Wednesday, February 11, 2015

#StopOrI'llSayStopAgain

So the squishy internationalists at Foreign Policy magazine manage to get themselves worked into a lather at the rather dismal treatment of women by the radical Islamist groups running roughshod over in the blank spots on the map these days:
Yazidis who have escaped from the Islamic State have told harrowing stories of women and girls being traded among fighters, forcibly “married,” forced to convert, and repeatedly raped. These horrific mass violations are mirrored in the accounts of Nigerian girls who fled from Boko Haram, in the tales of Somali women liberated from the rule of al-Shabab, and in descriptions of life under the Islamist group Ansar al-Din in northern Mali.
Mobilize the hashtag army! Something must be done said about this! Civilization in peril; women and minorities hardest hit!

In a cart-before-the-horse bit of antilogic, the thrust of the article is that advancing legal equality between the sexes will somehow roll back fundamentalist Islam, rather than the reverse.

Given the track record of radical Islamist terrorist groups in the Middle East, the title blurb linking to the article in my email from Foreign Policy was especially unfortunate. It was:
WEAPONIZING WOMEN
Well, yeah, the terrorists have been doing that for a while now, Sparky, but thanks for the reminder.

I'm reminded of the joke that all the people running around with "Free Tibet!" stickers on their cars would have been horrified if  Dubya had woken up one morning and decided to send the 82nd Airborne to actually, you know, free Tibet. "I didn't mean like that!"

Meanwhile, while the Foreign Policy writers are trying to mobilize the IndigNation Studies crew, ISIS's recruiting pitch continues to be "Come play GTA: Middle East for real! If you get too stressed, you can always take R&R back in your dole-funded flat in Brussels or London.
.