Every social movement must have a clear vision of its basic interests and goals. Sadly, much of the women’s and feminist movement seems to have lost its way recently as it has been sucked into the vortex of the intersectional bandwagon, which maintains that all supposedly oppressed and disadvantaged groups in the world must ally and show solidarity with each other.
No group had more to lose from the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan than its women. Yet the women’s organizations were silent on the decision of the United States and its allies to abandon the “liberal” Afghan government that encouraged women’s access to education and jobs outside the home. Military experts claim this government could have survived with a token U.S. military presence. On regaining power, the Taliban quickly closed schools and universities to women as well as access to employment. Further awful restrictions for Afghan women were introduced in August 2024 with Taliban decrees on “vice and virtue.” Women’s voices and faces are now banned in public as are activities such as taking public transportation and making music. The Virtue and Vice Ministry will regulate women’s personal conduct by issuing warnings and carrying out arrests. The ministry says face coverings for females are essential to avoiding temptation and tempting others and warns that clothing should not be thin, tight, or short. It says a woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public. It is also forbidden for women and men not related by blood or marriage to look at one another. So far there have been no protests on college campuses or at the United Nations against these restrictions.
The same silence and passivity has been shown toward the Islamic Republic of Iran’s atrocious human rights record against women. For example, when in 2022 its “morality police” murdered twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for not properly wearing her hijab, there was a striking lack of solidarity. There was no pressure on the White House to act on behalf of the tens of thousands of Iranian women in the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement who took to the streets to protest this crime, were arrested, and faced prison rape.
This situation is not surprising or unusual. The 2014 mass kidnapping of the Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls by the Islamic Boko Haram movement produced outpourings of outrage in the media and angry emails from celebrities and politicians but no practical support or action and was soon forgotten. The October 7, 2023, mass rape and atrocities against Israeli young women at the Nova Music Festival committed by members of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, also failed to evoke much outrage by women’s groups, and instead there was even denial of the visual evidence. The behavior of Hamas does not seem to have affected support for Hamas on elite college campuses across the Western world.
Fear of being accused of Islamophobia has obviously been a factor in this conspiracy of silence and inaction. The same fear of being labeled as an enemy of transgenderism has also inhibited criticism of that movement’s extreme objectives. Feminists such as tennis star Billy Jean King and author J. K. Rowling have been vilified by woke activists for their views opposing biological males participating in women’s sports. The most absurd case of appeasement of transgenderism occurred in Scotland in 2023 when the progressive Scottish Nationalist Party government, led by Nicola Sturgeon, concurred with the Scottish Prison Service allowing a convicted male rapist, claiming to be a transgender woman, to be transferred to a women’s prison. Sadly, the public outrage that led to the reversal of this decision was not led by women’s organizations but by church leaders and conservative politicians.
Clearly the intersectional movement has been hijacked by Muslims and the transgender community to the detriment of women’s own rights and interests. This strategy is similar to that of the “popular front” political strategy of the 1930s, when social democrats and other socialist organizations were duped and manipulated by the communists into supporting the Soviet Union and defending Joseph Stalin’s purges, mass murder of “counter revolutionaries,” and the Gulag slave labor camps in Siberia.
An interesting women’s response to their predicament has occurred in Israel following the events of October 7, 2023. Paradoxically, while ultra-Orthodox Jewish men have protested to maintain their exemption from the draft and military service and so exposure to danger, by way of contrast there has been a large increase in young secular eighteen-year-old women called for national service volunteering for combat units in the Israel Defense Force. At least these young women have decided not to be helpless, passive victims of patriarchal male violence.
Every social movement must have a clear vision of its basic interests and goals. Sadly, much of the women’s and feminist movement seems to have lost its way recently as it has been sucked into the vortex of the intersectional bandwagon, which maintains that all supposedly oppressed and disadvantaged groups in the world must ally …