Female Muslim Academic Champions Islam's (Abysmal) Treatment of Chicks; Bruce Bawer Gives Her a Righteous Smackdown

Bruce Bawer takes on a "repulsive" book with impeccable academic credentials. It's written by a Columbia University professor, a woman, and published by Harvard University Press. The author, a devout Muslim, criticizes those who criticize the Islamic oppression of women--and no wonder. It is just such oppression which is Islam's Achilles heel, so to speak, an obvious abridgement of rights that clashes with Western values and with modernity itself. So to defend how Islam views and treats women is to defend Islam at the expense of half of humanity. It is that, along with the author's duplicity and tu quoque arguments, that most disgust Bawer:

One way in which Abu-Lughod trivializes the oppression of Muslim women is by accusing Westerners of “trivializ[ing] gender issues in the United States and Europe.” It was Christians, not Muslims, she reminds us, who burned women as witches in colonial Salem. She even claims that frat-house gang-rapes are considered “acceptable” in the U.S. (Huh?) Why, she asks, haven’t any of the would-be saviors of Muslim women “taken up the cause of oppressed Jewish women, or questioned proud proof of the continuity of Judaism that is pinned on genetic markers passed down from father to son among the priestly group known as Cohens?” (No, I have no idea what she’s talking about either.)

Ah, yes, it always--always!--comes back to the Joooos. For if anything is a "genetic marker" passed down through the generations, it is the poisonous, pathological Jew-hate embedded in Islam's foundational text, the Koran.