Nancy and Hillary - The Empty Sacks that a Couple of Human Beings Once Lived In

For the month or so that I have been stewing about Nancy Pelosi’s craven fawning over the despot of Damascus I have been trying to put my finger on why I have felt an urgent need to compare her to Hillary Clinton. I knew it wasn’t so much that they are both self-professed feminists and leaders of the Democratic Party. That was too obvious. It wasn’t that they are both unrelievedly ambitious and self-promoting. Honestly, all politicians are, some are just slicker than others about concealing it. It was not even that each of them in her own way has let her naked ambition, self absorption and lust for power trump all pretense at retaining the liberal and feminist ideals they both profess. Too many articles have pointed that out in too much detail (link 1, Link 2 ) to even think it needed to be pointed out again.

No, as I thought about it, there were two things that I thought most other observers had missed.

One was the sheer moral bankruptcy of Pelosi’s junket. At least Clinton had a clear path in mind as she was prostituting her dignity, and the education of her daughter about what a woman should have to expect from a man for her Presidential Ambition.

Pelosi, that holier than thou feminist, on the other hand was just getting carried away with the sheer rapture of being able to throw her weight around. She didn’t seem to have any deep calculation in mind as she played up to the leader of a country in which it is legal for a ny family member to kill a woman relative for so much as flirting with a member of the opposite sex.

She must have known in her heart, even as she helped to cut the Arab reformers and anti-Baathists off at the knees, that her time in power will be brief and that she is such an incompetent that she can’t help sowing the seeds of her own political demise. As I have pointed out before, “The left feels kinship with moribund totalitarians because they share that same doomed feeling of futility and humiliation. The Modern Left knows that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Capitalization of China, stirrings of successful modernization in India, Mexico and much of the old Soviet block and the defection of the best minds (Hitchens, Podhertz, Kristol, et al) they are no longer the “Modern Left”, they are merely “What’s Left”. It has never been more apparent that their ideas are mawkish, cheap and unworkable. “

The second point has been elusive. Tonight, I finally realized what it was that was so difficult to pin down and yet so compelling. I recalled Hillary’s Suha kiss back in 1999. Sharing the stage with the ultra-wealthy wife of the “savior” of the impoverished Palestinian people, Hillary found herself on the receiving end of a good-ole’ Arab tongue lashing. Mrs Clinton was there in the Palestinian Territories for a ceremony in honor of the opening off an American funded (our tax dollars at work) health program. When Mrs. Arafat got up to speak she tore into the U.S.. In a typical fantastic tour de force of Palestinian calumny (a simple thankyou would have done fine, thanks Mrs. A) she accused us of complicity with Israel in leaking poisonous gas into the Palestinian Territories to sicken and kill Palestinian children. Ms Clinton not only stayed on the dais and listened to the blood libel, when it was over she ran over and planted a big, Hollywood/Washington style kiss on the shocked Mrs. Arafat. Look at this picture- Suha didn’t even know what hit her – one look at the stunned look on her face here and you realize that that day Hillary raise the bar for the height of self-destructive, liberal phoniness she could leap to. Her display of out-of-control fawning and obsequious toadying, however, was only a chilling foretaste of the spectacle Pelosi would make of herself several years later with the dictator of Syria. Here is a shot of our new Lady Speaker giving the Democrat stamp of approval to the guy who gets up every day and finds new ways to smuggle Iranian arms into Lebanon and suicidal Jihadis into Iraq. Here she is,
with evident glee on her face pulling on the bloodstained hands of the foul brute who presides over a country in which her husband could legally beat her to death with a willow stick for so much as shaking that hand. Some feminist.

Assad is bad enough- here is the real face of horror- a woman with the education, freedom, personal wealth and political power to make a real difference in the world and all she cares about is self-aggrandizement and hogging the spotlight. Look at the face of either of these women an you will see the face of horror- a human being who knows they have the opportunity to do something good and are not strong enough to do it. They know they are a waste of space, oxygen and skin and it shows on their faces.

Phyllis Chesler's Personal Encounter with the Beast

Reproduced here, with Ms Chesler's permission, is a story that preempts our natural reactions by its juxtaposition of one of the most agile and powerful minds alive with the most archaic and atavistic social systems on earth. If the young firebrand that Ms Chesler must have been could find herself in this situation, how careful we must be ourselves...

How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam
Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?


Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York