Rita Panahi, on the wonderful, the brave, the true, the truth-teller, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
We can’t have a fiercely intelligent woman talking about worthy issues when there’s trivial nonsense to be bleating about; why worry about female genital mutilation when Tony Abbott is brazenly winking and looking at his watch?The rest...
Hirsi Ali’s principled and uncompromising approach to equality and human rights is at odds with the vacuous attention seeking ways of the shrill feminists who dominate the agenda in Australia, UK and the US, though it could be argued that our local frightbats have set a new standard in faux fury.
It’s not just Hirsi Ali’s preoccupation with justice that infuriates the sisterhood but it’s her determination to highlight what she sees as the root cause of much of the world’s entrenched misogyny — Islam.
Many on the left simply cannot abide by the only religion they don’t find abhorrent being scrutinised; time and again leftist feminist have sided with radical Islam instead of standing with the subjugated women from communities who adhere to backward cultural practices.
Who can forget the idiocy of Australian women donning hijabs in solidarity with their Muslim sisters at a time when women in Iran were being blinded in acid attacks for breaking the strict hijab code?
Then there’s Germaine Greer who has likened FGM or female circumcision, carried out on millions of women every year, to getting a boob job or piercing. It takes a truly twisted mind to compare a young girl being held down while her clitoris and labia are excised without anaesthesia to a woman choosing to change her appearance through cosmetic surgery, piercings or tattoos.
For educated, Western women to liken the agonising pain and lifelong devastating effects of FGM to plastic surgery is not only offensive, it is depraved. But this cultural relativism is popular among some feminists, who see condemnation of FGM as an attack on cultural identity.
