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How to Make Women's Rights THE Issue of the 21st Century

2 years ago

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"The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women's rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid -- people will insist that it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, and that's when change happens."

Those words come from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali victim of genital mutilation who wrote a screenplay about the mistreatment of Islamic women. Theo van Gogh turned the screenplay into the film "Submission." Two months later he was assassinated. Ali, whose life was threatened, has lived under guard for the past five years. Her comments were made in a recent Los Angeles Times interview.
They can't be repeated enough.

The denial of women's full equality is wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong.

That assertion must be made without compromise, said Ali, a fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, she was named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people. Her autobiography, "Infidel: My Life," which detailed her own genital mutilation in Somalia, was a bestseller. Her next book, "Nomad," will be published in February.

Fighting poverty helps. Education helps. But only firmly stated principles of freedom and equality backed by action, by protest, by laws and by enforcement will bring change for that half of the world's population that does the majority of the world's work and produces all of the world's children.

We must be unyielding and constant.

When women are cut, burned, beaten, raped, sold for sexual services, underpaid, denied education, told what they must wear and where they may go, most of the world – not some of it but most of it – thinks that's just the way of the world. That's how it has always been. It's the way God wants it. It's the custom. It's the only way to protect women. It's the only way to protect the family.

And most horribly of all, it's good for women. It was Ali's grandmother who insisted that she be circumcised, as she recalled in the Times interview:

"That's why I'm always hammering on principle. My grandmother was convinced she was doing something right. She was brainwashed. She was doing it out of love. She had done it to all her daughters; it was done to her, to her grandmother. She didn't know it was possible not to be, as she called it, 'cleansed.' Yes, education helps, but it had everything to do with the conviction that what she was doing was right."

What must we do? In the interview, Ali charts a course:

BE INTOLERANT OF INTOLERANCE

"To be a community of free people, you have to defend that freedom tooth and nail, and for this country to remain vital, you have to understand that freedom is a very, very vulnerable institution. It's something you have to keep defending, and the only way to achieve that is intolerance of intolerance."

QUESTION INFALLIBILITY IN RELIGION

"[Mainstream Muslims] have to question the infallibility of the prophet Muhammad. They have to quit teaching children and young people that everything in the Koran is true and has to be taken seriously."

STOP BEING TIMID

"In Africa, you're told, 'Oh, this is our custom -- polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values.' Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, 'Oh, I'm really sorry, it's your custom.' "

STOP BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT

"Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it's the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, 'Stop oppressing your women,' they'll tell you, 'Don't impose your culture on me.' It would have been fantastic if, when [President] Obama went to Cairo, he [had said], 'We have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man, whatever color.' "

APPLY UNBENDING PERSISTENCE

"The Sudanese woman who decided to wear trousers, and when the world rallied to her support, she doesn't get the lashes. It is this kind of unbending persistence. Human trafficking -- girls kidnapped and then forced into prostitution -- that is economic exploitation. That can be eradicated by going after the traffickers, by providing education and eradicating poverty."

Say that the oppression of women is wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong.

Anywhere. Anytime. For any reason.

And believe that it can be stopped.

Filed Under: Woman Up

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