"If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?" Germaine Greer explaining why cutting off the clitoris and labia of eight-year-old girls is fine and dandy in her book.As regular readers will know, your humble Devil is not a raging feminist: apart from anything else, he thinks that the law should apply equally to all citizens and that all discrimination—positive or negative—is A Bad Thing. Not only that, but he feels that—in most parts of this country—a cultural evolution is taking place that is moving broadly in the right direction.
What does enrage him is the disgusting treatment of women—or, rather, individuals who happen to be women—in certain parts of the world. As long-time readers will know, your humble Devil considers female circumcision, for instance, to be
absolutely one of the most evil things on the face of the planet. In that linked post, I attacked yet another one of these filthy cultural relativists...
What it actually is is a product of colonial, Western guilt; it is a morally bankrupt and cowardly position that allows people to turn away from condemning the barbaric practices of others. There are, as I said previously, some things for which there are no excuse: FGM is one of them.
...
And being civilised means recognising and defending those who have no autonomy. I would consider that young girls of under 10 (to whom FGM is most likely to be applied) do not have autonomy; they are held down and cut. As civilised people, it behoves us to help the helpless.
It seems that this kind of crap is still continuing in this country—this filthy cultural relativism that says that it is OK for a woman to be treated like shit, beaten, cut, viewed as property and killed for doing something that their family dislikes. It certainly seems that Germaine Greer—the author of
The Female Eunuch—has no problem with the castration of women, for instance (the above quote is entirely genuine, by the way).
What has prompted this? It was the reading of
this Prodicus post and the subsequent perusal of the articles recommended.
In the current edition of Standpoint magazine, Clive James has published an article he hoped never to have to write. It is a blazing rebuke to the left-liberal intellectual establishment for its contemptible complicity (my words) in the terrorising of millions of women in the name of Islam.
James is backed up by Nick Cohen who, in another powerful article in the same issue, rails at, specifically, Western feminist apologists who, from the comfort of their Hampstead apartments and in the name of cultural relativism, volunteer as apologists for the genital mutilation of women in third world societies and are therefore, de facto, accessories, in their silence, to the terrorising and oppression of even brown-skinned women who live in the less appealing parts of their own, British, cities.
Both writers express their contempt for those who would accord moral equivalence with Christianity and Western moral sensibilities in general, to principles and authorities which permit, condone or encourage the oppression, terrorising, rape, imprisonment, torture and murder of women in the name of Islam and other oriental religions.
Both writers condemn the veneer of post-colonialist remorse which masks the Left's and Western feminists' cowardice, hypocrisy and self-evident hatred of their own society, and the alacrity with which they leap to champion almost anything which affronts it.
Cohen will make you seethe. James will make you seethe and laugh out loud, as serious as the subject is and as nauseatingly contemptible the hypocrisy of their targets.
When leading men formerly (?) of the liberal consensus finally clamber to their feet to accuse their sisters of complicity in crimes against half of humanity, you know the tide is turning.
Do go and read the articles and—if you do not seethe at the inhumanity of people, as well as the cowardly stance of the liberal
intelligentsia—then you are a calmer person that I.
I want to be quite, quite clear about this: these things highlighted in the magazine have absolutely no place in a libertarian state—no libertarian could possibly condone the enslavement or use of force against women or men. Equally, these things should have no place in a liberal Western culture—libertarian or otherwise.
Your humble Devil has absolutely no time for religion at all. I certainly have no time for religions pleading that they should have special exemptions from the law of this country. And I most especially have no time for any culture that insists on treating any person as nothing more than a possession—and a poorly-valued one at that.
No, we cannot go and invade all of those theocratic states that persecute women, but we can fucking well do our damndest stop it happening here.
Yet at the same time, the Archbishop of Canterbury can call for Sharia law to be imposed on British Muslim women, safe in the knowledge that his own women priests will nod their approval. Similarly, the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips can call for Sharia at the East London Mosque and women lawyers will not remind him that the mosque is a centre for Jamaat-i-Islami, which in India insists that husbands who throw out their wives have no duty to pay them maintenance.
We should be burning effigies of
the Sharia-endorsing bearded goat-botherer and Lord Phillips in the street. They should be relieved of their posts and stripped of all titles, honours and privileges. These people are cheer-leaders for mutilation, rape, slavery and oppression. Instead, they are allowed to carry on peddling their filthy, relativist views from positions of power and influence.
All religious exemptions from laws—Christian, Muslim, Sihk, Jewish, whatever—must be overturned. Now. This country must remove the Church of England from its privileged position (which will probably consign it to the dustbin of history, where it belongs). This country must stop being a refuge for religious zealots of all stripes. There should be
one law for all and everyone—everyone—should be equal under the law.
And, quite seriously, if you don't want to live in society in which enforced slavery, mutilation and murder are absolutely against the law in all circumstances and when practised against all citizens, then you can fuck off.
I am, frankly, fed to the back teeth of people justifying their sickening behaviour towards other human beings on the grounds of a belief in a totally fictional sky-fairy which, if it existed, would in any case be imprisoned and excoriated as one of the worst beings ever known in creation.
To sum up, I shall use the same quote from
Does God Hate Women? that
Nick Cohen does.
Well, what can one say. Religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of 10-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship—despite rhetoric about justice and compassion—a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug. They worship a God who thinks little girls should be married to grown men. They worship a God who looks on in approval when a grown man rapes a child because he is "married" to her. They worship a God who thinks a woman should receive 80 lashes with a whip because her hair wasn't completely covered. They worship a God who is pleased when three brothers hack their sisters to death with axes because one of them married without their father's permission.
And whilst I acknowledge that many decent people are followers of one religion or another, perhaps it is worth contemplating the fact that they might actually be decent people even if they did not believe in some sky-fairy? I think that the answer is "yes".
To be sure, the flip-side is that many of the evil scum who currently justify their behaviour with religion would still be evil scum—but at least we could treat them as such, rather than providing exemptions and special case pleading.