Once Again, Phyllis Chesler Dares to Confuse Her Victimhood-Besotted Feminist Sisters With the Truth

Phyllis Chesler has a new book, a compilation of pieces on the subject of Islam and women, which is to say that it deals with women's subjugation in and by Islam and those who act in its name. Bruce Bawer, for one, has no doubt that "feminists," who seem to manifest a fondness for patriarchy when it is bound up with victimhood (it's part and parcel of the "intersectionality" claptrap), will remain deaf to the truths that Chesler imparts, and will continue to excoriate and dismiss her as an "Islamophobic" messenger. In Bawer's words:

This foolishness, this madness – this outright patriarchy-worship in the guise of feminism, this perverse insistence that political virtue always consists in taking the side of “the other,” even if “the other” is out to oppress or rape or even kill you – this is what Chesler is up against. And her only weapon is the facts. That's what this book is – 462 pages of facts about a culture whose systematic abuse of women she refuses to stop talking about. In these pieces, she takes us to Iran and Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Nigeria and Pakistan, and France and Britain and the U.S. She attends to such phenomena as forced marriage, underage brides, honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM), Muslim family rapes, female suicide bombers (and their Western defenders), splenetic Muslim cabdrivers in New York, slaveholding by a Muslim millionaire on Long Island, and much else. Not to mention plenty about burkas – about a burka ban in Syria, proposals for burka bans in the West, opponents of burka bans in the West, fights over the burka in Nantes, riots over the burka in Paris, and so on. 

It's all there in Chesler's book. But the people who most need to read this stuff and take it to heart – the Women's March marchers, the pussy-hat wearers, the would-be glass-ceiling-breakers like Lena Dunham and self-described “nasty women” like Ashley Judd – they'll probably never go near this book. As for Women's Studies, of which Chesler is one of the founding mothers, it has – as Chesler herself laments in these pages – been “Stalinized,” shifting its concern from “the 'occupation' of women's bodies worldwide” to “the alleged occupation of a country that has never existed: 'Palestine.'”...

Well, if you keep your eyes on "Palestine," you never have to deal with the unpleasant reality that your ethos, your belief system, your ideology, is a crock.

Update: Oh frabjous day--it's a Bruce Bawer two-fer!