Injustice anywhere

In Slate, Anne Applebaum tries to explain why there are so few Western feminists campaigning against the horrific repression of women in Saudi Arabia (the answer: basic freedom for women isn't something Americans have had to deal with in our own country in recent decades). And Emily Yoffe remarks that condemnations of Muslim honor killings are pretty sparse on NOW's website (Yglesias offers a weak defense of NOW, but it's obvious that the issue of Muslim women's rights is incredibly low on American feminists' agendas).

To Applebaum's and Yoffe's analyses I'd like to add my own. Many people in places like Saudi Arabia defend their cultures' endemic brutalization of women by saying that this practice is part of traditional Muslim culture. This blunts Western criticism in two ways. First of all, one of the central tenets of Western liberalism is anti-imperialism - it's wrong for rich high-tech Western countries to condemn and denigrate the indigenous cultures of weaker, poorer countries (this is also why American feminists don't talk more about female genital mutilation in African countries). Second of all, if oppression of women is Islamic, anyone who condemns it must be condemning Islam, and therefore siding with George Bush. American feminists are understandably squeamish about doing anything that helps the Bush administration.

As someone who is utterly disgusted by gender inequality and violence against women, I've always been horrified and disgusted by what goes on in Saudi Arabia, and doubly so by the even worse oppression that seems to exist in many insular Arab and Pakistani communities in Europe and Canada. It makes me sad to see American feminists, who I respect and admire more than almost any other political movement, cowed by the lie that oppression of women is somehow an essential part of the Muslim religion and culture. Arab and Pakistani women are women too, not exotic animals subject to the laws of the jungle, and they deserve our help.