Why Islamists and feminists avoid confronting each other

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others.

We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that, “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’.

This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at university.  You might wonder if Britain is “very misogynistic” what that makes Saudi Arabia for instance, but according to the generalities of feminist theory, they are just two different examples of the same thing – male oppression and female victimhood – but in different forms. The specifics of different cultures come down to the same root.

As Owen Jones puts it in his article:

“Men are conditioned from an early age to feel a sense of superiority over women, and to objectify women. Violence against women is the most extreme conclusion of a belief – nurtured over thousands of years – that women are subservient and exist to satisfy men. Rape, assault and murder exist on a continuum that begins with degrading jokes and comments; cat-calling in the street; images that objectify women; the shouting down of women for daring to have an opinion, often involving insults about their physical appearance on social media.”

This is universalist ideology – or ‘totalising social theory’ as we might call it – talking about the whole of society as something that we understand in its fundamentals – meaning we don’t have to pay much attention to actual reality as it shows itself. Jones’ use of the passive voice “men are conditioned” is instructive, for it abstracts away from any actual action of conditioning to the realm of universals where it just happens, and we all fall in to line doing it. We are all determined by it and have to join Jones and his fellow travellers and start propagating the same ideology in order to overcome it (thankfully of course, we don’t have to do that in reality, which is a relief).

What our actual culture is and our actual beliefs are irrelevant here, for they are conditioned into us – so Islamic codes on women’s dress and how they must live their lives aren’t fundamentally different in character from Western norms about womanhood. But you will rarely find feminists even confronting such questions – or at least when they do it is nearly always in order to withdraw back into the comfort zone of much broader generalities and ideological truisms. One of these is revealed by Jones in his article about male violence. He does bring in Muslims as an interested party, but only as victims – of white men. He says: “Misogynistic hate also intersects with other forms of bigotry: take the targeting of Muslim women on the streets by white men.” Of course, Muslim women are never targeted on the street by white women, and white women are never targeted on the street by Muslim men...that does not fit the narrative so it is not mentioned, while the accepted oppressor groups are highlighted.

This is the feminist standpoint, which is now virtually interchangeable with liberal-left identity and ideology. Both concentrate on what I’m calling ‘the administration of diversity’, which means keeping strictly to favoured/unfavoured identity group categories mapped on to victim/oppressor distinctions. Ideologues tend to call it ‘intersectionality’, as in the intersectionality of victimhood joining up all the different groups who are universally victims.

Islamists avoiding feminists - more about politics


For Islamists the tendency to avoid confronting feminists directly is rather different in character to that of feminists. It is much less ideological and more about practical politics (after all, their ideology concerns Islam and Islamic power and victimhood rather than the administration of diversity as a whole).

From the standpoint taken by Owen Jones above, making sure the correct victim groups and oppressor groups keep their places is a vital function – and it is a function that you can see him and others repeating again and again in what they say and do, almost as if by clockwork. It is a presiding perspective. It gives protection to the favoured groups, including by protecting them against criticism, while directing criticism either to broad generalities about society or to the unfavoured identity groups – of which ‘white men’ is a favourite given that it incorporates at least two unfavoured identity markers – of white skin colour and male sex (and also implies a third, of non-Muslim). 

We can see this protective stance in how liberal-left institutions like the Labour Party and the Guardian choose what to highlight and what they do not, but it also feeds out into general society through taboos of what we should all talk about and avert our eyes from. For us here, the point about Islamists* is that they benefit from this protection as the representatives of Muslims, including through representative organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslim Association of Britain and Islamic Human Rights Commission. The administration of diversity treats Muslims as a victim group (indeed with double victim status due to Muslims generally being non-white). So whenever these organisations and others speaking on behalf of Muslims claim victimhood – by crying ‘Islamophobia’ for example – they can expect the liberal-left to respond and support them, as with their opposition to the Government’s anti-extremism strategy ‘Prevent’.

These organisations and others routinely segregate women from men at events and invite speakers who preach about curtailing women’s rights in public life and against homosexuality. But they rarely if ever directly confront feminists who take the opposite standpoint. The reason is structural – for the protection and support they receive from administrators of diversity is at the very least allied to feminists if not actively feminist in character itself (as with Owen Jones). Any challenge to feminism directly would bring into question their place in the system and right to support and protection.

