... is women
(From the Daily Telegraph, a British national paper)
SO we're going in. In the next few days, our boys will be taking on the Taliban, and we must all pray they succeed. Let them winkle him out of his cave. Let them blast Osama bin Laden's arms dumps and blitz his followers, and carpet-bomb the Khyber with pineapple chunks, to appease the civilians, and then, and then . . . er: nobody seems sure what happens then, because this is a war against terrorism unlike any other.
We have had our own such war for the past 30 years, and we know that it is accompanied by a stately hypocrisy. On the one hand, we do our best to catch them, or sometimes just shoot them. On the other hand, we secretly talk to them and give them what they want. We invite them first to Cheyne Walk, in 1973, and eventually to Downing Street. My dear Gerry, my dear Martin, what would it take to get your lads to stop blowing us up? A ministerial Rover? Done. The end of the RUC? Say no more.
The trouble with the war against Islamic fundamentalist terror is that the terrorists themselves have no interest in talking. Bin Laden calls on his followers to kill all infidels. Then, he says, the killers will go to heaven. There is not much room for negotiation there, not even over tea at Number 10. We are not only horrified by the actions of the 19 suicide killers; we are still baffled, two weeks on.
What is it really all about? What is the true well-spring of this rage? We have all read that these crazed young men resent America for supporting Israel; that they believe the sufferings of the Iraqi people are excessive; that they hate their own corrupt regimes, especially in Saudi Arabia, and blame America for backing them. None of these geopolitical reasons, I am afraid, quite does the trick, for me. There must be some deeper offence to their pride.
I think it is to do with their sense that they are representatives of a culture under siege. They fear that American morals and values will take them over, just as Coca-Cola and McDonald's have conquered the Earth. And what is the biggest single difference between their culture and Western culture? That's easy: it's the treatment of women.
Not all Islamic societies are equally sexist. You may not believe it, but the Turks gave women the vote before the British did. But listen to the casual bias of bin Laden's address to "brother Muslims". Look at the wacko women's gear that the BBC's John Simpson wore when he smuggled himself into Afghanistan, a sort of blue tent with a letterbox hole for the nose.
This is a world where women are lashed for adultery; where little girls are denied education; where female teachers are sacked; and where women are kept from elementary health care. Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, says that mingling men and women is Western and decadent, and leads to licentiousness. To call these views medieval is an insult to the Middle Ages. And yet they are held, with varying intensity, across the Muslim world.
In Kuwait, the country for which we fought, they recently decided against giving women the vote. As one enlightened Kuwaiti MP, Ahmad al-Baqer, put it: "God said in the holy Koran that men are better than women. Why can't we settle for that?" The Kuwaiti tribunes later had a debate on the Sydney Olympics, in which a fruitcake called Waleed al-Tabtabaie called for the banning of women's beach volleyball, on the ground that it was "too sexy and indecent".
In Kano, Nigeria, the Muslims banned female soccer. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, women have been banned from working for NGOs. A Malaysian minister recently announced that any kind of skirt is an invitation to rape. Iranian magazines may not show unveiled pictures of Monica Lewinsky, or any other woman who has had sexual relations with President Clinton. The imam of a mosque in Fuengirola, Spain, one Mohamed Kamal Mostafa, has just published a handy guide to when you may beat your wife. Only hit the hands and feet, he says, using a rod that is thin and light. Of course, it's all grotesque. It's nutty. But these prejudices are so deeply held by Islamic fundamentalists that they will die to preserve them.
They look at America, and they see a world full of spookily powerful women, such as Hillary Clinton. So terrifying have been the advances of Western feminism that her ludicrous husband can almost be expelled from office for having a sexual liaison with an intern. The Muslim fanatics see denatured men, and abortion, and family breakdown, and jezebels who order men around. It tempts them and appals them and, finally, enrages them. Mohammed Omar says that "only ugly and filthy Western cultures allow women to be insulted and dishonoured as a toy". What he means is that only the West allows women to be treated as equals.
Now, there will be plenty of British conservatives who think these Taliban chappies run a tight ship, women's lib is not an unalloyed blessing, look at all these poofters these days, and so on. There are even ex-feminists, such as Germaine Greer, who will take a perverse pleasure in announcing that women can look very beautiful in a veil.
These points may or may not be valid, but they are essentially irrelevant. Female emancipation has been the biggest social revolution since print. In trying to resist it, the Muslim fanatics are establishing themselves as doomed cultural Luddites. Let me say what the Left cannot say, since it chokes on the contradictions of its position, at once feminist, and yet relativist.
It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about women. We are right. We can't have them blowing us up. The deluded fanatics must be helped to a more generous understanding of the world. Female education is the answer to the global population problem. It is the ultimate answer to the problem of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Keep on rocking in the free world...