Anne Applebaum Spanks Saudis, then Spanks NOW

Gulag should be essential reading for all schools in the USA. Anne Applebaum's Pultizer Prize winning book on Stalin/Lenin's horrific system of slave labor camps demonstrates Socialism with a Kim Jung-Il twist.

But the Saudis' systematic downgrading of the status of women is hardly in line with Islamic traditions, though in backwaters like the Kingdom & Pakistan, this persecution prevails. Chalk it up to barbarism---honor killings in Canada show how irredeemably retarded elements of Islamic culture remain today.

But Anne goes on to castigate the self-absorbed morons at NOW:

Unlike American blacks, American women have not had to grapple with issues as basic as the right to study or vote for a long time. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women's groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women's Organizations' most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to pick on that group, but it's so easy) has space for issues of "non-sexist car insurance" and "network neutrality," but not the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear a hijab.

The autism of the American womens' movements is well nigh narcissistic:

The reigning feminist ideology doesn't help: The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that "sexual terror" in America (a phrase from a real women's studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism. But the deeper problem is the gradual marginalization of "women's issues" in domestic politics, which has made them subordinate to security issues, or racial issues, in foreign policy as well.

Anne argues that NOW and other womens' organizations should expand their horizons:

American delegates to international and U.N. women's organizations are mostly identified with arguments about reproductive rights (for or against, depending on the administration), not arguments about the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.

Let's move beyond the Andrea Dworkin screeching to some sort of balanced view of womens' rights around the world.