Do Something Syndrome on Display

This time from Canada:

Panties for Peace:

The Panties for Peace campaign plays on the regime leaders’ superstitious fear that contact with a woman’s underpants will rob them of their power. Women around the world are asked to post their panties to local Burmese embassies in a bid to strip the regime of its power and bring an end to its gross violations of human rights, especially those committed against Burma’s women.

The only group that has ever shown even close to this kind of stupidity is the group "Boobies Not Bombs". The idea that sending panties to the Burmese government will effect any meaningful change is downright moronic...as even the website admits:

A humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions has been playing out in Burma for more than 20 years. Thousands have been killed and many thousands more arrested, forced into slave labour or displaced from their villages by the ruling military regime. Burma’s women have endured rape and other forms of systematic sexual violence employed by the military to enforce its control over the country’s ethnic minorities. On May 3, 2008, Cyclone Nargis brought new and terrible suffering to the people of Burma, suffering made only worse by the military regime’s refusal to promptly accept the international community’s ensuing offers of humanitarian assistance. What began as a natural disaster was soon supplanted by a catastrophe rooted in the pride, paranoia and corruption of Burma’s military rulers.

For decades, this government has endured threats, worldwide mockery, and embargoes, but this...THIS will break the bank. THIS will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back. THIS will be what finally exacts change in a corrupt dictatorship that murders it's people!

And i'm the prince of England!

The idea that doing ANYTHING will bring about results is childish thinking. Certain actions bring about results. Others don't. Even if the regime is afraid of touching women's panties (and I can't find an objective site that backs this up), they'll just throw them away...not touch them. And this seems to be made up out of whole cloth.

Doing SOMETHING...isn't a substitute for doing an action of value. Protestors need to realize this. And stop pretending that every action has an equal consequence.

The Silent Plight of Muslim Girls

If there is any area on which modern day liberalism is not willing to compromise its beliefs in order to appease the worst excesses of radical Islam, I have yet to find it. The staunchest defenders of human rights are oddly silent about the most eggregious human rights violations facing Muslims, mainly women and children. To the extent that ANY of them speak about barbaric practices such as female genital mutilation...it is usually to defend such practices.


One of the most grissly recent stories to fit this model is the tale of Yasser Abdul Said who murdered his daughters Amina and Sarah for offending his honor. No stories on DailyKos or DemocraticUnderground. And in a search on yahoo, google, and even ask.com, the first 40 stories are all from right wing blogs, usually linking either to JihadWatch and Robert Spencer, or to Phyllis Chesler. This is a case of TRUE theocratic religious zealots murdering their daughters for impure sexuality (real or imagined) and for religious reasons...yet, there is silence.


As Chesler reports:

[B]ased on extensive interviews that I have done with the female relatives of the murdered Texas teenagers, it is clear that:


a) Amina and Sarah were expected to wear headscarves. Their failure to do so, their “hidden” lives as normal American teenagers, doomed them.


b) Amina and Sarah were expected to enter into arranged marriages against their will to much older Egyptian men whom they had never met. Their refusal to do so doomed them.


c) Amina and Sarah were expected to keep quiet about the horrific sexual, physical, and psychological abuse which was heaped upon them by their father, mother, and brother. Their failure to do so doomed them.


d) Amina and Sarah were not supposed to have “boyfriends.” At the very least, their friends, both male and female, were not supposed to be Christians. The fact that they were friendly with Christian male teenagers doomed them.


e) Amina and Sarah were supposed to learn to hate America and to choose Shari’a law. Their failure to do so doomed them.


These are only some of the “rules” that Amina and Sarah were expected to obey. One of my informants has quoted their brother Islam, who often stalked his sisters, as saying: “They knew the rules. They broke them.” Islam is saying that it is their fault that his father had to kill them.


Thus, whenever you see a woman in a face veil, headscarf, or burqa, it is very likely that these rules also apply to her.

Western feminists, who leap to defend the poor and downtrodden female from having to unfairly look at ultrasounds of their unborn fetus, report to their parents that they need to travel across state lines to have an abortion at the age of 12, or have a 15 cent an hour wage difference from their male counterparts...are shockingly silent about the execution of two beautiful young women by their zealot father for not conforming to his expectations of their lives.


The charge of racism to anyone who brings up such issues is not only irresponsible...it is silly. How is it racist to try and defend women and children of color or minority faith? All those who would defend "the Muslim community against such slander" is defend behaviors that lead to the deaths of young women the world over in such "honor killings". It's just a shame that some would rather play victim politics than save lives. That those who would defend western women from the rather minor inconvenience of a wage disparity would not stand up for their sisters who are being executed by a very real patriarchy is a terrible dereliction of duty. And that some would actually defend a patriarchy responsible for such attrocities is disgusting and pathetic.

Feminists Abandon Women-Again

They're there over a 50 cent an hour difference between men and women's wages, but when it comes to something like civil rights...not so much.

Can't sweat the small stuff you know?

Academia's fixation on cultural sensitivity is changing the debate around female genital mutilation, with a growing number of professors and women's rights activists becoming hesitant to condemn the practice.

That's bad enough. "Hesitant to condemn" means they have to think long and hard before condemning non-consentual mutilation of women...by men. But it gets worse.

Where feminists rallied against the operation from the pages of Ms. magazine in the 1970s, today's critics are infinitely more cautious, with most suggesting that the Western world butt out until Muslim African communities are ready to reconsider what they are doing to their daughters.
The shift in attitudes about the practice-- which in the worst of cases involves the carving out of a woman's clitoris and inner labia and can cause lifelong urinary tract infections, sterility and even death -- comes at a time when high-profile victims of the operation such as writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali and model Waris Dirie, both Somalis, have launched very public campaigns against the practice.
"There are good reasons within the society for the operation to continue, but these are cultural reasons. They are not scientific ones," says Prof. Boddy, author of Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan.

"There are good reasons for it to continue." Like what? Please, enlighten us?

Where once feminists railed against every act of the patriarchy...now they defend the patriarchy is truly oppressive women in ways beyond what the feminists ever complained about.

Remember that the next time a feminist talks about inequality.