Wednesday, August 16, 2006
WRONG SIDE WINNING
Former peacenik Sarah Baxter notices how twisted is today’s peace movement:
Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”
For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic ... On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say.
Got that right. One of the few to speak up is Pamela Bone, whose latest piece appears in The Australian:
My parents were atheists, but whenever a school form required an answer about our religious denomination, my mother would tick “Presbyterian”, because “that’s what you’re supposed to be”.
Terrorist! I kid, I kid. Go read the whole thing.
(Via Adrian the Cabbie)