So it’s in the interests of Islamists to maintain that protection and access to wider public life and not remove themselves from the system which provides it. This means not offending those who preside over it or challenging the right of other favoured groups to favouritism. In consequence, rather than attacking and ridiculing feminists publicly, they stick to attacking broad generalities in their public pronouncements, like British society, the West, white racism and British foreign policy – keeping to the victimhood narrative. By doing this they do not challenge those who provide support to them, the system remains robustly intact, and politics can continue as it did before.



* I use ‘Islamist’ in the sense of a political standpoint that seeks to maximise the social and political power of Islam and Muslims. It is not the same as being a Muslim extremist or terrorist, but does include them just as the term ‘Irish republican’ includes peaceful nationalists and those who use violence to achieve their political ends. 

Comments

  1. The ideological denial by the likes of Owen Jones is staggering. To date, gangs of Pakistani males have been jailed in thirty towns and cities for the systematic gang rape, prostitution and even of torture of white working class children. This has been going on since the late 80s at least with Birimingham city council knowing about it in 1990 and quietly burying the evidence that they had about it:
    http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingham-city-council-hid-links-8131813

    Note how Owen Jones missed all the ''micro-aggressions'' which occur between Muslim men AND women and white women who are not 'modestly' dressed. I have witnessed this with my own eyes and note now how this is becoming a serious situation in France with white French women actually being attacked for wearing shorts.

    The Labour party and the wider liberal left are not only totally divorced from reality, they are positively dangerous in the way they are dividing society up into sanctified victims and oppressors.

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  2. Full details of the gangs convicted to date:

    http://www.pmclauth.com/sentenced/Grooming-Gang-Statistics/Facts-Gangs-Jailed

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  3. Today's example of how (most) avowed feminists give Islamists (or perhaps just Islam in this case) a free pass is Justin Trudeau and his fans, as publicised here: https://twitter.com/AsraNomani/status/775345922062581760

    I am a feminist (of the 2nd-wave mindset at least) but also a (true) liberal so I would be very reluctant to force a religious community to stop treating its women as 2nd class citizens, and I wouldn't necessarily even oppose the idea of a politician engaging with such a community. But for the politician to engage with it on its own terms by entering into its segregated world on an official visit is definitely wrong. He could have offered to meet all those people, men and women on equal terms, at a non-religious venue. Instead he will be interacting with (talking to, making eye contact with, shaking hands with) the 1st class citizens (men) and presumably not the women.

    And it's not just those women who chose to be part of this community who are affected. Women journalists covering his official visit were asked to wait at the back, and so were unable to cover the story as fully as the male journalist(s).

    Furthermore, as Nomani points out in her tweet, Trudeau is the man who appears to have used a quota to select his cabinet "because it's 2015". I suspect he has more of an authoritarian mindset than me. Presumably he would consider it should be a crime to refuse to bake a feminist cake, for example. So to be consistent, not only should he be boycotting that mosque, he should also be introducing laws to prevent all religious communities treating women as 2nd class citizens. (I would oppose such a law, but Trudeau's opposition to such a law would be an act of hypocrisy.)

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  4. Thank you for such a well written and respectful analysis. Why can't we have people like you and Anna Raccoon and Cranmer etc on telly and radio?

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  5. Good blogpost.

    Personally I would add a third category to the oppressed-oppressor dichotomy that many feminists use. There are also what one could call "oppressed oppressors", i.e. those who exert oppression on some group of people but who are at the same time also oppressed by another group. So, in this view, Muslim men in the West may oppress their daughters/wives/families, but at the same they are oppressed by a pre-dominantly racist or Islamophobic society.

    Which all basically comes down to acknowledging oppression in Muslim communities but spinning the whole story to such a degree that this oppression is seen purely as a function of the larger social context, and so ultimately the people who are truly guilty here are again white men...

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  6. Re objectification: at around 3 minutes into this programme, Sue Perkins objectifies a woman. What would be the response if a man said the same thing? This seems to me to exemplify the double standards of the MSM:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01l3bg9/worlds-most-dangerous-roads-series-2-2-ho-chi-minh-trail

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  7. I'll keep this short on account I have to go to work (something Marxist Jones doesn't have to worry about)I hate Owen Jones.

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