Neoconservatives for Women's Rights

In light of the Republicans' demonstrated devotion to the rights of women in Afghanistan and Iraq (see previous posts), it's interesting to see what David Frum and Richard Perle have to say on the subject in An End to Evil (2003), which I've given the subtitle "War Without End, Amen."

Whenever militant Islam approaches power, it turns its wrath on women. During the Algerian civil war of the mid-1990s, Islamists tossed acid into the faces of the unveiled. Kashmiri Islamic militants issued a threat to do the same in 2001, frightening thousand of Kashmiri women into burqas. In the West, too, honor killings are proliferating. In February 2002, a Swedish Muslim woman was killed by ther father for attempting to marry a man not of his choosing, the latest in a series of such crimes in Denmark and Britain, too. Indeed, Muslim concepts of sexual morality are beginning to govern the lives of non-Muslim women n Western Europe. [Note the association of sinister Muslims with sinister Europeans.] In September 2001, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that two-thirds of the country's rapes were committed by people of non-Norwegian descent, almost all of them Muslim. [Willie Horten comes to the "war on terror"?] A (woman) professor at the University of Oslo who was asked to comment on the report argued that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes," because they dress in ways that Muslim men find provocative. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

Those who mocked President Bush for explaining that terrorists attacked the United States because they hate American freedom should consider the remark from the point of view of America's - and the world's - women. For the terrorists do hate the freedom of our women, not least because they fear it is putting ideas into the heads of their women. (pp. 173-4)

Are they serious in their devotion to liberating Muslim women from these evils? See previous posts on Iraq and Afghanistan.