The vindication of women

One of the few good things about Bush’s State of the Union speech was hear­ing him say “Madam Speaker”, watch­ing the look on Pelosi’s face as he said it and of course, seeing the stand­ing ova­tion that fol­lowed it. And recently, with her little “I’m in’ video, the other Clin­ton dipped her toe ever so tent­at­ively into the Pres­id­en­tial waters. 

Mean­while, Aus­tralia has one woman fewer in our Cab­inet (although I have to say I’ve never liked Van­stone par­tic­u­larly, surely there was another woman who could have been pro­moted to the new cab­inet in her stead?).

My father recently sent me a mes­sage asking whether I had “no interest in how Moslems treat their women”. After calmly explain­ing that put­ting it this way implies that only the men are Moslems (his spelling) and that the women belong to them, I answered:

I am inter­ested in how Sharia law treats women and in the dan­ger­ous spread of this form of extrem­ism to other coun­tries. It’s noth­ing new: women have been stoned to death for adul­tery in Nigeria under Sharia law and now it’s spread­ing to Somalia if you believe the leaked doc­u­ment at wikileaks​.org. I haven’t seen much in the way of out­rage about Sharia law in Nigeria. I’d like to. Is it per­haps because the women being stoned to death in Nigeria are black, so no one cares? Or is it that Nigeria isn’t stra­tegic for Israel and Amer­ica right now?

I prefer my inform­a­tion on women’s oppres­sion to come from neut­ral organ­isa­tions com­mit­ted to human rights for all, such as Amnesty Inter­na­tional, rather than from people who want human rights for those whose rights suit their agenda at a given time.

That said, though, I star­ted think­ing. One art­icle in the Jer­u­s­alem Post for­war­ded by a friend of Dad’s is the tran­script of a talk by a Per­sian-Amer­ican about the plight of women in Iran. She men­tions the high rate of teen­age exe­cu­tions by the State. I thought: I’ve been watch­ing SBS news pretty much nightly all year. I don’t remem­ber seeing cov­er­age of these death sen­tences for teen­agers. But we get an item last night on whether Barak Obama really atten­ded the school he said he atten­ded (mind you, we also got a story on the Israeli Pres­id­ent being accused of rape and sexual assault of three other women; people in glass cul­tures should­n’t throw stones, perhaps).

Should­n’t we hear inter­na­tional out­rage every single time a child is sen­tenced to death, con­sid­er­ing that it’s against inter­na­tional cov­en­ants? But I forget – and should­n’t – that media values aren’t like that, and that the Israeli Pres­id­ent is import­ant because he has prom­in­ence while a few power­less girls and teen­aged queers are pretty irrel­ev­ant in the grand scheme of things.

I know there’s a women’s move­ment in Iran, fight­ing hard to change this cul­ture. I know that Muslim women in Aus­tralia and Canada and else­where are work­ing on this too. I don’t believe there’s a place for pat­ron­ising (mat­ron­ising?) West­ern fem­in­ist inter­fer­ence but it’s hard not to want Pelosi and Clin­ton and Gil­lard and hell, even Rice to stand up and say some­thing. On the other hand, they can’t be seen to only be about “women’s issues”. 

I also find it chal­len­ging how all of a sudden, cer­tain people (my Dad, Bush) are so con­cerned about the treat­ment of women in these areas, but how easy it was to ignore the Taliban for all those years until it was stra­tegic­ally advant­age­ous to pay attention.

Think I might add Amnesty to my list of com­pan­ies to call about jobs in the US.