Feminism as Colonial Tool

ay, the West seeks to ideologically subvert Muslim cultures through ideologies such as feminism.”

You shouldn’t require any familiarity with the irrational excesses associated with the social sciences and humanities departments of certain third-rate universities to notice something a bit off about these claims. But if you find yourself agreeing with this sort of thing, you might want to check your head. The passages quoted above come directly from “Feminism as Colonial Tool,” an editorial published only last week in Voice of Jihad, the English-language propaganda organ of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Taliban.

It’s clever, in the same way the effort mounted by proxies of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert and weaponize the recent and urgently necessary “Stop Asian Hate” mobilizations in western countries — a mischief rarely noticed outside the community of Uyghur human rights activists and pro-democracy diaspora Hongkongers — is also quite clever.

Real Afghanis, meanwhile, are not buying:

Afghan women aren’t taking their cues from any “colonialist saviour” in wanting to maintain what few gains they’ve made in law, education, social status and employment since the brutally misogynistic Taliban satrapy of Pakistan’s intelligence establishment was overthrown in 2001. And that desire for basic human freedom runs across Afghan society.

In its 15 years of intensive public-opinion polling in Afghanistan, the Asia Foundation has consistently found that Afghans overwhelmingly support the rights of women to work outside the home, vote, run for political office and so on. Now that the United States is determined to pull its troops out of the country by September, a crushing anxiety has set in among Afghans. Nobody wants peace more than Afghans do, but still, a series of Asia Foundation polls conducted since last September show that between 82 and 85 per cent of respondents say it’s “very important” that women’s rights be protected in any so-called peace deal with the Taliban.

Whatever the Voice of Jihad claims about what Afghans want, “troops out” has never been a top concern among ordinary Afghans, at least not since the days of the bloody Soviet occupation in the 1980s. In the Asia Foundation’s last 15 years of barometer readings, popular Afghan support for anti-government forces like the Taliban has rarely broken the double-digit barrier.

The thing about “woke” politics is that anyone can play the game.