DIANA WEST
You may have missed it, but March 8 was International Women's
Day, a holiday unconnected to a religious rite or person, and with no
national or even seasonal significance. It is socialist in origin, and
it was Lenin himself who made it an official holiday in the Soviet
Union. Not surprisingly, it is now a rite of the United Nations.
In these origins lie the day's basic fallacy: that womanhood is an
international -- global -- political state of being; that there is a
universal female political condition, which urges, a la Marx, "Women of
the world, unite!" Against what? The common foe -- men.
As with Marxism itself, for such a sisterhood to coalesce, even on
paper or in elite committees and multinational organizations, the
profound cultural and religious differences that shape and guide
people's lives have to be minimized, denied or actually destroyed. In
real life, however, culture and religion will out, as they did on this
year's International Women's Day.
In post-U.S. Iraq, Reuters reported on the International Women's Day
activities of "about two dozen" women -- a brave handful -- who
demonstrated in Baghdad against new, sharia-based legislation now before
Iraq's parliament. Known as the Ja'afari Law after an early Shiite
imam, the legislation would allow Iraq's Shiite Islamic clergy to
control marriage, divorce and inheritance. Among other things, this
would permit marriage between a man and a 9-year-old girl, according to
the marital example of Islam's prophet Mohammed. Indeed, by the
Gregorian calendar, as The Associated Press pointed out, such
legislation would apply to girls who are 8 years and 8 months old. (The
Islamic calendar year is 10 or 11 days shorter than the Gregorian
calendar year.)
Guess who has approved of this child rape legislation -- some den of
social outcasts? No, the ministers of Iraq's cabinet. They preside, of
course, over a government created in large measure by great
expenditures of U.S. blood and treasure. The draft law now awaits a
parliamentary vote.
The Baghdad protesters shouted: "On this day of women, women of Iraq
are in mourning." At least two dozen of them are, anyway. But more
than Iraq's women should be in mourning. After all, child rape -- not
to mention marital rape and discriminatory divorce and inheritance
practices also legalized in the draft legislation -- shouldn't be
defined as "women's" issues alone. If they are so pigeon-holed, by
feminist implication, the modification of "male" behavior will
ameliorate all. What these women are protesting, however, aren't men or
the "patriarchy" generally, but rather the brutal impact of Islam and
its law on women, on children, on the family itself -- the basis of
civilization. It is here, in the treatment of the weak and the young, of
motherhood, marriage and childhood, where core, existential
differences between Islam and most of the world's religions and
cultures emerge. They are obscured as "women's" issues.
In pre-withdrawal Afghanistan, the celebration of International
Women's Day took place inside the heavily guarded New Kabul Compound.
It was an upbeat event, at least according to a Defense Department
report, featuring several laudable and prominent Afghan women doctors,
who naturally talked up education and the need to retain post-Taliban
gains made on behalf of women in Afghanistan. Tragically, the State
Department's most recent report on the shockingly low state of human
rights in Afghanistan reveals that such gains for women -- not to
mention children, boys and girls alike -- are already mainly on paper
only. As the armed utopians withdraw, the dust of tribal Islam settles.
The elites who take International Women's Day seriously, however,
probably won't ever notice. Consider the one American woman who spoke at
the Kabul event, Rear Adm. Althea H. Coetzee. As director of U.S.
Forces Afghanistan, operational contract support, Coetzee has a big job,
a hefty salary, status and power that few women -- or men, for that
matter -- achieve anywhere in the world. But she, too, the Defense
Department report noted, took to the same podium as the Afghan women who
preceded her, to speak of her "challenges beginning with her
graduating in the sixth class of women at the U.S. Naval Academy in
1985."
Poor thing. I wonder what the Afghan women really thought of
Coetzee's "challenges" -- being among an early class of women at the
elite military academy -- in comparison to the challenges of their
countrywomen -- violence and degradation suffered at the hands not only
of criminals and outlaws, but, as the State Department report makes
plain, policemen and judges and other officials, too. As "international
women," they all can relate, right?
The report continued: "Her career, by her standards, has been
non-stop. She reminded the crowd that she holds herself to three
mantras that have enabled her to minimize any missed opportunities, and
allows her to live life to the fullest. Those mantras are, 'Carpe
Diem! Semper Gumby! And, Insha'a Allah! That is, seize the day! Always
be flexible! And, everything will turn out, God willing!,' said
Coetzee."
That's Allah willing, actually. There's a difference -- and
particularly for women and children. But not on International Women's
Day
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