NYPost | Oh, how the feminist movement has lost its way. And the deafening
silence over ISIS’s latest brutal crimes makes that all too clear.
Fifty years ago, American women launched a liberation campaign for
freedom and equality. We achieved a revolution in the Western world and
created a vision for girls and women everywhere.
Second Wave feminism was an ideologically diverse movement that
pioneered society’s understanding of how women were disadvantaged
economically, reproductively, politically, physically, psychologically
and sexually.
Feminists had one standard of universal human rights — we were not
cultural relativists — and we called misogyny by its rightful name no
matter where we found it.
As late as 1997, the Feminist Majority at least took a stand against
the Afghan Taliban and the burqa. In 2001, 18,000 people, led by
feminist celebrities, cheered ecstatically when Oprah Winfrey removed a
woman’s burqa at a feminist event — but she did so safely in Madison
Square Garden, not in Kabul or Kandahar.
Six weeks ago, Human Rights Watch documented a “system of organized
rape and sexual assault, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS
forces.” Their victims were mainly Yazidi women and girls as young as
12, whom they bought, sold, gang-raped, beat, tortured and murdered when
they tried to escape.
In May, Kurdish media reported, Yazidi girls who escaped or were
released said they were kept half-naked together with other girls as
young as 9, one of whom was pregnant when she was released. The girls
were “smelled,” chosen and examined to make sure they were virgins. ISIS
fighters whipped or burned the girls’ thighs if they refused to perform
“extreme” pornography-influenced sex acts. In one instance, they cut
off the legs of a girl who tried to escape.
These atrocities are war crimes and crimes against humanity — and yet
American feminists did not demand President Obama rescue the remaining
female hostages nor did they demand military intervention or support on
behalf of the millions of terrified Iraqi and Syrian civilian refugees.
An astounding public silence has prevailed.
