Dear feminist,
I write this as a last ditch attempt to reach you; to reach your common sense, and to reach any genuine concern at least some of you may have about the future of women’s rights in Europe. ‘Why only Europe?’ may well be your first question, and the answer is quite simply that we are threatened in a way we have not known in our lifetimes, and this threat is entirely preventable.
Great Britain is on the verge of electing its second female Prime Minister. This is an incredible achievement when one considers that it has not yet been a century since women won our right to vote. While this takes place, the Government of once-secular Turkey (a country that many European leaders seek to fast-track in to the EU) has legislated to allow “village heads” to conduct marriages. Metin Feyzioğlu[1], of the Turkish Bar Association, claimed that this represents “the first step in switching from secular to sharia law.” He adds “This regulation will remove women’s right to marry of their own free will”. Please absorb the seriousness of this; if a woman may not choose who, or whether, she marries, she is a slave. She is property. Her life is not her own and she will be traded as chattel, handed to men who will have complete dominion over her. A fate she cannot escape because she has no legal right to.
This reversal of the freedom of women in Turkey is happening for a distinct reason. Turkey is increasingly embracing Islam in its public life. It is not unique. Women have seen, and are seeing, themselves reduced to property in countries all over the world as Islam tightens its grip.
Do you think that the women of Iran or Afghanistan has always lived as they do today? They have not. Both countries have known secularism, and their women have known freedom, but as the tentacles of sharia disperse their poison, women in both countries suffer unimaginable cruelties – Islam justifies, sustains, and maintains these cruelties. That is a matter of fact.
Sexual harassment is rife across the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt for example, 99% of women experience it. Over the last several decades, both through social change in attitude towards women and through legislation, the harassment of women for sex is deemed both unlawful and entirely unacceptable in Western countries. This enormous progress has not been mirrored elsewhere in the world. That too is a matter of fact.
Who do you conclude is responsible for the sexual harassment of 99% of a country’s women? It is of course the country’s men, who clearly see nothing wrong in this behaviour. Young boys learn behaviour from observing older men. If they observe men harassing women without consequence or guilt, what do you expect those young boys will learn? Do you think they might learn, by their surroundings, that sexual harassment of women is entirely acceptable?
Now, what do you think might happen when 100,000s of men from societies where women are harassed as a matter of course, move to Western countries? Do you think they will leave these attitudes to women behind, or will they bring them to Europe and begin to harass European women? For a start, European women should not have to fight off these sex-pests and should be free to go about our business unmolested. But there will also be vast numbers of cases where these men will not take no for an answer, this will lead to rape. And it has.
The mass sexual assault of women in Cologne, Germany, that took place on New Year’s Eve 2015 would not have occurred if men from misogynist societies had not been given access to Germany. That is a matter of fact. Women who would not otherwise have been raped or assaulted have been, that is also a matter of fact.
In Sweden, rape has become so widespread that police now warn Swedish women to remain indoors. Do you really not see the significance of this? For how long did women fight for rape to be recognized as a male problem, not a female one? It is not the actions of a woman that causes rape, but the actions of a rapist. However, it is Sweden’s women who are being asked to give up freedoms in order to protect themselves from men who need not be in their country in the first place. What do you expect to happen as and when these assaults become even more widespread? Do you think women’s freedoms will be restricted in response? If you don’t, you are simply not paying attention to what is already occurring.
The response of many feminists to what I have written above will be ‘misogyny exists everywhere, we oppose all misogyny’. Good. I entirely agree. But law are not the same everywhere, men’s attitudes to women are not the same everywhere, and the progress of women to independence and freedom has not been the same everywhere.
What you are doing by condemning all misogyny (as of course I do) is simply making a grand statement and leaving it there. Your statement will make no difference whatsoever to any woman suffering anywhere. Action needs to be taken. This is how you win. You pick battles and you fight them. Might I suggest that you see the battle you have against Islam-inspired misogyny, and take practical steps to oppose it?
The Suffragettes didn’t stand around making statements about how wonderful it would be if the world was perfectly just and free. They didn’t spend their time debating theories and congratulating themselves for tolerating the oppression of women in the name of their culture. They took action, they demanded, they starved themselves, they chained themselves to Parliament, some even committed suicide. They did so for a reason, to win the right to vote, not to condemn misogyny in general.
I am asking you to do the same. I am asking you to cease the cowardice of making a virtuous statement and then going about your lives, this achieves nothing. If we are to preserve the freedoms won for us by our mothers and grandmothers, we must demand that men who pose a threat to those freedoms are not permitted to move here en masse. It’s a real solution, not a grand statement. We must also demand an end to sharia law, which is facilitating the slavery of women right under our noses in the UK. We must demand prosecutions for forced marriage and jail-time for the obscenity of FGM. If this occurred, not only will it save countless individual girls, but if you’re a fan of grand statements, one could hardly be grander than that.
Its time to show some courage feminists, stand up to this. It won’t solve all the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are solved one at a time. To solve problems, you must fight, and to fight you must recognize who threatens you. Putting your head in the sand is not an option.
Its time to stop your virtue-signalling and do something worthwhile. Forget about all the nonsense and lies about “far-right” that you like to apply to others. This isn’t about labels, it’s about the freedom of women and if you truly are a feminist, that should be your greatest concern.
I shall conclude by asking you to join me to protest against the mass migration that is bringing Islamic misogynist norms to our shores. Protect the places where women are free – it helps no woman anywhere when women’s rights go in to reverse.
I will be at the House of Lords in Westminster at 2 pm on August 20th. I will shout and protest and demand that I have the right to maintain my freedom from all threats – including immigration.
I suspect some of you will agree with me but have too much fear to say so. Come along anyway. Nobody needs to know.
We need numbers at this protest, we need loud voices at this protest, its time to stop being naïve about the world and the various societies and cultures within it. We are not all the same, we are not all alike, and we do not all value women or believe in our autonomy.
Take a step feminists, this time in the right direction.