Matt Ridley on Feminism's New Puritanism and Common Cause with Islam

Linda Sarsour

Wikipedia

The British journalist Matt Ridley, in "A New Puritanism Explains Why Some Feminists are Making Common Cause with Islam" (The Spectator, February 4, 2017), offers his view as to what's gone wrong with contemporary feminism:

The bicoastal elite [in the US] might be more effective in opposing Mr Trump if it weren't obsessed with the persecution of anybody who says the wrong thing. "While you self-involved fools were policing the language at the Kids' Choice Awards," raged the broadcaster Bill Maher last week, "a madman talked his way into the White House." This new puritanism must explain why some feminists make common cause with Islam. One of the Women's March organisers was Linda Sarsour, a defender of sharia law, which is misogynism incarnate. She said on Twitter of Brigitte Gabriel, a feminist critic of Islam, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of female genital mutilation and of death threats for apostasy, "I wish I could take their vaginas away - they don't deserve to be women." So she's a pussy-grabber too. She has since deleted the tweet.

This passage is borrowed from Ridley's Diary in this week's Spectator, and he makes an interesting suggestion about a new 'puritanism,' but he provides no clear evidence that a puritanical mindset is the problem. What I see in this passage is the same old political correctness that has characterized the Left since the 1990s, at least. The Left perceives minority groups as oppressed, and because Islam is a minority in the West, it is considered oppressed and is therefore protected from criticism, any criticism being merely an expression of 'Islamophobia.' Meanwhile, Islamism continues to exert an influence on Islam, which is hardly a minority in the world!

The Left likes to think that it thinks globally, but Leftists have missed the big picture . . .