"Their Jail Is Islam, and Changing the Warden from One Thug to Another Won't Set Them Free"

Diana West
Saturday, June 27, 2009 6:48 AM
Over at Family Security Matters, Ruth King tells it like it is ... to women. She writes:

I am dismayed by a number of stylish, well coiffed, décolleté and manicured “feminists” in America, including Iranian expatriates, who urge the courageous women of Iran to continue their bloody struggle against the regime in Iran without naming the real enemy….Sharia. It is like telling them to die in vain.

The poster-boy for the rebellion is Moussavi and he and his “reformist” wife, who dresses in hijab, utter not a single word of opposition to Sharia, the cruel, misogynist Islamic law that oppresses women and reduces them to the status of animal.
...
Revolution cannot be successful if sacrifice brings more Islamic repression and degradation with another face and a new set of Ayatollahs. Their jail is Islam and changing the warden from one thug to another will not set them free.


Soaring line. King goes on to address the "women of Iran." She tells them:

Freedom is what I see daily in my supermarket…women in saris, in hijab, Orthodox Jewish women in wigs or headscarves, girls in miniskirts, girls with navel rings who live and play and love and pray without fear of “honor killings” or stoning or lashing or rape, or forced marriages even at the pre-puberty age of nine. [DW: Sadly, these barbarous Islamic practices are now taking place in Muslim populations in Western societies.]

Freedom is not just the right to vote for candidates that are both sides of the same coin. It is the right to live without fear that your father or your brothers will murder you for committing adultery or apostasy or a perceived insult to the Prophet. It is the right to read books…porn if you choose….see movies from musicals to erotica….to dance and to kiss in public….to divorce or marry …to drive and to travel and to choose how and when and if you must wear that scarf, all with the protection of the state and not the religious dictates of the state.

You are being compared to the crowds of oppressed people who brought down the Soviet Empire. They named their enemy. It was an evil ideology named Communism. Your enemy is an evil ideology named Sharia, which enables your tormentors....

Semantically speaking, I prefer to label the ideology "Islam"; sharia (Islamic law) is its application. But I wonder whether King's rousing words can be understood across the Western-Islamic divide? That is, to what extent are people, women -- Muslims -- in Iran secularly motivated to throw off the coils of sharia, an act of apostasy that would place them in direct, full-frontal opposition to Islam? Frankly, rejecting Islam is quite a lot to expect of a people brought up in an Islamic nation, particularly one such as mullah - and sharia-ruled Iran. Indeed, we have seen scant indicators of this so far. This, of course, doesn't matter to our pundit-ocracy, which has failed to note the connection between Islam and repression to date. Regardless, Ruth King's main point -- the craven ommision by Westerners to identify the Islamic ideology that oppresses these people, particularly these women, is certainly where our own impotence and failure begin -- and with dire consequences to our own liberty.