UK: Why have Western feminists been so muted in their criticisms of Iran?

Submitted by Broadsword on Sat, 2010-08-14 05:25

Article here. Excerpt:

"The fate of the 43-year-old Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning took a sinister turn yesterday when she appeared on Iranian state television to confess to her “crimes”. Her lawyer fears she will now be executed imminently, probably hung by the neck until she is dead.
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Yet the response of feminists in the West has been strangely muted.

Hillary Clinton lost no opportunity to brandish her feminist credentials during her campaign to become the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee in 2008 and even went so far as to blame her failure to beat Barack Obama on the “glass ceiling”. Unfortunately, the concrete ceiling of Ashtiani’s jail cell hasn’t inspired any comparable rhetoric. All she has said is that she’s “troubled” by Ashtiani’s case.

At least Hillary Clinton was able to bring herself to mutter this mild rebuke. No other prominent feminist has spoken out about Ashtiani’s case, unless you include Yoko Ono who has signed the petition calling for her to be freed. We’ve heard nothing from Germaine Greer, nothing from Gloria Steinem, nothing from Jane Fonda, nothing from Naomi Wolf, nothing from Clare Short, nothing from Harriet Harmen.

We know why, of course. Almost no one on the left, with the honourable exception of Christopher Hitchens, dares to breath a word against any Islamic country for fear of being branded “Islamophobic”. Thus, a brutal dictatorship is able to torture and murder thousands of innocent women, safe in the knowledge that the self-styled keepers of the West’s conscience will remain silent.
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Could the West’s self-appointed defenders of women’s rights have done anything to prevent the wholesale slaughter of their sisters in the developing world if they’d taken up their cause? Could a feminist outcry today about the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani do anything to prevent her death? We will never know, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their continuing silence reveals the moral bankruptcy of their movement.'

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