic gender apartheid. ”

Below, please find an edited version of our correspondence which she has allowed me to publish.

Dear Dr. Chesler:

In January 2008 I will be teaching a Masters level course at X University. It is my first experience teaching in a university. In the course of developing my thoughts and syllabus a friend lent me The Death of Feminism. The book has expanded my thinking and given me words for another “problem with no name”. I feel it will be instrumental in my teaching students how to think.

I have had two recent experiences where I have been shut down by other feminists for launching a critique of Islam and of women wearing headscarves. I have been called naive, and racism has been implied, despite 22 yrs on the front line as a most outspoken feminist and defender of women’s rights and equality rights. So I thank you for your book. I have given it to the head of the X Department at my university; this dept used to be quite feminist in perspective and now it is LEFT LEFT LEFT.

Dear X:

Greetings! Thanks for your kind words about this book and for embarking on a personal campaign to spread some of its ideas. How did you learn about this book? There has been a concerted effort to bury news of it by the mainstream media and by feminists with major media connections.

All best,
Phyllis

Dear Phyllis,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I couldn’t agree more… (but) putting your book on my reading list would get me into big trouble. How powerful is this silencing and these accusations of racism. I am not sure, as a new teacher, I could handle the uproar that will ensue if I put your book on my list. Your book I worry would end my career before it’s started. I am not generally a wimp but I have to be strategic, don’t you think? I am thinking maybe I could use the ideas, or excerpts from the book…? Any thoughts? Is the book being used in any university? Do you think I am a coward? Isn’t this ridiculous, insane, intolerable, to even have this conversation, to have to fear for my career (and my life, let’s be clear) for putting a book on a course outline? Shades of Satanic Verses. This is how I feel. Like an infidel.

I’m sure you are following the case of the 16 yr old Toronto-area girl Aqsa Parvez who was strangled to death this week by her father for being “too western”. I wept reading this in yesterday’s paper. Talk about being martyred. Her death is causing a real stir here; a very brave woman from a Muslim women’s organization spoke on TV last night about how rampant this ideology is and how the Imaans here are feeding it.

(I was attacked and ostracized by other feminists when I challenged a very liberal approach to the problem of battering in the Muslim community. The speaker said that such batterers needed to be taught that Allah and the Koran do not demand the beating of women. I said it was more complicated than that). Well Phyllis you could hear a pin drop in that room. Not a single person, many of whom were feminists and long-time activists and have known me and my work for 22 years, agreed with me or came to my support. I was alone, felt I was being seen as racist and it was very traumatic. So I went for tea and moral support to a clear thinking feminist friend. She said, “This is exactly what Phyllis Chesler is talking about in The Death of Feminism” and went upstairs and got the book.

The Death of Feminism has affected me powerfully. Unfortunately it is rare that a book really moves one’s thinking along. I have never understood why people resist having their minds stretched. I am really appreciative of your hard work and hard thinking and gutsy writing t’ords a better world for women and for all. Clearly you have paid a heavy price. The price of leadership I guess, though one does not expect to be crucified by one’s own community. That hurts.

I protest. Everything is too loud, too fast, too vulgar, too aggressive. POW! BAM! Only celebrities matter. Even our so-called thinkers write the same book over and over again (everything is reduced to branding) and are expected to behave like attack dogs on a short leash.

Welcome to our Comic Book Culture.

I can’t keep up with who is running for the American Presidency. Who can? Today, the campaign for President constitutes a permanent spectacle, a veritable Roman circus. Are ambitious parents already grooming their unborn children in utero with tapes to encourage a future Presidential run? Will children be signed up at birth as future contenders?

Although I understand that this is the way things are, it still seems “over the top” to have Oprah take to the campaign trail for Obama. Stadiums filled with frenzied folk remind me a wee bit of Nazis cheering.

Call me sensitive.

Once, Oprah conducted a love-fest in Madison Square Garden. She (safely) and symbolically removed a woman’s burqa while 18,000 fans cheered. But the girls and women of Afghanistan still live under the Islamist boot.

Are Hollywood stars and television hosts our only and most reliable source of truth? Don’t people understand that these talking heads rely upon writers, that they mainly read someone else’s lines? And that Hollywood is still a suburb of Moscow-on-the-Pacific?

Once, when I was a much younger professor, I happened to mention to my class that my appearance on either Donohue, Oprah, or the Today show (I can no longer remember which program it was) would be broadcast while we would remain together in the classroom. Many of my students wanted to go home in order to “see me.”

“But I’m right here. You can see me and we can also talk to each other.”

Some left anyway. Televised reality was so much larger to them than in-person and interactive reality.

Thus, celebrities are powerful and dangerous influences. They are like dream-figures or Gods. We watch them at home, in bed; they are our Harry Potter magical hearth-figures dancing in our tribal campfire.

And both television and Hollywood have been flirting–they are obsessed with–the American Presidency. Michael Belson in Wag the Dog, Martin Sheen in West Wing, Dennis Haysbert in 24, Michael Douglas in The American President, John Travolta in Primary Colors are as real to most people as are our real got-the-finger-on-the-nuclear-button Presidents.

As to the really real Presidency: The contenders are hardly impressive. Yes, it would be momentarily thrilling to elect the first woman or the first African-American as President but honestly, at the end of the day, I care more about a president’s agenda than about his or her gender. A president’s skin-color (or sexual preference) should only matter in a Hollywood movie, not in reality.

What a pity. These lines are blurred and people increasingly prefer escape entertainment to reality. Presidential contenders and their campaigns are judged as if they were contestants on American Idol.

May God bless America and our precious, shrinking planet.